The Art of Looking Up

Learning about PERSPECTIVE while chaperoning a 4th grade field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts

Mar 30, 2025

As we enter National Poetry Month here in the United States, I will be writing a bit more about the struggles of juggling the life of being a poet and a mother in a family with complex needs. It is one of the reasons why I went from publishing once a week to 2-3 times a month.

As I make decisions about my future I’ve had to ask myself:

What price am I willing to pay for the creative life?

I think of the Gambler when he says,

You've got to know when to hold 'em,
know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away,
know when to run.

Writing poetry has changed the way I think about language and culture, how I use words, and how I relate to other people. I am no longer someone who writes poems. I am, despite the uneasiness of acknowledging it, a poet. It is like how having children made me into a mother. Some things in life are utterly transformative. In both cases, I feel being a poet and a mother has changed me for the better. However, I have a very ordered way of thinking. I have shared my very simple morning prayer1 in the past, but for those who are new, it goes like this:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

O Lord, 
Please make me a better Catholic, wife, mother, friend, and writer.

The writing comes fifth, but it is still something I care deeply about. My goal is to make my writing good enough for you, the reader. But I have a body that needs sleep. I have family members who need my labor and love. And I would love keep the friends that I have, and that takes some type of investment as well.

From January to March I’ve had the opportunity to meet other poets who have families, many of whom have children roughly in the same range as mine (aged 22 to 9). These mothers and fathers have found ways of creatively navigating the limitations of their resources. Having more resources definitely helps, but no one I spoke to felt like they lived in abundance. I’ve needed to hear a variety of people’s perspectives.

Questions for my creative friends:

Do you write and have a family and a job ourside the house? How do you make time for everything? What have you had to sacrifice?

Do you have a job that allows you enough time to pursue a creative life?

Have you ever had to put your art on the back burner and wait it out for years? How did it go? Were you able to get back to your artistic life?

Have you ever lost the ability to create like you were able to when you were younger?

perspective (n.)

late 14c., perspectif, "the science of optics," from Old French perspective and directly from Medieval Latin perspectiva ars "science of optics," from fem. of perspectivus "of sight, optical" from Latin perspectus "clearly perceived," past participle of perspicere "inspect, look through, look closely at," from per "through" (from PIE root per- (1) "forward," hence "through") + specere* "look at" (from PIE root *spek- "to observe"). The English word is also attested from early 15c. as an adjective, "pertaining to the science of optics."2

My main experience of the word perspective comes from studying art, such as when I was in high school and learned of Da Vinci’s use of one-point perspective in The Last Supper. For an artist, perspective is the skill of creating a three-dimensional effect on a two-dimensional surface. Some call it an optical illusion. I prefer to think of it as an optical translation from one dimension to another.

Speaking of art, I recently had the opportunity to chaperone a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with my daughter’s 4th grader class. I boarded a bus full of 9 and 10-year-olds and led a group of 4 kids on a quick jaunt around a very large museum. My crew was loquacious and well-behaved — but very excitable. One of my boys yelled,

“Look! It’s Jack Black dressed like George Washington!”

Unidentified Artist, *Admiral Peter Ranier.* (late 18th-early 19th century) Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

Not only did the children see things in funny and interesting ways, but they saw more than I did because they seemed to look everywhere except straight ahead. A lot of times they were looking up.

My child finding one of my favorite painters on the ceiling. (Credit: Zina Gomez-Liss)

John Singer Sargent mural on the ceiling of the MFA. (Credit: Zina Gomez-Liss)

The children had no trouble finding a scavenger hunt piece installed on the ceiling on the second floor. It was a work called Untitled by Tara Donovan, and it is made of nothing more than styrofoam cups and hot glue. It looks round and bubbly — a very whimsical piece made on a fairly large scale.

*Untitled*. Tara Donovan. (2003) (Credit: Zara Woodhead Kuzia)

(I didn’t think to take a photo when I was there, but you can see it at this link. I will try to find a picture to put into Substack at a later time.)

That evening I asked my daughter what artworks she liked the most, and she said the ceiling piece by Donovan and the Picassos.

“Why Picasso?” I asked. I remembered that she stood by a particular piece for a long time. It was Portrait of a Woman.

“He was really good at making paintings of people that didn’t look like people.”

*Portrait of a Woman*, Pablo Picasso (1910) Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

And for the rest of the week, I saw things differently.

The day after the field trip I went with my 19-year-old son to a potential vocational placement, and as I waited for him at a café I looked up…

Then a few days later, in church I saw this…

Then I remembered the first day of spring had just occurred and that I would soon be greeted by flowering branches…

One of our neighborhood trees taken last year, but I think the branches will look like this before we know it. (Credit: Zina Gomez-Liss)

And I realized that even rainy days offer another way of looking up.

This type of seeing asks us to do two things:

Stop,

Pay attention.

As Simone Weil wrote,

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Over the past two weeks I have found that looking anywhere with close attention is a way of “looking up” — in another sense. Looking at a landscape, in a painting or on a hike, is an opportunity to glimpse heaven.

Being around other people and asking them what they see becomes a way of giving your imagination another set of eyes. Talking to people — without judgement, with an open mind and heart — can be as transformative as any art. Art comes from the Latin Ars, which means skill or craft. I have learned that there is art to looking.

Sometimes the master artist is the 9-year-old looking at a Picasso for the first time. I realize I am only an apprentice.

Thank you for reading. It is a blessing to have you here.

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