Komorebi Taught Me Seeing Is Always From Somewhere

Something happened in a session that made sense to me. I don’t remember if I said anything about it, but somewhere in my head a few pieces moved towards each other and settled. Ah. This is what is happening.

I like these moments. There is relief in finding a pattern, particularly when I have been sitting with fragments for some time. One thing explains another, an old story connects with something happening now, and suddenly what looked scattered begins to have a shape.

The trouble is that once I see the shape, I become capable of seeing it everywhere.

I thought of komorebi, the Japanese word commonly used for sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees. I have always loved the word, mostly because somebody thought this particular thing deserved naming. But lately I have been thinking less about the light and more about the leaves.

The light never arrives whole. Leaves interrupt it. Branches move. Wind changes the pattern. Where I am standing changes what is illuminated. A few minutes later, the same tree produces a different arrangement of light and shadow.

Perhaps understanding another person is something like this.

Therapy asks me to make sense of things. I listen for patterns, repetitions, contradictions, connections. Someone tells me five things and my mind, being a mind, immediately wants to make six from them. This is grief. This is shame. This sounds like an old adaptation. Perhaps this relationship resembles that one. Sometimes these connections are useful. Sometimes they are accurate.

But accuracy has its own seduction.

Once I have an explanation, everything that follows can begin arranging itself around it. A silence becomes avoidance because I already think this person avoids. Anger becomes evidence for a wound I have already located. Even disagreement with my understanding can, rather conveniently, become further evidence that I am right. Psychology has enough language available to make this frighteningly easy.

Then, occasionally, another piece of information arrives and the whole picture shifts.

Something I understood as fear turns out also to contain anger. What looked like dependence contains loyalty. A story about a parent changes when another memory becomes speakable. Something a person has always described as love begins to look, even to them, like obligation. Or something I thought I understood three months ago becomes inadequate simply because the person sitting in front of me is no longer quite the person who sat there three months ago.

The earlier understanding wasn’t necessarily false. It may simply have been what could be seen from there.

I find that distinction important. If I become so afraid of getting another person wrong that I refuse to understand anything, I cannot be very useful. But if I become too attached to understanding them correctly, I stop looking.

Perhaps that is what komorebi gives me: not a metaphor for beautiful attention, but a reminder about the conditions of seeing. Whatever is visible is visible from somewhere. There are leaves in the way. There is a particular hour of the day. There is the position from which I happen to be standing. And there are parts still in shadow that I don’t yet know are there.

I used to think becoming better at this work would mean seeing people more clearly. I am less sure now that clarity is the thing I want. I think I want my understanding to remain movable.

Enough confidence to say, I think I see something.

Enough humility to add, from here.