Matisse: Seeing Like A Child

"Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder." E.B. White

(art by Henri Matisse)

Last night, I gazed out my kitchen window and spotted my first fireflies of the season. I watched as their phosphorescent lights blinked and twinkled in the garden like tiny stars. How much they reminded me of my childhood. My friends and I would race about to see who could collect the most fireflies in mason jars that had holes punched into the top to provide air to the fireflies we caught. Our magical firefly lantern, as we called them, as if we had captured a jar full of Tinkerbells. We would release them all before we went inside our collective houses - at each of our Mothers insistence.

This morning, the sky was full of cirrus clouds as if a painter’s brushstrokes had created quick dashes of white in a sky of cornflower blue. I am a nephophile or a person who loves clouds. I am constantly looking up at them, taking photos of clouds, and admiring them. The child in me still tries to make out what their shapes resemble: a bunny, a horse, a face.

I watch two bluebirds in the garden. I am transfixed because I have never seen two bluebirds together before. I love their bright blue feathers and their rusty chests. I watch them land, first on my younger son’s basketball goal and then on a crepe myrtle tree by my picket fence. It is only after they are gone that I notice a brown-headed nuthatch at my feeder. I begin to hear the sounds of a a chipping sparrow.

The beauty and poetry of a lived life: to retain a tender heart, a childlike sense of curiosity and wonder. I believe the key to having a continual sense of wonder in life is to look at it with the eyes of a child. One of my favorite painters, Henri Matisse, said, “To see is itself a creative operation, requiring an effort. The effort needed to see things without distortion takes something very like courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time: he has to look at life as he did when was a child and, if he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself as an original, that is, in a personal way.”

I love the bright joy Matisse brought to his art. His childlike way of seeing things, of creating art trough collage: almost childlike in their simplicity.

This past week, I released the Painted-Lady Butterflies that had hatched from their chrysalises. If only the kids in my class could have seen them take flight and flutter off into the sky. I imagined my students this way, having left my class as second graders for next year. There is something magical about releasing butterflies and seeing them rise from this world.

Nature always reminds me of its abundance and resilience even amidst the destructiveness of humankind.

Outside, the wind is blowing the leaves of the big-leaf magnolia tree so that I can see the white under-leaf. It is soothing to the soul to watch the gentle movement of trees in the wind. I ground myself by watching this, just as the trees are rooted in the earth. This small, seeming insignificant daily act grounds me in a world of crises and catastrophes and chaos.

I do not seek a happy life but a contented one. Happiness is as fleeting as one of the soap bubbles my class was blowing and playing in on the last day of school. They delighted in both creating and popping them. They giggled and laughed and ran about with the joy of a Matisse painting.

Going outside to my car, I hear the usual sound of Robins, Chimney Swifts, and Cardinals but pause to really listen. I hear it. The less familiar sounds of the House Finch and White-breasted Nuthatch.

My older son needs to take his electric car to have it charged. I follow him in my Toyota so that he doesn’t have to stay there and wait. While he is plugging his car in to charge, I watch a man outside La Bodega across the street. He is smoking a cigarette and using a coin to scratch off his lottery card in the hopes of changing his fortune and his life in an instant. I watch and, from his expression and the fact that he tossed the card to the ground as he walked off, assumed his life did not change. If only he knew. If only he could see that he could change it simply by being present and noticing the beauty about him. The bodega cat that is lying in a patch of sunlight. In the fact that all of this exists about him. That he exists. That the awning is a bright red with white letters. That the pulsing, bass-driven music that blares from a passing car exists. That music exists.

Back at home, I go outside into the garden to drink my coffee. I fun the lavender between my fingers gently so I can have that glorious scent on them.

I notice the sounds of a Tufted-titmouse and a Great Crested Flycatcher. These are both overshadowed by the chattering of a Carolina Wren.

I watch the passing clouds through the foliage of the oak trees.

The Carolina wren gets louder. He is somewhere in the branches of the old oak above me.

Chimney Swifts dart about the sky.

The morning air is cool.

I should be working in my garden but I am simply being, as it’s been a very rough week, filled with bittersweet emotions.

Now I hear an Eastern Towhee and a Northern Mockingbird.

I take such delight in learning and recognizing individual birds by their songs.

I sit on the garden bench and notice the white veins on the green leaves of the English ivy and of the lines of light amidst the shadows on the grass, which is patched with weeds.

Sitting here, I think of W.S. Merwin’s words, “The time of wisdom cannot be measured, and for me, wisdom is the garden. There is no time in the garden.”

I close my eyes and listen to the beautiful, lively birdsong all about me.

When I open my eyes, I spot a bluebird again. Recently, I have been reading Henry David Thoreau’s Journals and am reminded of a single line from it: The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

There is such pure, calm harmony found just by sitting in a garden and being present to the life all about me. I sense a more cohesive world when I’m in the natural one. A connectedness. My very blood is connected to nature, as. there’s a 98% match between my blood plasma and sea water. Is it any wonder that I am drawn to the ocean? As a young child, upon first seeing that massive, glorious body of water with its crashing waves, my first instinct was not fear but to run straight towards it. Only to be stopped by the hand of my Father, who knew its dangers and how I could be pulled under and swept away.

Returning to Matisse, he believed that to be an artist, one must “subject yourself to the influence of nature.” He said, “An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.” By sitting here and being fully present to nature, I am identifying myself with “her rhythm.” Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

For me, to return to nature is to return to my childhood, to the woods I loved and spent so much time in. To never lose that sense of awe and amazement when spotting a bird or animal or cloud or dandelion. To luxuriate in the warmth of sunshine or walking in a wild field of grass and flowers. Such exultant beauty is all about us. Become like little children and delight in it again. Be the artist who sees the world afresh and new, as a kid does. This is what forms contentment.