Seeing Small
by Cheryl Sadowski
Introspection
Silence bleeds into time, and I am drawn ever closer to the details of divine composition—in pods, wood, leaves, and petals.
As a writer, I’m accustomed to noticing details: the flash of a smile when someone unexpectedly holds open the door, the low thrum of irritation over a friend’s overly rambunctious dog.
For bookish individuals especially, details are part of the intimacy that exists between a writer and a reader. The acclaimed English novelist A.S. Byatt said, “Think of this: that the writer wrote alone and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.”
Yet for all the magic and power of reading, there are times when words cannot reach the place within us where ineffable ache and longing reside.
Last autumn—a season I normally relish for its crisp, cobalt skies and sweater weather—the political fervor in the United States reached such a fever pitch that my interest in any kind of reading plummeted like a broken thermostat. The onslaught of analyses, and opinions, exacerbated by the macabre, excessive exuberance for AI, overshadowed everything. Novels and anthologies, my default refuges, felt far away and unknowable: dead scrolls, detached from the light of their original source.
Observation
One afternoon I stopped whatever I was working on, grabbed a few colored pencils, and opened a long-neglected sketchbook in the hope of passing a few unremarkable moments drawing. A few days earlier, I’d scooped up an interesting-looking dried seedpod from the driveway and put it aside in the laundry room, intentions unknown.
Now, turning the pod over in my hand, I admired its stiff petals of variegated color—pale green, yellow ochre, raw umber. The pod seeds had long fallen from their chambers, leaving an empty, geometric pattern, like a garden parterre. The sturdy stem bore circular ridges that I presumed kept the pod anchored to its host branch until it finally fell away, sprinkling its bounty over the ground.
I knew the pod came from the tall tulip poplar that stands as the centerpiece of our erratically maintained suburban lawn. I also knew the tulip poplar to be native to Virginia and a generous host for wildlife. However, the visual details that I observed were not “known” to me as much as they were communicated through the silent language of observation. I quickly sketched the seedpod, not for accuracy but for likeness, as I’d developed an affection for it in the space of 15–20 minutes.
I’ve been writing long enough to recognize the creative energy that arises when I submit to the process and not the result. But sketching the seedpod felt different: I left behind my writer’s eye—always grasping and defining—and instead approached the pod with the same enthusiasm and interest one holds for a newfound friend.
Connection
In time, I sought out other friends to sketch: shafts of pine needles, whole pinecones with husks as diverse in shape and order as the trees from which they’d fallen. As the seasons marched on, I sketched a piece of dried wood, a stunted daffodil bulb, a shaft of freshly sprouted maple leaf, a withering dandelion, curls of regal purple pansies, and a lotus bud arching toward the sun.
One morning, I rescued a bee from the sugary depths of our hummingbird feeder and watched closely as it shook its bee head and wings from the sticky water before moving along; embarrassed, it seemed, by its earlier gluttony.
None of these drawings would ever win awards for botanical art. But the shapes, lines, patterns, and colors of my everyday companions from nature became the only language I wanted to hear while the nation roared and clamored over its decisions and dissolution, piling words upon words on screen after screen. Alternatively, the pinecone and the pansy spoke of union and kinship without even knowing they did so, for it was I who ascribed to them such words and attributes.
Gradually, the quality of my attention sharpened and extended beyond the sketchpad. I lingered in bed listening to the distinctive “cheet-cheet” of a rousing, red-bellied woodpecker and the “churt-churt” of a protective scarlet cardinal. I sat for an hour on the back porch while five acts of a spring storm unfolded in a grand narrative arc. One morning, I rescued a bee from the sugary depths of our hummingbird feeder and watched closely as it shook its bee head and wings from the sticky water before moving along; embarrassed, it seemed, by its earlier gluttony.
Illumination
The 62nd hexagram of the I Ching is a reminder to pay attention to details, to see greatness in small things. In Saint Francis’ devotional poem, the “Canticle of Creatures,” there is a similar refrain: “Be great in small things.” In our contemporary culture obsessed with goal-setting and speed, there is a tendency to interpret both adages—one of the East and one of the West—as personal affirmations for achievement.
While it’s true that big things can be realized through small steps, this kind of individualistic interpretation ignores a more important, underlying message about the need for silence and time—two requisite bookends that make seeing small possible. “Silence is so accurate,” says the artist Mark Rothko, whose plaintive planes of color and tone quiet the mind so that it may “see truly,” (the latter phrase, taken from Annie Dillard’s essay on “Seeing”).
If I am silent, I am not speaking.
If I am not speaking, there are no words to refute, labels to qualify, numbers to quantify.
Silence bleeds into time, and I am drawn ever closer to the details of divine composition—in pods, wood, leaves, and petals. We are alone with each other.
I hear a language without words. It whispers of empathy, connection, and compassion: messages meant for me, yet wholly universal. It says we must learn to truly see one another, if we are to survive.
