day 23: gaze

To gaze is not simply to see. Rather to gaze is to be drawn into the object that one sees. We may liken a gaze to a visual experience of embrace.

St Clare of Assisi

If the focus of my work is accepting the invitation to ‘consecrate this day with your camera’, what might that entail?

How can I develop a consecrating gaze?

At least part of such a practice is conferring a conscious blessing on whatever is in front of me as I push a camera button.  My job is to keep my looking compassionate and crucially, to let that inform all aspects of my craft.

Another part is ensuring I remain open to whatever the Spirit may channel through me in this moment.  My job is to get out of the way and to create the space where gratitude and wonder might be expressed through me.

Christine Valters Paintner suggests a ‘shutter push’ prayer might be "Bless this shimmering moment, may my eyes receive its gifts, may my heart open ever wider in response.”

Again, this is beholding: the reciprocal gaze of blessing and consecration. The making of all holy.

I look and look.

Looking's a way of being: one becomes,

sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.

Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes

dig and burrow into the world.

They touch

fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.

World and the past of it,

not only

visible present, solid and shadow

that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms 

of echo and interruption?

That's

a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain

looking, 

walking and looking,

through the world,

in it. 

‘Looking, Walking, Being’

Denise Levertov

shimmer. iPhone image.