Seeing

I’m beginning this entry on the 8:08 train from Paekakariki, an earlier train than I usually get because Michael is working at home today and taking the kids to school. This train is empty enough for me to have a window seat that looks out over the sea (which isn’t easy on the 8:48) so that’s where I am now, laptop on lap, climbing higher and higher above the sea, through tunnels that will take me past fields and harbours and into Wellington. I’m thinking, looking out at the water, about things we don’t usually see and what happens when we can see them.

I talk about this in a developmental way quite often; the subject-object shift is the most central shifts of Kegan’s theories of development—and of mine, too. I think about what it means to take something that was once hidden to you—the way it makes you think about your relationship to anger or blame or perfectionism—and take it out, examine it, look for the roots of it, and then make better decisions about that. Since we’ve moved here, I’ve made that move—or have made a beginning of that move—with my Americanism, with my urbanism. What does it mean to be me in these cases, what does it mean to be me knowing about the forces which shape me? How am I reshaped in the noticing of the shaping process?

There are other things, though, that I see here in New Zealand that have been invisible to me before, but these are things which aren’t about my psyche, but about my world. I see vowels in new ways, see how they can be reinterpreted, reshaped. I see the word “process” and it catches me each time --is it prah-ses (rhymes with bra-cess) or pro-ses (rhymes with mow-cess)? I see hills and trees and hundreds of greens that I’ve never seen before, so many greens as to be profligate. I see the weather move in and pass by in great slashes of fronts, in clouds that move so fast I get dizzy watching them. These are things I would perhaps have been able to see in the past, had I been paying attention. In New Zealand, though, there’s something to see that it’s enormously hard to see elsewhere. I see the wind.

You can always see hints of the wind, even in Washington DC. There are flags flying or lying limp, trees waving in the breeze, empty potato chip bags kiting across the street. That is seeing evidence of the wind, seeing what the wind does. Here, though, I actually see the wind, see the form of it, see it made manifest. I see the way it moves and changes across the sea. I watch the swath of mostly waveless sea, and I can see the wind currents move and change along the surface. I can watch the way the wind swirls by looking at the little wavelets, wind made solid, given dimension and form. I see the wind gust and change direction in the long grasses in the meadows, see the wind making waves on the land. Walking on the beach on a windy day, the sand swirls into near-solid sand channels, funnelling into busy roads with form of their own, whipping against my ankles in small stinging bites. And even when the wind is still, it's visible in its powerful traces. The pohutukawas on the dunes are moulded in the shape of the hill, constant wind shaping trunk and leaves into living statues, a coastline marked with monuments to the power of the wind.

If seeing parts of your own thinking or emoting that you haven’t seen before helps you become more developed, what is it that happens when you see parts of nature that were once invisible do to you? Do you become more naturally developed, more in love with the planet? Do you become more nuanced in your love for and appreciation of this powerful and fragile place? And what does it do to my children’s developing sense of themselves? I have a new understanding of the fierceness of nature, and a new fierceness in my wish to protect it. The wind here is cold and bitter and keeps me up at night with its moaning and rattling of windows. And it is magnificent and more beautiful than I ever knew air could be. It’s a new world, this windy Wellington. And I see it in new ways.