A Glass Eye That Never Breaks

If you’ve made it this far in life without a bag of tricks, then get one. But, remember, you get to be the one to fill it, and to decide what goes in it. If some whatsit doesn’t work, then you can spend time trying to master it to endless frustration, or you can just let it go and let someone else have it. No need for self-blame, defensiveness or explanations. It just didn’t fit in with everything else you have to carry.

Some tricks come to us fairly easily, and their secrets can be passed along freely. The big reveal is that if you’re still here, then you have learned how to recognize the ways and means that help you and those that don’t. That’s pretty much the essence of resourcefulness and trusting your instincts.

Here’s a trick I picked up from the movie, Big Fish, starring Ewan MacGregor and Albert Finney. As a kid, Edward Bloom takes a dare from friends to ask a local witch for a look into her glass eye. In it, a person will spy the moment of his own death. The other kids take in their fate with horror and dread. But Edward takes this foresight as a gift. He says:

“I was thinking about death and all, about seeing how you’re gonna die. I mean, on one hand, if dying was all you thought about, it could kind of screw you up… but it could kinda help, couldn’t it? Because everything else you knew you could survive.”

He then lives his life according to this principle, and when he’s in danger he reminds himself, “This isn’t how I go.”

Starry Night handprinted art glass by Harry and Leslie Besset found at Marblebert.com

Well, we don’t have crystal balls or glass eyes to give us this confidence by way of foreknowledge, yet you can turn the idea into a different trick. Imagine, instead, that the glass eye will tell you not the manner of your death, but what will have the power to permanently break your spirit before that. And the eye shows you nothing. You can meet catastrophe upon disaster upon loss, and if you remind yourself, “This isn’t how I break”, then your spirit is safe with you.

If this notion doesn’t appeal to you, then just roll it along, and it can find its way into another bag that has been waiting for it to show up.

If you like tricks, you might like riddles, too:

"The Riddle" by Five for Fighting 2006

There was a man back in '95

Whose heart ran out of summers

But before he died, I asked him

Wait, what's the sense in life?

Come over me, come over me

He said,

Son, why you got to sing that tune?

Catch a Dylan song or some eclipse of the moon

Let an angel swing and make you swoon

Then you will see, you will see

Then he said,

Here's a riddle for you

Find the Answer

There's a reason for the world:

You and I

Picked up my kid from school today

Did you learn anything, cause in the world today

You can't live in a castle far away

Now talk to me, come talk to me

He said,

Dad, I'm big but we're smaller than small

In the scheme of things, well we're nothing at all

Still every mother's child sings a lonely song

So play with me, come play with me

And Hey, Dad

Here's a riddle for you

Find the Answer

There's a reason for the world:

You and I

I said,

Son, for all I've told you

When you get right down to the

Reason for the world:

Who am I?

There are secrets that we still have left to find

There have been mysteries from the beginning of time

There are answers we're not wise enough to see

He said, You looking for a clue? I love you free

The batter swings and the summer flies

As I look into my angel's eyes

A song plays on while the moon is high over me

Something comes over me

I guess we're big and I guess we're small

If you think about it man, you know we got it all

Cause we're all we got on this bouncing ball

And I love you free

I love you freely

Here's a riddle for you

Find the Answer

There's a reason for the world

You and I

Elijah May Come in or Not

Living in an arid landscape makes Middle Eastern scriptural imagery accessible and immediate. During my Sonoran Desert days, my feet were nearly always hot. Ritual foot washing, as described in the New Testament, seemed like a good custom to revive for family and guests alike. The water streamed from an easily turned faucet in my climate-controlled bathroom as my swollen toes whitened a shade less pink, and the beige dust swirled down the drain. I felt a little more human, a little less hot-headed, a little more peaceful. If this water had been less plentiful and harder to draw, as it was for previous desert dwellers, then foot washing would indeed have been the zenith of relief and hospitality, and a priority offering for all visitors.

Another aspect of my life there, and my thoughts surrounding the tending of guests, were the two French doors that opened from our dining room out onto the patio and scrubby vegetation beyond. I had harbored a small but persistent longing to have doors like this, where I could seat friends and family in a sheltered air as the sky retreated into dusk. Although our house was a hastily constructed frame and stucco replica of the California style that had mushroomed everywhere across the Southwest, I insisted on the more expensive, and impractical doors in place of other amenities. 

