A friend once told me that eyes were a
window to a person’s soul. I hadn't really believed him because I had never
seen that for myself. At a bicycle collective
downtown, he had asked me what I thought of the red-bearded man, the one who talked to us about building fixies from
old bike frames. I told him I thought he had pretty blue eyes and seemed nice
enough.
“I
know he’s a good man.”
“How
do you know that?”
“Well,
you saw his eyes didn't you?”
“Yes,”
I replied, “they were pretty; they were blue.”
“Then
you should've seen he was a good man if you looked at his eyes.”
I
only saw the color.
It was another week later when I met my
friend at the Baskin-Robbin’s parking lot to carpool. We were going on another
excursion to look for bike frames downtown. It was evening and the rain had
stopped; the sun was low in the sky beginning to set. The smell of the wet
asphalt filled my nostrils as I stepped out of my car and slid into the
passenger seat. The light blinded my eyes as it bounced from the water on the
hood of his Subaru.
“I
love rain, don’t you?”
I
watched as the clouds continue to part.
“The
rain always makes things brighter.”
It’s now a full year later. The sky is
gray, but that doesn't matter because I’m sitting in the basement of the Fine
Arts building in a corner classroom. I don’t like the fluorescent lights. I
feel like they are slowly killing me. The sun is light; the sun brings life.
These lights aren't the sun; they’re false and that’s why I’m dying. It will
take awhile for my eyes to adjust when I walk outside. If the sun is out when
class ends then I will see differently, too. When I walk back into a building
I’ll see the difference in the light quality. I’ll start dying again. I’ll be
like the yellow flowers sitting on the table in front of me while I write this.
They are wilting and slowly turning brown. No one waters them and my roommates
never open the blinds. All they have is fluorescent light, and that is why they
are dying. It may be slow, but it will still happen. These lights will slowly
kill us.
Class is interesting. We have a guest
speaker today and he starts talking about passion. I think every guest speaker
that comes to an art class talks about this. He tells me I need to be
passionate. Passion will drive you. If you have a passion you will succeed. I
start to wonder what it is. I don’t think I've really ever felt it. I don’t
think I have ever allowed myself to. I stop listening when he starts going over
his Digital Asset Management. His voice trails off as I pull my thoughts in.
The lights turn off. That’s good; at least the light isn't killing us. There is
a power point up of his photos, they’re beautiful, but I still don’t hear much
because I’m starting to worry about what he said.
What is passion? If I have never felt
it, then I have never succeeded. If I don’t have passion then I have never been
driven to do something worthwhile. So what am I doing here? I start to have a
panic attack and I burst out of my seat, taking the steps two at a time until I
make it outside to the light that brings life: the sun. It has to be out there;
it’s not here in this dark corner room.
The bell rings. I didn't physically
burst out of my seat, but now I have some catching up to do because half of me
is already outside. I take the steps one at a time. The sky is gray; this time
it matters. It looks as if it will start to rain. I love the rain.
I have my favorite purple rain jacket
on, the one with the conversion chart on the inside pocket, but I don’t wear
the hood. It makes it harder to see with my peripheral vision and sometimes the
hood comes over the top of my eyes; I don’t like that. I try to catch up. My
mind is still racing. I start passing people and I wonder if I could ever feel
passionate about them. A raindrop falls and hits my bottom lip. I stop in my
tracks and look up. It is a strange sensation. I realize I haven’t really felt anything
for a long time. It takes me by surprise because it hits something so
sensitive; it wakes me up. It was cold, it was quick, then it started to
trickle down my chin and I wiped it away. I think back to when I read a Rock and a Hard Place. “Passion: That
which I suffer, allow, endure, to me is done.” I had been trying for so long not
to feel, but that small drop of rain had just foiled my plan. By removing my
hood I had allowed that raindrop to fall onto my lip. I had allowed it to
remind me what it was like to feel. It had scared me, it was like a cool hard
jab that somehow managed to bounce lightly away. It was quick then as it began
to slide off my lip I was already changed.
We’re coming back to Baskin-Robbin’s and
as I get ready to go back to my car I ask:
“How
did you know something was wrong?”
“Your
eyes looked like the sky does when it clears after a storm.”
I look up now and my senses have
heightened. I am aware of the light. And now I realized that is what I've been
missing. I start to understand it. I look at the next person that passes me and
it’s almost terrifying because I see the light and I can feel an overwhelming
sense of compassion. I can feel. He was right: eyes are a window to a person’s
soul. It was this compassion from understanding light that I had been missing.
I look at the next person and again I am terrified because I never knew you
could see pain like that before. Once again, I can feel. “Passion: that which I
suffer, allow, endure, to me is done.” The opposition is part of it. My
thoughts jump back to a pink highlighted page “…color produces vibrations in
the soul…a path leading color to the soul (Kandinsky).” It makes sense and now I understand
what my friend saw. The light helped him see the pain, even feel it, but he
allowed it and endured it. I finally catch up. That’s what passion is. I look
up.
“I
love rain, don’t you?”
I
watched again as the clouds started to part.
“The
rain always makes things brighter.”
