Only recently when I visited my parents’ house—my childhood house—that I truly see and notice the great Kinabalu Mountain; the dark blue rock, stood majestically against the cloudless, late afternoon sky and the green hills, the rainforest that adorned the mountain’s feet. How could I miss this after all these years? I had asked myself. And in that moment, I felt there was something the mountain tried to tell me, something that I needed to know and learn; it was a subtle whisper to my spirit, and I understood it, yet I couldn’t utterly express it in words. It was mysterious, unfathomable, but satisfying. Perhaps this was what Adrienne Rich meant in the lines of her poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”:
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
There are meanings in every creation, and these meanings are waiting to be discovered and to be understood. I believe that they are letters from the Creator to us, written in a “common languages” that codes like English, Mandarin, Sanskrit, Malay, or any other languages on Earth have captured beautifully through literature and art. Sometimes it can be a mere code-less, transcendental language that requires one's full consciousness to grasp it, to understand it, and to be connected with the souls of the Earth.
Today, our advanced technology makes it easy for us to forget, and to become preoccupied with capturing moments with our cameras and sharing them on social media. It becomes easier for us to forget to be truly present in beautiful moments.
Sometimes we missed the chance to see, to live, and to thrive in these raw experiences. It’s not wrong to capture moments with our cameras. I’ve done it and I’m still doing it, but there are times when I look through my photos, and am amazed at the beautiful moments I’d captured, yet I forget what these frozen moments meant to me and what it felt like when I was in them. I think some moments are worthy to “go unglossed” once in a while. They are meant to be lived out.
The opening stanza of Walt Whitman’s poem “Eidolons” says:
I met a seer,
Passing the hues and objects of the world,
The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,
To glean eidolons.
After reading this, I asked myself: am I not passing the hues and objects of the world as well? Am I not a seer? Instead of meeting the seer to learn what he has learned in his travels, why don’t I become a seer myself, “passing the hues and objects of the world, / the fields of art and learning, pleasure, [and] sense”?
The only difference between the seer and myself is that the seer sees and is aware of the things that matter to him, and from these experiences he gleans eidolons! I was not doing that, but I’m aware of that now. I can be that seer too, and I am learning to glean eidolons.
Recently, I read Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. When I finished reading it I felt as though I have hiked with her, and had seen the PCT through her eyes. I’d learned that Strayed had been living in her past and that she was scared of the uncertainty of her future. She forgot about living in the present. With her past haunting her, the hike was merely about existing and surviving, rather than living and thriving.
Only when she was done hiking, while she was sitting on a white bench, internalizing what she’d been through along the PCT, did she notice the present and how uncontrollable life is: “It was my life,” she said, “like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.” Cheryl Strayed had seen, listened, lived and thrived in that moment “unglossed”! The hike was her metamorphosis into a beautiful seer.
There are many ways for us to sustain our environments, but I truly believe that it is important to deal with the root of the problems first before anything else. Education through Arts and Literature is an effective way, and in fact, one the the best ways to deal with the "roots," for Arts and Literature influences a society's culture. I myself have become aware of the environmental issues, not only through science, but significantly through Arts and Literature. Poems, fictions, novels, films, photographs, paintings, and so forth, have opened my eyes to see the drastic changes in our environments.
With all these in my mind, on that day when I was sitting outside at my parents' house, facing the Kinabalu Mountain, I allow myself to open up to the vulnerability of uncertain future, and be fully conscious, and then I saw, noticed, and heard the subtle whispers of the mountain, and of Nature.
Through awareness, appreciation, and beauty--sustainable lifestyle and culture emerge naturally. And eventually a sustainable society would born.
As the blue sky slowly filled with an apricot tint, and as darkness allowed the stars to twinkle and the moon to govern the night, I promised to myself that the next time my soul cried out to me to open my eyes and ears to the things that really matter, I would always be ready to see and listen, and to glean eidolons “unglossed.”