They were installed in the bedroom, as well, where I could see the moonrise shining in through the clerestory window above them, and only needed to step outside to immerse myself. Now that I no longer live there, those doors are only memories for me; portals to past dreams, to a time when all around me was a flood of yearning, sighs, wishes, tears, heads in hands in dejection, hands uplifted in petition. All of these deferred desires became blisters upon the soul.

I look back on that groundswell of longing as being universally human, but also being locally specific to the desert. There is no longer such a tension quivering around me, because the air of a Pacific Northwestern forest doesn’t rise in waves. There are no mirages here, and no teasing. All is sated greenery, and pooling, slippery rivulets leading to still more dripping green and more water, until you’re all the way through a forest and out the other side. You can stand on the edge of the ocean coming at you: water behind, water ahead, water taking you, water setting you back again. There is an uplift and a contentment in this.

Anasazi polychrome bowl found on prehistoriccollector.com

The desert, by contrast, is too much and never enough, and everyone in it is hard to please. The sun is too bright, the shade is too far, the lawn is too small and needs too much care. The summers are too long, the towns are too far apart, the drives across glittering roads meet up with the ignoble end of beetles flying into the glass. The riverbeds are choked with sand, but can flood in an instant, too high to cross. Animals and cars are stalled in the washes after a monsoon rain. The showy birds have long since flown, leaving only those that can perch above the sand. An Easterner plants iris bulbs under a tree and we smile at the their childlike hope. All of the desert’s problems are just barely solved, and yet, if we pushed a little harder, it could be more like it was back home, to the drumbeat of “if only, if only, if only.” 

The hope never dies, in spite of the evidence. Here is the graveyard of Howard Hughes' ingenuity in row after row of retired warplanes. Here are many thieves, but rarely a moth has eaten, and never has rust destroyed. Not for nothing is the infamous town called Tombstone, yet still they came, hellbent for leather. It’s all godforsaken and accursed. Yet, there is nothing that can be traded for such a wide vista and a clarity of vision and purpose. It makes you still, like a lizard on a rock, and you can wonder yourself to death, not at the why of it all, but at the how of it all. The land of enchantment is harsh and stony and towering in its vastness, but with the most delicate and fragile survivals scattered across it, both ephemeral and timeless at once. The light falls over it, an unblinking dare to show yourself.

"Bliss" from Desert Sun

On one especially dry and dark evening, I sat at my dining table alone, under the brightness of the simple glass chandelier, and thought of the custom of the Passover Seder, and of setting an empty cup at the table before an empty chair for Elijah, in the unlikely but anticipated event that he should appear at the door to foretell the coming of the Messiah to the people of Israel. I've never enacted this unfamiliar ritual, but I thought of him that night, making his way up from the sandy arroyo below, through my gate, and standing before me upon the threshold of both French doors, flung wide to receive him. He seems suited to a place where foot washing is appreciated. He may marvel at the convenience of a garden hose coiled nearby. He may see the neighbor’s palm tree waving its fronds in silhouette over a pool and say in weariness and recognition, “Yes, I am come, and this is home.”

So, if Elijah were to sit at my table, and even though I were not fit to loosen the strap of his sandal, how would I entertain him? Would I gesture him into comfort, and then sing to him while shutting the door behind him? Would he then be mine, forever seated with a cup for me to fill, over and again? Would the mountains change each day from blue to lavender and then to russet and charcoal, while still he sits and is quenched, and still I stand and pour out? That would be an enchantment of the sort that holds one captive in the damp, mossy, primeval forest on my island home, and not a spell cast by cacti and a thousand-starred sky. 

The desert is for seeking, the forest is for finding, and the sea is somewhere between and all around, ready to fool you into believing you’re always headed in the right direction.

And so I think that Elijah may dip his feet, come in as he pleases, and I will unfold myself like a linen laid across his lap: to hear his voice, his tidings, and to see with his eyes, staring down into his cup of wine at the reflection of all of the evening lamps yet before him, and not shut the door. I will not hold him to more blessings than are mine. He may go, until a day when he says, “I have knocked at them all; now, come with me and let’s see who has answered.”

Photo: Doorways Kolmonskoppe Namibia found on mrsmithworldphotography.com