Shifting Perceptions

I spent last week in Denver. It was a work trip of sorts to help my former husband get ready to sell his house and move into smaller digs. Lee was my middle husband, and has remained my close friend these past 30-some years. I supported him through the loss of his wife to Covid, and he was a Godsend to me through my ghastly divorce of husband #3 last year.

People have asked us over the years how it is we continue to get along so well. I tell them that we were friends first, and friendship was what remained after we parted ways. I also tell them I am a much better friend than I am a wife, it seems.

This was my second trip into house-hell with Lee, but this trip ended up being very different from the first. This trip, I dove headfirst into my perceptual world, both by surprise, and by plan. Seven days in Denver startlingly illuminated for me that how you see and think can shift over time—or in an instant— opening up a whole new world of possibilities, attitudes, and perspectives. I learned that you could shift your perspectives because of your intentions, or your will to see things another way—a deeper way. Or this shift into a different dimension can just flat out surprise you. You glance sideways and suddenly the world has changed.

Moving is one of my least favorite things to do. I would prefer a root canal by a drunken gorilla. So after three long days of sorting, hauling, dumping, running up and down three flights of stairs, packing, gifting, and advertising old stuff, I was pretty wrung out. By then, Lee had been in moving-misery for weeks, coordinating fix-it stuff on the house and filling one or two dumpsters before I ever got there to help. I think we were both too tired and frenzied to notice how smoothly we worked together through all the hubbub.

We had planned an overnight in Rocky Mountain National Park weeks before, knowing a rest break would be necessary—at least for me. Many of you know I had moved away from the Rockies, my soul’s home, in 2008 and had never returned. Aspens, sagebrush, marmots, thin sweet mountain breezes were a lost landscape of my life. 

As Lee and I drove out of Estes Park and toward the entrance to the National Park, the once-familiar essence of those mountains wrapped their arms around me. My heart thrummed between joy and loss, back and forth, again and again. Intellect told me that my time in such places was over. Yet my heart drank in the wonder of the Rockies, singing to me of how much I had missed them. 

My elder years seem to have ignited in me this urge to strengthen my worldview of wonder, my seeking to see everything more genuinely in all directions from the tiniest marvels to the grandest. And so when I stepped out of the car and we began walking down a narrow dirt trail, I had to laugh when I found myself shuffling along on hands and knees, taking pictures of all the plants and flowers and running them through my identification app. When I had last lived in these lands, plants and insects and bees were not a part of my inquiry. 

I had lived in the mountains wanting to know its geography, its animals and bird life, the habits of aspens and lodgepole pines. “I missed all this!” I said to myself, snapping a photo of a fleabane, the likes of which I had planted in my own yard just last spring. “I never looked down! Heavens, I missed so much!” Fireweed, goldenrod, yellow coneflowers, asters all smiled and waved at me from the sides of the path.

And because I was living more from wonder every day, I recognized those flowers along the path as true friends. Everything in the natural world I had come to perceive as  “my relative”—not by mind, but as a felt-sense in my body. “Hello you. Hello each and every one. How beautiful you are all dressed in yellow, and you in purple fringe!” When I finally took my eyes off the path, the landscape around me opened wide, wide, in a way I could not have seen it years ago.

I caught a sideways glance at Lee, watching patiently as I crept along giggling joy and surprise. Lee, also, was a part of my inner landscape that I could not fully see years ago when we were two married bumbling idiots. Post divorce, we had gone on very different journeys. I had stayed a rural gal, and he had become urban. His joys were skiing, classical music, game nights, and travel. My delights were ducks, frogs, writing, and fermented foods. But one way we had  moved along parallel paths was in our commitment to personal growth. Lee took courses and retreats, while I did counseling and meditation.

When I started visiting this past year with Lee, I saw him in the light of our previous years together. It was automatic to drop into the old. There were still similarities, of course. But in the passing decades, we had become very, very different people. So I made a conscious determination on this trip to see him as a wide, wide fresh landscape. 

The first thing I noticed was how kind he had become. I recalled our conversations over the past year or more, and how—more than anyone—he had cared about me, assuring me while I worked to create a new life after leaving home and marriage, that I needn’t worry. “I will not let you fall,” he told me. And in word and deed, by gosh, he meant it. Our conversations and visits were all so easy. We both hungered for good, honest communication. Somewhere along the way, we had both outgrown any desire for drama. My appreciation for him expanded as I viewed him through this wide, wide lens. He even started looking different to me. Our friendship had matured and deepened, and I was able to see it and sense it. He did, too.

We roamed the Park together with a newfound sense of affection and gratitude for each other. And I let my heart open to the new and old joys of high granite peaks, and quivering aspens, and nodding stands of yellow goldenrod.

As my bones become brittle and my muscles weaken a bit with age, I am so grateful for my lifelong desire to remain flexible in this life of mine, curious, and committed to seeing everything as openly as I am able, with as much compassion and delight as I can. Spirit, spare me from becoming concretized! To whichever ancestors sent me down the birth canal with these gifts, I am profoundly beholden.

I truly believe that you can change your perception on just about anything that you honestly want to. You can stop, listen, focus your intention, and watch the world around you shift in a day, a month, a year, a minute. I think that “want to” is the operative phrase here. It requires some willingness to release old attitudes, and maybe some old resentments, but it is so worth the work!

Lee and I will be visiting more over the winter. Who knows what else there is to discover/uncover in our friendship?