Watching the Watchers

Sitting at my daughter’s swim lesson I watch a cloud as it drifts across the open blue sky. Hovering low, it appears as if it is going to encounter a nearby water tower. I want to climb the tower, or even the branches of the nearby trees and extend my hands out into the velvety softness of the misty haze. I imagine the cloud passing over farms and cities, looking down as it soars on the trade winds, spying down on people like me. Wondering, perhaps, why we stare back.

Long before the movie American Beauty showed us the image of a plastic trash bag dancing on currents of wind in a small alley I have wondered about the about the life behind ordinary objects. 

Take, for example, the tomb of Tutankhamen. His tomb was robbed in antiquity, but based on the evidence found in the tomb it is entirely possible that these robberies took place within several months at most of the initial burial. Antiquarians suspect that eventually the location of the tomb was lost, forgotten, perhaps buried from the debris of subsequent tomb constructions, or covered over by the sediment of floods.

As I sit here thinking about this I imagine those robbers resealing the tomb. Behind those locked doors lays a vast treasure that is theirs for the taking. I can see the hand of the last robber departing the scene. He gently pats the walls in farewell, a treasure enough to sustain his family for lifetimes, envisioning the time when he will soon return. History suggests he never will.

I think about the lock on my garden shed, hanging there in the heat of the day, in the rain and the night and the dew of the morning. I think about the things contained with, sitting there in the dark; a mower, a few children’s toys, a bag of fertilizer. They sit there in the dark, slowly aging. As I press the lock together I am sure that I will be back in a day or week and that the things I left behind will be waiting there for me.

Authors sit in front of screens describing the world, even as readers patiently make there way across lines of text. I wonder, does the screen look back? Long before I had ever heard of Alice and her looking glass I imagined that the face in the mirror, the one that looked so much like mine, might actually be alive, and that as he turns his back on mine and walks through the bathroom door, he enters into a world surprisingly familiar.

“Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you.”

Walking down the bike path I am suddenly struck by a thought, what if I am not looking at the world at all? What if all that I am seeing is nothing more than the world’s gaze reflected off of me and in reality it is the world that see me long before I see it? Thinking this way I feel entirely surrounded by things: the air, the trees, the grass and stones, all of them patiently watching me as I walk by. Their gaze like a warm blanket envelops me holding me in place. There is a comfort here, and quiet to as all the world is stillness.