POINTS OF VIEW

This morning, alone in the house,
moving up the stairs to my room,
I think…
I am the only one of 7 billion humans who is seeing these particular dust motes
dancing in this specific ray of sunlight
streaming across this bamboo floor at the top of these stairs.
I feel the Universe is charging me with seeing this one particular view.

Across the face of the planet, 7 billion of us look from corn fields and rice fields, deserts, mountains, forests, cities, war zones, prison cells, sick beds, from boats and ships, from airplanes, from beaches and the sides of volcanoes, opening our eyes for the first time and closing them for the last; we are looking from billions of singular points of view.

Trillions of members of other species are looking out on this world with strange eyes
that see a completely different world than mine.
Now as I watch my hens moving and pecking in the grass
I think…
My three hens move through the space of the yard each day,
Looking out of eyes that see more colors than mine.
They are charged with seeing the same world from their particular view.

This Earth is being fully seen.

POINT OF VIEW

Let me be true to that little child who saw that the adults didn’t understand that they couldn’t really name her.
Let me be true to the vastness that has coalesced to form this dot of matter that finds me looking out from this tiny point of view.

My work in this world is to remember the infinity, the emptiness from which all is born into form to take up a vantage point.
All points of view, from plant and insect, to predator and prey, look out on this world and the Formless lives the totality of form and view.

I wish I didn’t keep forgetting that I am a tiny point in an unimaginable, endless infinity.
I am born from the Formless into this particular, individual shape, never to be repeated.
I am here to be awestruck and to look and see and hold the unbearable beauty and the unbearable breaking heart of this lonely, soon to vanish, point of view.

Veda Stanfield for The Poplar Grove Muse