How can we look cleanly, without wanting to find in things what we have been told is there but rather what is simply there?

This is the innocent game I propose we play.

Whenever we look we tend to see only what is given around us: stuff, normally quite humble, barely glimpsed in the middle of the infinite.

Take a look at the simplest of objects. Let’s take, for example, an old chair. It seems like nothing. But think of the universe comprised within it: the sweaty hands cutting the wood that used to be a robust tree, full of energy, in the middle of a luxuriant forest by some high mountains. The loving work that built it, the joyful anticipation of the one who bought it, the tired bodies it has helped, the pains and the joys it must have endured, whether in fancy halls or in a humble dining room in your neighbourhood.

Everything, everything shares life and has its importance! Even the most worn down of chairs carries inside the initial force of the sap climbing from the earth, out there in the forest, and will still be useful the day when, broken into kindling, it burns in some fireplace.