Beginner’s
Eye
“Beginner’s
eye bypasses the adult mind and goes straight for the jugular. Beginner’s mind
is not polite or bound by convention or shackled by past experience. It is
fresh, spontaneous, alive and untested, like the eye of a child.”
David
Ulrich (“The Mindful Photographer,” reprinted in Parabola, Spring, 2022)
There
are some beautiful articles on the topic of Wonder in the most recent Parabola,
including this one by David Ulrich, called “First Sight, Beginner’s Eye.”
As a photographer, he tried to capture that first glimpse, with as much spontaneity
and skill as possible. The problem for most adult artists is that we have a
hard time shutting off our mind long enough to simply see what we see without
commentary or criticism, without comparisons to other work and other times. We
are always too self-conscious and self-involved to simply see and respond to
what is. Children don’t do that. They have no past—or very little. They very
much respond to things in the moment. If you’ve ever played with children in a
creative way, you know they experiment wildly, piling on things willy-nilly.
With
Beginner’s eye, we try to simply observe without comment and allow the subject
to speak its truth. Without beginner’s eye, we overlay our creations with our
perceptions instead of allowing it to speak for itself. Remember when you were
a child and the whole world was your studio. You could create an entire universe
from pinecones and acorns, discover worlds inside a knothole and believe with all
your heart that the fairies would come and dwell there. Ulrich asks the
question, “Can we become free again to experiment wildly?”
We have
lost our sense of wonder because we box ourselves into rigid forms in the way
we live—certain ways of behaving and believing and thinking are the only right
way. And then we set about trying to make the whole world conform to our limited
vision. One cannot be in wonder and hold a constricted view of the world at the
same time. If we can return to beginner’s mind, we could reinvent the possibilities
of life without all the consternation and fear that runs it today. We could
return to the Garden instead of blowing it up. How cool would that be?
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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