Beloved,
Lately I have been living with a set of images. In each one, a woman leans toward a gilded mirror. And in each one, the face that looks back is not quite her own. It is a goddess: Brigid with her flame, Selene with her crescent, Iris with her rainbow. The wanderer looks in, and something older and kinder looks back.
I keep returning to them because they ask a question I think many of us carry without words. When you look at yourself, who is doing the looking?
Looked at, and seen
There is a difference between being looked at and being seen.
Being looked at happens from the outside. It measures. It compares. It notices the tired eyes, the new line, the thing we wish were different. Most of us learned this way of looking early, and we learned to turn it on ourselves before anyone else could.
Being seen is something else. It is the friend who catches your eye across a room and knows, without a word, that you need to leave. It is the person who says you seem quieter today and waits for the real answer. To be seen is to be known from the inside out, and held there.
To be looked at is to be measured.
To be seen is to be met.
We spend a great deal of our lives hoping to be seen by someone else. And that hope is good and human. But I have come to believe the first person who has to see you is you.
Before there was glass
Long before mirrors were made of glass, people met their own faces in still water. A pond at dawn. A bowl set down on the table. A rain barrel after the storm had passed.
Later, they polished stone until it could hold a face. Some of the oldest mirrors ever found are disks of black volcanic glass called obsidian, ground smooth by hand about eight thousand years ago at Çatalhöyük, in what is now Türkiye. I love imagining the patience that took. Someone sat for hours with a stone in their lap, rubbing it slowly, so that one day a person could look down and find themselves there.
I think about that whenever I rush past my own reflection. The first mirrors were not meant for a glance on the way out the door. They were made slowly, and I suspect they were looked into slowly too.
The boy at the pool
The Greek myths have a famous story about a reflection. In the version the Roman poet Ovid told in his Metamorphoses, a young man named Narcissus leans over a clear pool, falls in love with the face in the water, and cannot pull himself away. The nymph Echo, who loves him, can only repeat his last words back to him. He wastes away there, and a flower grows where he lay.
We usually read it as a warning about vanity. But I read it a little differently now. Narcissus was not truly seeing himself. He was looking at a surface, and the surface could never answer him. He mistook a reflection for a relationship.
That is the trap of the measuring kind of looking. It keeps us at the surface. We stare and stare and are never met.
What the goddess sees
This is why the mirror images move me. The wanderer is not checking her hair or counting her flaws. She is looking deeper than the glass, and what answers her is the part of her that is wise and whole and old as the moon.
I don't mean that you are secretly a goddess, unless that language feels true to you. I mean something simpler. There is a way of looking at yourself that sees what a loving friend would see. It notices how hard you have been trying. It sees the grief you are still carrying and the courage it takes to carry it. It sees the child you were, still in there somewhere, still hoping to be welcomed.
Whatever your faith, or if you hold no faith at all, you can practice looking at yourself that way. You don't have to believe anything to begin. You only have to look a little longer, and a little more kindly, than you usually do.
Look until the measuring stops
and the meeting begins.
A small practice for seeing yourself
- Choose your mirror. A hand mirror, the bathroom mirror, or a bowl of water set on a table. If looking at your reflection is hard right now, choose a photograph of yourself at any age, or simply close your eyes. All of these work. You can do this seated, standing or lying down.
- Breathe slowly three times. Let your shoulders drop. You are not here to fix anything.
- Look softly for one minute. Notice when the measuring voice begins, and when it does, simply name it: there is the measuring. Then let your gaze soften again, the way you might look at someone you love who is sleeping.
- Ask one question: What would someone who loves me see here? Let the answer come in its own time. It may be a word, a memory or nothing at all. Nothing is all right too.
- Close with a small blessing. Say quietly, or only in your mind: I see you. I am glad you are here. If you used a bowl of water, pour it into a houseplant or the garden afterward, as a way of giving the moment back.
Try it once a week through the dark of the year. Some days it will feel tender, and some days it will feel like nothing much. Both count.
Looking at ourselves can stir up old pain about our bodies, our faces or our pasts. If this practice brings up more than you can hold, please stop, and reach out to someone you trust or a counselor. In the United States, you can call or text 988, any time, to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You never have to carry it alone.
For your journal
- Who in my life has truly seen me? What did it feel like?
- When I look at myself, whose voice do I hear doing the looking?
- What would I want my own reflection to say to me today?
About the sources: The obsidian mirrors from Çatalhöyük are described in archaeological reports on the site, dated to about 6000 BCE. The story of Narcissus and Echo is told in Book III of Ovid's Metamorphoses, written in the early first century CE.
Wander wisely, wild one · Kelli