A song I grew up with pleads for God to “open the eyes of my heart.”

I remember singing this as a child and a youth, and it’s a beautiful metaphor.

At its root, it asks the same thing that all of us want:To see the world as it really is.

After all, aren’t we all just searching for truth?

I love this passage where Dillard sees a glimpse of it too.

And do you know what?

I hope you see it one day as well.

I hope you realize your place in this puff of warm breath, and I hope you ring like a bell when you catch a glimpse of it.

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek