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“One day I had a momentary, sharp sense of how remarkable it would be to have a way of viewing crows and snow-covered fields without such needy, such self-located eyes. Wouldn’t it be a new and unusually interesting experience, I thought with excitement, to look at a world that is not filtered by me, that loses me in the looking?

I looked at the sea. And in looking at it, all at once I saw the fact of it, the life within it, and the rock I was sitting on, a part of it, I saw warm living shore, cold living sea, and for the moment, detached from my own involvement in earth and sea, I had an illumination of the oneness and the counterpoint of life. And in seeing this I had such a strong sense of life – not a feeling about it but an attentive comprehending of it – that I was taken out of myself in a calm, sensible way. Life is, I thought, with a sober thrill. It is not as I see it, but as it is.”

Peggy Freydberg

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