So much of what is seen often arrives already wrapped in a set of fixed expectations. So much so that it’s easy to start forgetting what might really be driving those expactations in the first place. All the otherness of our worlds can simply be swept away in the process.

But this only seems to leave some rather unsettled feelings in its wake. New ideas — those awkward things that push us to grow and expand — just seem to get left behind, things that are too much bother. And they can be left to find their own way into the world, hoping to find their footing.

Those thunderous or miraculous moments of epiphany seldom just arrive, driving these ideas into being. Though, in truth, many of us probably hoped for those kinds of miracles to do just that. Instead, I found that certain new ways of seeing were more like slow accumulations. Things would keep happening and layering themselves over one another, like one thing dripping over another until a kind of layered, deeper reality began to take shape.

And many of those layers often remained hidden from plain view.

Gradually, it became clear that we needed to explore these depths in ways that weren’t always immediately available. I always felt that the expressions of art and symbols could help in this — something I hadn’t always understood very well. They offered ways of building our views rather than simply taking them. And that always seemed to open hidden frames or forgotten threads within our deeper lived realities. Along the way, they often revealed some other, peculiar truths about ourselves. Over time, at least for me, this began to feel less like a prescribed method or measure of seeing than a way of learning how to see our worlds beyond our own bare assumptions about them.