The Art of Appreciation
The Gentle Art of Appreciation
Dream of Sept. 14, 2021
I wake up in a small, plain, but neat cottage bedroom. Instinctively I know that I have recently died. Gingerly I sit up, put my feet on the floor and, discovering that I’m perfectly capable of walking, I open the door and go into the next room.
I am in a cottage kitchen and Bruno Ganz, the German actor who played the lead angel in Wim Wenders magnificent 1987 film, Wings of Desire, is sitting on a kitchen stool eating a bowl of soup. He looks up and smiles as if he were expecting me and inquires politely if I’d like a bowl of soup.
“Thank you,” I say, “but I just died recently and I’m feeling a little queasy.” He smiles again as if this is a perfectly normal response. I wonder if this is some kind of afterlife test of manners so I decide I should be on my best behavior and hurriedly say, “But I’ve caught you at a bad time and I don’t want to interrupt your meal. Please do finish your soup.”
I sit down on one of the kitchen stools and wait while he finishes his soup, which he seems to be enjoying immensely as there is much slurping and smacking of lips to accompany the eating. I glance around the little room and it feels vaguely familiar. Then I realize that it reminds me of the illustrations from the children’s book The Maggie B. (Irene Haas) which was one of my all-time favorite books to read to my children and they often requested it. As I’m looking around appreciatively, I realize that the interior has morphed and now it looks more like a Maurice Sendak illustration. This surprises me and I look to Bruno inquisitively.
He has just finished his soup and wipes his mouth on a napkin and says, “I expect you would like to see your own heavenly home.” This brings me up short and I forget my question about his malleable kitchen interior.
We walk out into a perfectly lovely countryside setting of gently rolling hills, lush grass, wildflowers and little cultured gardens in a village setting. We walk down a lane and there is another idyllic little cottage with a front yard filled with lilies of the valley. The aroma is already wafting across the field and filling my nostrils with its fragrance. In the middle of this snowy spread of white blossoms is a single red poppy.
The sight of this makes me stand still in my tracks and I am thrown back into a Sacramento summer in the early 1990s when I was a student at the seminary and did a summer program at the Waldorf College in California. One afternoon we were sent out for a very specific metaphysical exercise where we were supposed to commune with some piece of nature. It didn’t matter if it was a stone or a leaf or a cloud or a bird or a twig. I saw a red poppy in a field and lay down on my stomach to commune with the flower.
Our instructions had been enigmatic as we were told to simply stare at whatever object we had chosen and wait until something occurred. We were not told what was going to occur, so I had no idea what to expect. I must have stared at the poppy for 25 or 30 minutes when suddenly the hair stood up all over my body and my heart missed a beat and the breath stuck in my throat because I was fully conscious of the fact that not only was I looking at the poppy, the poppy was looking at me!
I was so shocked by this that tears sprang to my eyes and I found myself lying there on the ground, on my stomach, weeping with the most enormous sense of gratitude and affection that this beautiful little flower was willing to acknowledge my existence. That may seem crazy, but the feeling was so genuine that the impact of that moment has never left me. I consider it to be one of the peak experiences of my life.
I became aware again of Bruno standing at my side and when I looked up at him with tears on my face he nodded and said, “It was at the moment that you learned the gentle art of appreciation that this place blossomed for you here.”
I stare at him, speechless, as I am trying to reconcile his statement with everything that I’ve learned as a child about what it meant to be good. The “gentle art of appreciation” was not one of the lessons that we were taught and yet it clearly seems to rank very high in this celestial book of deeds.
As if reading my thoughts Bruno smiles again and says in his gentle German accent, “Oh yes, this level of heaven is nothing but the manifestation of what you have learned to appreciate.” He flings his arms wide and as his eyes travel over the landscape it seems to morph and take on various painterly forms: Constable, Turner, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne… he winks at me and spreads out his arms in another direction and everything seems to whirl about like a Van Gogh painting.
Feeling emboldened I look back at my own little cottage landscape with my lilies of the valley and red poppy and begin to visualize additions to the garden. Immediately, lilac bushes sprout at the sides of the house and waft their fragrance across the air. A curved arch with blossoming roses appears, and a wide trellis dripping with wisteria shows up at the front windows.
Bruno nods approvingly and then continues to look at me in a probing way. I realize that I’m feeling cheated; if I’d genuinely understood what the rules of the game were, I would have been much more discerning and disciplined about appreciating the things of true beauty and worth in the world while I was alive. But somehow that activity had been so diminished in importance that I had neglected that part of my life.
Bruno nods again and tells me that I can go back. We return and walk back along the path and I see jutting out in front of us a narrow bridge that arches over a gorge leading back to the living world. As I look at it I can feel myself reshaping it into a much grander edifice; something that looks like one of the stage sets for Wagner’s Gotterdammerung opera; the great bridge to Valhalla with waterfalls and a rainbow and dramatic sky behind it. I hear a little cough behind me and I turn to see Bruno doing one of his famous little lifts of the eyebrow as if giving the gentlest of reproaches: “Rainbows? Seriously?” I laugh easily without the slightest sense of shame as I’m beginning to understand the playfulness of this whole heavenly realm.
I wake up feeling more hopeful and childlike than I have since before the pandemic.
. . . .
Later that day I watched the full film, Wings of Desire, and realized that that’s really the whole message of the movie - gentle appreciation for the small and precious beauties; human beings finding the glimmers of gold amidst the dross of earthly existence.
[excerpt from the film; two angels sharing notes from the day’s observations of humans:]
At the Zoo U-Bahn station, the guard, instead of the station's name suddenly shouted, "Tierra del Fuego!"
In the hills, an old man was reading The Odyssey to a child and the young listener stopped blinking his eyes.
And what do you have to tell?
A passer-by, in the rain, folded her umbrella and was drenched.
A schoolboy described to his teacher how a fern grows out of the earth, and astounded the teacher.
. . .
Rebecca Armstrong
Sept. 14, 2021
