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| Union Station (left) and Grand Junction Depot (right), Grand Junction, Colorado (Image from Google Earth) |
Perception is a tricky thing. The mind is influenced by what is taken in at the eye, but the eye is also influenced by what is put out by the mind. All my life I have been in search of what is real. Sometimes I glimpse it. I know it at the moment, and then there is doubt, and it fades away.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle in perceiving reality is the "I" rather than the eyes. It's difficult to take in what's real when all we can see is ourselves. This is true on a purely physical level. A blind man sees the world very differently than a deaf man. It is also true on a spiritual level. A narcissist sees the world very differently than Mother Teresa.
Some see only the physical world, and others discount science whenever it clashes with their beliefs even while they trust those same laws and theories without a second thought every time they get in a car or walk across a bridge. Chemistry is reality when it is applied to the plastics on an I-Phone but not when it comes to predicting global warming.
On the other hand, scientists, who spend their entire lives studying things at the molecular level, the atomic level, the subatomic level, and at the other end of the spectrum, on the astronomical level--things so small or so distant they are completely undetectable though our natural senses--many of these same people are still somehow sure that there is nothing more than the physical reality before us. To them, those who believe in a tangible spiritual realm are simply crazy. It is impossible for them to consider that the spiritually-minded may simply have tools they themselves do not possess or choose not to utilize. They cannot fathom how anyone can believe in the unseen, even though they go to the lab or to the observatory and see complete universes for themselves that the rest of humanity are not privy to except second hand.
As a species, it astounds me how little we see.
My biggest problem with seeing reality is not with my eyes but with my "I". Unfortunately, I never have a thought that doesn't include myself. I can, at times, be quite generous, but everything I feel or do is filtered through me. What's worse, loner though I project to be, my whole life is driven by the need for acceptance. My entire life is built around craving connection--to get past the "I"--and I can't get there because I need that experience so much. I want to feel. I want to be. I want to be loved. It has nothing to do with you, only me.
Eeek! I looked in the mirror last night before going to bed and that's what I saw: me, me, me! I would have been better off staying up late and watching Psycho. My face was this distorted, dripping flesh of "I, I, I." The pupils of my eyes were in "reality" highways of "I,I,I.." slowly vanishing back to eternity but the I's getting obnoxiously large as semi-trucks coming forward straight at me. I wanted to duck and hide from me.
It was surreal and not at all comforting. It was, of course, just a moment. That is how reality usually hits us. In flecks and flakes of inspiration. In this mortal state, the human mind simply isn't built to take in more than brief moments of truth. In the end, I was able to leave it all behind, go to bed, and get a good night's sleep.
Or sort of. I woke up with the same icky feeling of "I." So, here I am trying to sort it all out.
Here's how it came about:
On Sunday, I got up early to work on my Sunday school lesson. I probably hadn't given myself as much time to prepare as I should have, but I did give myself a good three hours. The lesson was on recognizing some of the wonderful things Christ has done for us, and the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament was the scriptural base. But as I read through the lesson, I just had this feeling: forget the scriptural references today and have the class members write for themselves what wonderful things Christ has done for them personally. There will not be time for you to do more than that. I felt the spirit very strongly and found some videos of hymns to play while the class members and myself free-wrote on the topic. Then we would share out.
In the past, I had given several writing workshops to teachers in the public school system, and at almost every workshop, the activities hit some nerve, and someone ended up crying as they accessed a part of themselves that was previously closed. That was not my intention. It just usually happened. We as human beings bury a lot of pain and writing gives us an avenue back into ourselves and back out, renewed, so that, over time, we come to some sort of semblance. Because I felt the spirit so strongly as I prepared my Sunday school lesson, I expected a similar, only stronger experience.
I didn't get it. While I sat there, the music playing, not even I, who spends all his extra time rambling out his entire life on paper to some unknown audience, knew what to write. All I got down were the exact same things the lesson would have presented anyway and in the exact same fashion. Nothing personal was willing to come out and be presented on the page, let alone to the class.
When I asked if anyone wanted to share out, there was this enormous silence until finally someone who has always been a good and generous friend to the family, took as much time as he could to spare me embarrassment.
And here's the thing. It didn't bother me. I felt that I had delivered the lesson my Savior had wanted me to give on that particular day. I even had some tangible worldly confirmations of that along the way. The talks in church aligned with my intent perfectly, and church had gone way over time, leaving me with little time for my lesson. There was just time for that 10 minutes I'd set aside for writing and a few extra extra minutes to share out and wrap things up.
