by Hallie Waugh
Still, in a way, nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven't time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. … I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. — Georgia O'Keeffe
Out in the yard, a world opens beneath the weight of my son’s steady attention.
He observes every ant, every roly poly, every gnat. A rock is an occasion. He can, in the right moods, spend hours this way. Back by the garden in late September, weeks after production has slowed and I’ve stopped looking, he spots the tiniest red bead and yells out, ’MATO—tomato.
I am learning to see on his plane. I am failing most of the time. My attention is sporadic and flung wide; even during play with my children I flip through the open tabs in my brain: When is that doctor’s appointment? We forgot to pay a bill. The house needs vacuuming. What’s for dinner tonight? The mudroom is unfinished. Am I a good friend? Will my kids resent me when they’re older? We’re out of lunch meat.
This onslaught of task management is, of course, the way of things in our world—particularly for women. The mental load overspills its banks, dropping its detritus across ordinary moments when our brains are, momentarily, free of immediate demands. For me, the tabs always open themselves when I’m with my sons, trying to remember how to play.
Playing with my children on their level is as near to meditation as anything I’ve ever done. At the beginning, it feels impossible—painful, even—to still myself. I feel as if I’m moving through molasses; I clear my mind over and over. The present feels impossibly boring and void of anything interesting for at least the first ten minutes. I get down on my hands and knees in the garden and look at the rocks, or I lay down on the floor, entering the world of miniature fire engines, and I almost cannot bear it. I reach for my phone a minimum of five times.
But somewhere around the twelve minute mark, if I have successfully released my to-dos and have restrained from using the time to gather dust bunnies and reorganize toy shelves, something shifts. My attention gives in and matches itself to the pace of a single moment. I can sit there with the cars rolling back and forth on a carpet road. I can watch the roly poly descend into a hole beneath the rock and wonder where it went. I am forcing nothing. I have, as Oliver Burkeman says, entered space and time completely.
I feel like a jeweler holding the loupe to her eye, watching the world with increasing levels of magnification. I click another lens in place, and see things one degree larger. Larger still. I am as close as I can get to time, to reality. I can feel its warm breath on my cheek, smell its terrestrial musk.
I will emerge and take up the to-do list tabs. I will distract myself a hundred other ways. I will sit on the couch and look at my phone while my sons ask me to play. But for now, the only way is down.
The Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe brings the world under a microscope. A wash of color on nearly every wall. As we wander the small white rooms, I see things from the viewpoint of an insect, everything scaled up and looming.
There are her beloved flower paintings. And her famed pelvis bone series. Corn No. 2 (a most endearing name for a painting) shows the observer an ocean of pigmented green so vast you could tumble right into it.
But there is a bevy of other small things, cast in the light of the beloved simply by nature of being rendered so on canvas. Seashells, feathers, apples, avocados (then called alligator pears), geranium leaves, what looks like the hemmed edge of a white billowing curtain.
In one room, a collection of seashells, feathers, and pebbles have been placed under a glass case just beneath a series of paintings which explore the same objects. The feeling I have looking at these is a familiar one. It is as if one of my children has just come in from playing outside, pockets lined with treasures. They want to show me what they’ve found.
Here, in her paintings, they are the worthy subjects of O’Keeffe’s attention. I stand as close as I can to the paintings, as close as the tape lines on the floor will allow. I want the seashells, the flower petals, the pale pinks and inky blues, to swallow me whole. I am shrinking to the size of her world. She is asking me to see.
After her first visit to New Mexico, O’Keeffe, in her words, “was always making [her] way back.” Starting in 1929 at the age of 42, she began spending part of nearly every year there. In the latter part of her life, she would own multiple homes in Abiquiu, a small and isolated town an hour’s drive north of Santa Fe. In her canon during these years are at least 20 door paintings, a handful of pelvis bones, 200 depictions of flowers. One particular door, belonging to an old pueblo hacienda whose property she eventually came to own, became the subject of multiple paintings. A few of the paintings’ titles: In the Patio III, Patio Door with Green Leaf, Black Patio Door, Black Door with Snow, and My Last Door. She didn’t need novelty as her muse, nor travel or glittering events in big cities (though admittedly she’d had plenty of that in earlier years, attending gallery openings in New York with husband Alfred Stieglitz). For the prolific later part of her life, O’Keeffe needed only space and time enough to look closely and attend to the world around her. She lived, it seems, as slowly as the pace of her attention would carry her.
While in the museum, in a room where a video about her life and her New Mexico homes projects onto a blank wall, I learn about her garden. At her Abiquiu home, she grew an expanse of herbs, vegetables, native plants, and fruit trees. I like to imagine her spending hours there when she wasn’t painting, looking and looking at the plants, marking their growth and daily changing. I like to imagine this garden, this looking, helped hone the caliber of vision that marks her art and, decades later, bewitches me as I walk around within its rooms.
I’m heading out to my garden in early spring, my youngest son in tow. I spray water into his pale green watering can, and he waters the rocks. From standing, the soil of our raised beds looks bare. Just a bunch of dirt, speckled with the thinnest specks of green.
I crouch down so I’m as level to the soil as I can be. There I see the tender, spindly hair of carrot leaves. The two narrow spinach sprouts that precede the oval-shaped leaves. I run my fingertips along their leaves, lightly, like stroking strands of hair. He does the same, with a tenderness that is rare in him and yet available, just beneath the surface.
At the edge of one small blade is the remnant of the seed, a tiny husk stuck on its end like a cap. It is where everything starts.
Hallie Waugh writes essays and poetry about embodiment, faith, and creativity. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Seattle Pacific University, and her poetry and essays have been published in or are forthcoming from Ekstasis, Fathom, Mom Egg Review, Windhover, The Curator, and New York Quarterly. She lives in Oklahoma City with her husband and two young sons.