Lisa Gungor - The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen: Opening Your Eyes to Wonder

CONTENTS

I magine you are born on a dot. Your dot is your home. Your dot is where your caretaker cradles you, where you first go to school. You learn about math and how there are mean kids and nice kids and just where you fit or dont. Its where you adventure for hours, discovering the magic in the soil and the trees and how your body shifts, moves, feels in it all. Your dot is the tribe you were born into, your vantage point in the world. You learn a lot while living on this dot.

I magine one day your dot starts to tremble. You never knew it could. It shakes and tips to the side, sending you sliding to the edge holding on for dear life. You shake your fist and demand that your dot be calm. It obeys. But the next day it shakes again. Again you command your dot to be still, but it doesnt listen this time. You cry and beg your dot to be good to you like it promised it would from the start, but the begging seems to cause more shaking. Your dot turns more, thoroughly shakes you loose.

Strangely, gravity has shifted. You are a bit dizzy, but as you look up and brush yourself off, you see a line beneath your feet, stretching out for miles. You are scared because you dont know this line. You look at its edges. They are blurry, undefined. You wobble, gain balance, take one step. Then two. Then three. Like a toddler, you learn how to walk, then run, on this line.

You turn your head to see the dot behind you, realize with a jolt that it never was a dot. It was just the birds-eye view of this line. You had to change your perspective to see it. The change is frightening, as change always is, but you do like the perk of more leg room, more expansiveness.

Some of your friends are still living on their dots. You tell them about your line, but they have never heard of that before, so they scratch their heads and think you must be losing it.

You are thankful for your line, and you ask it to keep you safe and never shake like that mean dot did.

T hen the line shakes. You command your line to be still. But it becomes a wobbly thing, just like your dot did. It seems to be breaking apart, disappearing beneath your feet. You are terrified. You slip. And you fall.

You fall right into something. Its dark and unknown. And so you suspend inside of who knows what because it is darkness. There are muffled voices, but its like a different language you have never heard, so you grow fearful.

You sit there terrified to move, afraid you will never see your dot or line ever again because they both have been swallowed up by the darkness.

But then something happens. The darkness speaks.

It names all of the things you have been afraid of, and you beg it to stop. It wraps you up like a blanket as big as the night. It lets you scream and cry, lets you spill all of your anger out. You curse the dot; it didnt do what it said it would do. You curse the line; it fell apart and let you fall.

The darkness just listens. It puts its hand to your cheek when you make your demands. And soon, after youve spilled out all your anger and questions and hurt, you quiet. You look around. Its a struggle at first, blinking and squinting in the dark, tense hands stretched out in front of you to feel your way along. The darkness begins to teach you how to trust your heart when your eyes cant see, and how to let go of the illusion that you ever saw reality in the first place.

So you embrace the darkness, and it is like your bodys sight comes to life. You see you are in a circle, and you walk in the darkness, unafraid.

You slowly see the circle light up, with deep tones here, lighter ones there.

There are countless people who welcome you; you had no idea they had been here all along. They had watched you on your dot and cheered you on. They watched as you fell from your line; they were the voices praying for you, but you couldnt understand the prayer.

Until now. Now you can see that your little dot was the tip of a line which is really a circle you have always been within. The dot shook because it wasnt a dot. It was just how you saw it. The line broke because it was never a solid line. The dot and line were just your perspective. The circle was always the reality underneath and around the reality you could see.

I hung the pictures my mother made me above the crib. She stitched them for my sister and me when we were little, and now they would be in a room with my own two daughtersneedlepoint girls with a puppy and a cat in aged yellow frames. I straightened them, stepped back, and examined whether they were crooked.

As I situated the space for a second pair of little feet to romp around in, scenes flashed byI imagined her tiny face and felt her skin, saw myself looking into her eyes, breathing her in.

I saw Michael and me sending newborn photos to family and friends, laughing at how she looked like a small wrinkly old man, as they always do. I saw our older daughter, Amelie, meeting her for the first time; how excited she would be to have her very own real-life sister to dress up and boss around. I saw us singing all the absurd and sappy songs we make up at night because making up ridiculous songs is kind of our thing.

I saw Amelie holding her sisters tiny chubby hands as she wobbled about, learning to walk. They would run into their room together, screaming like mad as I chased them, telling secrets under covers while I told them to go to sleep for the hundredth time. I saw them calling each other when one felt heartbreak or had a first kiss, and yelling at each other for stealing clothes, stinking up the bathroom, not having enough privacy, for the slew of other things that come with having a sibling.

I realized I had plans for these two little lives already, yet I was only situating yellow frames on a wall.

In weeks the pregnancy became complicated. I was put on bedrest, saw my trusty OBGYN every two weeks plus a specialist every week. The specialist informed us my placenta, which I named Janice, was crapping out on me. Ol Janice, she was a swell ol gal but just didnt want to go the distance. Its common with smokers, said the specialist, though I didnt smoke. Rather, I drank spinach, kale, and magical human-building smoothies with vitamin powder. But Ol Janice the Placenta didnt care. She rejected it all.

Shes just small, the specialist said.

I looked to Michael for some sort of second opinion. Shes just small; shes our little squish. Shes going to be fine. Michaels hug made me feel safe, but I could see he wasnt certain he believed himself.

We went about our week, had another checkup. We were about to head out of the specialists office when he calmly told us that not enough blood was flowing to her brain. Dont be alarmed, but things have changed and we need her to come out today.

Michael called family and texted friends, Shes coming soon! And though the doctor said not to be worried, we both knew not enough blood to the brain was more than slightly concerning.

We anxiously walked into the hospital, onto the labor and delivery floor, and there stood our friends Bre and Jamie with a dozen donuts. Jamie is a lumberjackish hipster with a heart of gold. Bre is fiery and warm and can heal anything with her cooking. My mother went to get me some water and blankets as we settled into our room. My person-for-life, Rachael, came in, hugged us all, ate a donut, then found her spot in the delivery room as my doctor put her hand in uncomfortable places.