New Eyes

“The voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”Marcel Proust

This Proust quote has been a very important part of our front porch work. In our quest for more and more information about the landscape we face, we seem to be more confused and more lost than ever before. When Ben Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention, he was asked what kind of government do we have. He answered, “ a Republic if we can keep it.” As we approach election day, I worry about what lies beyond it and if we will keep the Republic. In my lifetime, I have never experienced such hate, incivility, polarization and pure venom in the political debate that seems to transcend issues. Can we come together? I think the answer to this question is not in new policies or reluctant submission to the tyranny of the majority in Congress, but in our ability to see our country, each other and ourselves with new eyes.

The view from the front porch gives us new eyes – eyes that see through our intellectual abstractions that divide us in endless debates and make visible a deeper reality that reveals the beauty and magic of life itself. Beauty illuminates a spiritual reality we all share that transcends our differences in the face of our insignificance revealed in the night sky, a sunrise on the beach or the face of an innocent child. Maybe we can see a way to keep the Republic —