Do you realize how mysterious nature is?
How come we spend so much time looking down? Our tendency is to look down, and to look straight ahead. Look up! What is up there, above? The celestial realms. The vantage of the higher. Father Sun, Mother Moon, the stars. Let us look up, to remind ourselves that there is something higher. There is a vantage, farther up, that can look down and survey.
The word supervision comes from the Latin roots meaning the “above seeing.” Looking up reminds us that there is something up there supervising all of this. It helps remind us how small we really are: both highly significant to ourselves, and minute in the scheme of things.
Related Practices:At its heart, look up is a form of perspective-taking that helps us become right-sized in relationship to the Creation. The most deeply related practice here is Gratitude. In that practice John Stokes speaks about this exact thing: becoming right-sized in relationship to the Creation. When we think of looking up as something we do with our eyes, it connects to other practices related to vision: Soften the Gaze, Stare Vacantly into Space, and Vista Views.
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Humans have probably always been awed by the natural world.
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Video: Distill | Photography: Stein Egil Liland | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.