A just and loving gaze

Mud Season has come early this year.  I usually look to escape New England in late March and early April because I take no joy in the browns and grays of this transition. Rain instead of snow, dirt instead of grass, last year’s dead leaves instead of purple hostas. 

March has just begun, and I’m not ready. I pile my apprehension about unseasonable weather onto the gloom that prevails outside in my yard and inside my newspaper. Everything calls me to stay inside - inside my house and inside my head.

But my dog, Otis, has other plans. He walks over to me, rests his chin on my knee, and stares up into my face. It’s time for a walk.

His is the kind of look that Iris Murdoch called “a just and loving gaze.” She was an Irish philosopher who opined that morality is about attention, not will. 

The distinction confuses me.  But right now, Otis wants my attention so I will myself to put on boots and a jacket and oblige him. 

Otis doesn’t mind that it is 50 degrees and overcast, that the road is edged in grimy sand. He knows nothing of melting ice caps or warming seas. He isn’t bothered by the fog or the dreariness of it all. He is busy inspecting a pile of leaves capped with dirty snow.  His investigation tells him more than I can discern from my daily news.  Maybe he is learning about a bear who has come out from her den, the deer that ventured into the yard, or the benevolent god-person who threw a bagel from his truck window days or weeks before. It is all good; it all merits his attention. 

If Iris Murdoch is right and “morality is a matter of attention,” then dogs must be the most moral beings on earth.  They pay attention to our moods, our smells, our habits. They pass no judgment; they just love.

We humans are capable of such attention, of casting our own just and loving gaze: a father holds his baby for the first time, a mother pulls her toddler’s hat down to cover her ears, a grandparent reads a bedtime story to her child’s child. Is there anything more attentive, loving, moral, human than holding the hand of an old woman at the end of her life? 

Artists understand this power of attention. They study their subject with a just and loving gaze before they capture it in a portrait, landscape, or still life. When I walk with my friend Cindy, a sculptor and painter, she delights in the things she discovers in our path: a heart-shaped stone, a bleached animal vertebra, or an arthritic piece of  driftwood. Things I might miss when I stay in my head rearranging paragraphs and phrases. 

On my walk, I try to follow Otis’ lead and attend to the smells, sights, and feelings of the morning. I don’t go as far as sticking my nose in a pile of dirt, but what I notice urges me out of my fretful state.

There is color to this gray day: the red blush of saplings and deep greens of loyal moss. Even the mist on the mountain is tinged blue. I see strength in this time of barren fragility in the tree that clings to a slab of granite. Its roots hold it upright against all odds. I have sold this day short.

My walk solves nothing. Problems remain that will not submit to my will. But today, I can turn my attention to the things I see and the people I encounter. I will greet them all with a “just and loving gaze.”