A Moment Devoted To My Warm-Tinted Sunglasses

You see, I recently lost my sunglasses, which was unfortunate because my eyes are relatively sensitive to bright light and Oklahoma is rarely cloudy this time of year. Yet of greater disturbance than the fact that the sunglasses were missing was the fact that I had lost them. You see, I don't lose things.

I don't always keep things neat, but I always know where things are. Perhaps this is a control issue; I don't know. What I do know is that I very rarely lose things, and when I do, I often find them very quickly.

Not so, here. So I bought new ones last night. Not a big deal; people buy sunglasses often enough. (I almost imagine the fact that I bought new ones means that the old ones will be showing their little faces quite soon.) No matter.

What I love about these new ones is that they are brown, not black, and thus the lenses are tinted a warm brownish color. I'm telling you: it is amazing how beautiful the world looks through these glasses. Everything is so much brighter--not lighter, mind you, but brighter. Colors have a depth and fullness that would otherwise be obscured by the sunlight. It's like walking through Hobbiton in the LOTR movies. If you've watched the extended commentary material, you may have seen the place where they show you how Hobbiton looked in the original filmed light and then contrast it with the warmer colors that ended up in the finished movies. The grass is a luscious green. Light is warm, yellow, and inviting. Flowers are vibrant. You see the village, and you just want to be there. Take away the color wash, and it all goes back to dull, bright blahness.

I wonder if this is how our perspective treats us...or, I should say, how we choose to allow our perspective to influence us.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke instructs his follower: "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place." I was reminded of this the other day when a friend responded to it (I use it as an occasional signature on one of my email addresses). What I think Rilke is saying here is that we have a responsibility for how we see things. We can look through the glasses of reality and see something as dull, poor, indifferent, menacing. Or we can choose to put on the glasses of one whose imagination (and hope...and faith) can carry him beyond "what exists" to a place of beauty, purpose, and meaning. And if we are artists, we intrinsically have been given the imagination that can alter perspective. (I might add, in addition to what Rilke says, that faith can often accomplish that same task, though I often think that faith itself requires the capacity for imagination, so perhaps they are intertwined.)

We know what we will see when we remove the glasses. We need not be bound to an ignorant, rose-colored (false) world. Yet with the warm-tinted lenses guiding our sight, we are given another view of the same picture...a view that can help us see beyond our circumstances...a view that can grant us much-needed hope.