What is “close observation” and why is it essential to living a full and fulfilling life? It is a skill garnered from an early age. ..in many ways instinctual, and also learned from peers, parents and teachers. In my humble opinion, we don’t pay enough attention to this...to “CALL attention”...to teach: “pay attention.”

The most successful teachers I know use authentic experiences to CALL ATTENTION...and then follow up with asking/provoking their students to record what they observed in whatever “language” is available and meaningful to them (writing, drawing, dance, mathematics, etc.). This apparently simple process (so simple that it’s often ignored), is the fundamental building block of all learning...of genuine understanding. What happened? What did you sense (using all five of senses)? How would you, can you, describe it?

I remember a personal epiphany with this process after college, when I was introduced to Frederick Franck by Louise’s mother, Adeline Boyd, an adjunct professor of Eastern Art at Washington University in St. Louis. The book of Franck’s that she recommended to me when she saw a couple of my sketches was The Zen of Seeing, Seeing/Drawing as Meditation. The book is a collection of Franck’s drawings and his hand written observations. It opened a whole new way of understanding the world for me.

He writes: SEEING/DRAWING is a way of contemplation by which all things are made new, by which the world is freshly experienced at each moment. It is the opposite of looking at things from the outside, taking them for granted. What I have not drawn, I have never really seen. Once you start drawing an ordinary thing, a fly, a flower, a face, you realize how extraordinary it is — a sheer miracle.

When I take the time to SEE, the world is transformed for me…I make sense of the parts in new ways…my perspective becomes more complete…my life becomes more full. There are so many experiences that I could recount for you, both in my personal reflections, in my teaching, and my teaching of teachers.

My most recent experience of the intractable value of close observation that leads to understanding was in Paris. When I saw the news headline last week that Notre Dame had burned, the gut wrenching blow I felt was directly related to these sketches I’d made only two weeks ago...one while sitting out front with 1,000 of my best friends from all over the world, and one four days later having stopped while biking along the Seine with Louise.

West transept and blooming cherry trees, Notre Dame

Neither of these sketches is really about “art.” They represent my full, undivided, completely delighted PRESENCE...really SEEING Notre Dame and drawing what I saw and felt. I understand Notre Dame in an utterly real and unfathomable way. Like feeling your breath, now here...now gone.

On a most beautiful, blue sky, first day of spring day, our son, Alden and his family said goodbye to a dear and beloved chocolate lab named Olly. Olly was almost 14 years old. Up until the week before, she seemed to be doing pretty well…talking walks in the snow when they visited us in Vermont, snuggling, wagging her tail. And then, she wasn't. She couldn't get up anymore by herself, she wasn’t hungry, her breathing became difficult at times, she was fading.

My daughter-in-law Caroline, brought a book home from the first grade classroom where she teaches entitled, Saying Goodbye to Lulu, about a family dog who dies. I walked over to their house to help with bed time and they had just finished reading it. Delilah, who is four, came over to me in tears and handed me the book and said emphatically, “I don’t want to keep this book. It is too sad!” Alden and Caroline were helping their children, gently and honestly, to understand that their dear dog that they had grown up with was about to die.

It is so hard for everyone to loose a pet who has become such a valued member of a family. All of us were in tears at one time or another during that hard week. On Wednesday, March 20th, I picked up Asher and Delilah from school. We walked up the stairs to their house and their parents told them, “Olly died today.” Olly was curled up on her bed. The four of them gathered around and patted her and cried and considered how things change so fast and that death is final.

Ashley and I went to join them for a ceremony for Olly. Alden dug a perfectly round and deep hole under their backyard apple tree. Asher and Delilah helped. They put one of Olly’s sheep skins at the bottom of the hole. Alden carried Olly from her bed to the back yard and laid her to rest. We held onto each other in the silent blue afternoon and felt very sad and also very grateful for each other and for the love, loyalty and joy of such a sweet dog for so many years.

Ashley and I were listening to an interview with Jean Vanier, a philosopher and Catholic social innovator, who founded The L’Arche movement which establishes communities for people with mental disabilities. He said that children teach us about tenderness, presence, and unity or wholeness. He said that, as adults, we can often be removed from the present, saying one thing and thinking another. Children, and I think also dogs, bring us into presence, wholeness and joy.

I was so touched and impressed with the way this family, led by their parents, honored the life and death of their dear dog in such an honest, real, and brave way. Ashley and I felt privileged to be a part of this passing.

Mary Oliver wrote this: Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old — or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.

And she also wrote this: Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

Close Observation...”The Zen of Seeing”

Saying Goodbye to Olly