Custody of the Eyes

A journal entry written while on retreat at New Camaldoli Hermitage, Big Sur

In loving memory of Kathleen Flowers (1964 - 2009), 

whose presence still remains in our circle of writers

I came to the hermitage with the intention, the hope, the need to shed every garment and sit in naked awareness of my heart, and to notice the countless ways I permit my spirit to be tugged away from the place I love most--the place where You and I live and move and have our being.

"Contemplation," Ivan Mestrovic

      This need, this hope, to bring myself back again and again to the heart is the reason I have cast my eyes down to the ground, choosing not to look up to see who is walking toward me or standing next to me in the kitchen. At such times, I notice a need--a compulsion even--to engage the other's eyes and give a smile of acknowledgment. But even this seemingly benign, polite, courteous gesture feels burdensome to my spirit.
      I have come to see that I have spent most of my life trying to take care of others' feelings--to make sure they do not feel hurt, spurned, ignored by anything I say or do or feel. In the name of goodness and "Christian" love, I have torn my spirit away from its source and handed it over to those to whom it does not belong. When this happens--this unwitting handing over--I feel my life draining out from the center and dissipating in a thousand directions. I experience it as a rending of the most deadly kind. I lose ground. I become terrified. I topple over. I struggle to gather myself up into one still point: my heart, where my own truth dwells.
      And so I have chosen, like Kathleen, to keep custody of the eyes, and to experience the habitual, conditioned urge to look up, be nice, to take care, to control, in some measure, how the other fashions her story about me, as if that story were the truth and only she and a thousand others could tell me who I really am.
      No. This time God demands that I gather up my faculties and turn them wholly inward, so that I might know who I am in God and experience the peace and stability that come from living in that center.