And so I felt good leaving the church. I didn't get the response that I'd expected, but I was fine with that. I believed I'd came and done my little part in the grand scheme of things. Someone in the audience, even if it was only one, must have needed to journal their thoughts that day.
That feeling lasted several hours, but by bedtime I was standing in front of the mirror disgusted with myself. Why? Some absolutely ineffective part of me craved attention so badly that I couldn't stand thirty or forty people thinking, "That lesson was sure a flop; what was he thinking?"
Why do we need the acceptance of others so badly that we can't fully engage in life out of fear of rejection? Why is our sense of self so immense that we are never fully open to the world around us?
This, in part, is what a road trip is for: to leave the self behind and focus on the sights ahead. To see and be something more than "I," to be the "transparent eyeball" Emerson describes so well in Nature and feel the euphoria created by temporarily shattering the ego and experiencing reality first hand.
But those intense moments of purity are so brief. Most of our lives are experienced through our ego. The life we live is not necessarily the real life, just the felt life filtered through our over-protective ego.
How I experienced Grand Junction, Colorado was a perfect example of this. I didn't experience one Grand Junction. I experienced two very different Grand Junctions based on my mood.
Going into Walker State Wildlife Area, Grand Junction had seemed to be a very ugly place. We had to go through an industrial area before reaching the river bottoms, where we intended to have lunch. I was hungry, wanted breakfast, and the little narrow road ran along the railroad tracks with electrical wires, corrugated tin, cinder block, steel, all abundant. It frustrated me. It kept me from reaching some dream rest area where we could pull up to a picnic table, pull out the ice chest, and eat while watching waterfowl rise from a glimmering, slow moving river.
But then once we got there, although there was no picnic table, that need was met. By the time we finished breakfast, our stomach was full, and we had a walk along the reeds as we looked out over an amazing run of cottonwood along the river backed by the cliffs of Colorado National Monument. This opened up the possibility of seeing Grand Junction in a new light. The Grand Junction I saw leaving Walker State Wildlife Area was not the one I saw going in.
Instead of being an ugly industrial sprawl, it was now a quaint, historic railroad town. I especially loved the two old train stations, Grand Junction Depot and Union Station.
Unfortunately, we were pressed for time. The stop at Walmart had eaten up a good bit of time as stops at Walmart always do, and so I didn't even stop to take pictures. The one for this post was provided by Google Earth.
However, since I've been home, I've learned that Grand Junction Depot opened on September 18, 1906, which you may also know as the day of the great San Francisco earthquake, although I didn't. In fact, the station was first used as a camp for refugees fleeing the devastated city on the bay. I doubt the refugees were in any state to appreciate the beauty of the building in this small city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, but extraordinary it was. "Designed by famed Chicago architect Henry J. Schlacks in the Italian Renaissance style," Grand Junction Depot "was considered to be the finest depot of its size in the west" (Colorado Preservation, Incorporated).
The clearly older Union Station just down the street is just as attractive as Grand Junction Depot, if not more so, but I was not able to find out more about it. It is an amazing structure, and the lack of easily available information on both of these buildings given their grandeur reinforces my perception that probably most people who travel through Grand Junction see it as I first did: a mass of industrial and commercial sprawl in what once was a beautiful river valley.
Actually, I doubt they even see it as that. It's either an annoyance on the way to Rockies if you're headed east, or a let down after being about as physically and spiritually as close to God as you can get in an automobile as you descend that same glorious range headed west.
Or perhaps worst of all, Grand Junction is a convenience: a place to stop for food, take a pee, gas up, and restock the fridge of your $100,000 RV at Walmart, if you be so lucky.
We see what we need, and we never need more than what we prepare to see.
To need in a spiritual sense is a good thing. I may never get past myself, but I'm less harmful as aware narcissist than as an oblivious one.
Yearning is a type of seeing. I yearn for the open road. I yearn to see more, to be more.
Perhaps spiritual death occurs when a man looks in the mirror and likes everything he sees.
Works Cited
Colorado Preservation, Incorporated. Grand
Junction Depot. 2018. 18 October 2018.
<http://coloradopreservation.org/programs/endangered-places/endangered-places-archives/grand-junction-depot/>.
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