observation & reality

I rise up

I wonder at the way reality changes with observation:

how I can see a kid, a person, a situation,
can be clear to me and seemingly just as clear to another,
and when we talk it can be as if
it’s not two different windows with the same view before,
rather it’s as if the window’s the same
and the scene outside qualitatively different,








because each of us creates a different reality
in how we make sense of the stimuli we notice,
in how we order what we see,

I like it when one of us speaks a way of seeing
that reorders the pixels before the others and us
into shape that holds true for more than one,

my camera has a wide-angle and a telephoto zoom lens,
the eagle can be there full-frame












or a piece within the Tetons’ grandeur,












I can hunker down and focus on the perfection of the smallest
or pull back and savor the gestalt of the larger field,

for me the larger, the wider, the deeper is often better,
for the separate can be illusion,
unless we feel the eagle’s world
when we focus on the eagle herself,

I also am drawn to the self-center
of what is most immediate, closest, surest to know,
then, like australopithecus, our earliest ancestor
who raised up on two legs to look around,
I rise up and want to know where I am
within where everything else is.

by Henry H. Walker
February 18, ’12