Look out your window

We learn so much from our friends.
Earlier this year, fellow Orcas A Cappella member Mireille Paulson created a honey-toned Byzantine-style icon, “Virgin of the Sweet Kiss,” under the tutelage of fellow Lopezian Colin Goode. I was so comforted and astonished by the beauty of it that I asked her to create another icon for me.
When she presented it to me, she also gave me a copy of philosopher Henri Nouwen’s book, “Praying with Icons.” As someone whose upbringing included icons and prayer, this idea is entirely within my comfort zone.
That being said, I found the idea of prayer, or meditation, through gazing at beautiful images profoundly soothing and grounding.
My Orcas home looks out to Buck Mountain and Mount Constitution. In the mornings I gaze out to them and note the sunrise further south each winter day. Between my home and Buck Mountain I see the crossroads of North Beach Road and Mount Baker Road with its churches and Senior Center. In the near distance I see the airport, whose fence illegally encroaches on our property, but that’s another battle fought and lost and left behind. Behind the airport road I see the wildly popular dog park, where dogs play in total happiness with their owners nearby, and I think about what we can learn from dogs, or in kindergarten, or in any release from strife and complexity to the simple goodness that life offers us, if we just choose to accept it.
I see the Fire Station “palace” in the foreground, with the Senior Center behind it, and am thrilled to know that last Saturday’s Holiday Festival netted the Senior Center $8,400.
Up Mt. Baker Road is the Center for Community and the Arts, where Orcas quilters are hanging their beautiful handcrafted works of beauty and comfort this month. This weekend the wacky and earthy Olga Symphony will perform (sold out, but you can always come hoping for a last-minute ticket), and next weekend, on Saturday and Sunday, Catherine Pederson’s Orcas Choral Society will present the annual winter concert with accompaniment by glorious brass. Catherine always includes universal (can I say catholic?) cultures in the Choral Society concerts, and this year, the most peaceful African “Kumbaya” and a rousing Jewish song with solo by John Heath are interspersed between traditional carols. Don’t wait until the last minute for your ticket and get turned away from the concert, as happened to some people last weekend.
Across from the Center, the new OPAL houses rise. I note that they now have roofs and are no longer the naked wood frames that punctuated the vista earlier this year. Next year, ten new households will spring up in our neighborhood.
I confess that just gazing out my window gives me a proprietory feeling (hmmm looks like I better look that word up in the dictionary) — it makes me feel like the Empress of Orcas Island or a rancher ready to set out to mend fences.
For someone who’s spent most of her life looking close at words and books and now computer screens, the wealth of an expansive gaze is a gift I can give myself if I just accept it.