Facing the Day
What actually occurs when I “face” a day? What does it mean to “face” anything, or any one? What is a face anyway in this larger context? What are the deeper connections, the undercurrents of meaning that flow from all the facets, all the faces of this remarkably complex word?
This word face does seem to have many faces. Strange irony. And it seems to have survived with most if its features intact since that time many centuries ago when it was formed in Latin as facies. Yet, as I looked through the word’s history, I came across this related word fax (and its earlier incarnation facés) meaning “torch”. And this particular face caught my attention on this particular day I am facing.
Maybe the ancestors were just more concrete than we often are, but I am continually amazed at how these words form and reform from such simple sources. The way so few primary and secondary colors can morph into millions of colors that even go beyond my capacity to see them. It is the same I guess with words – how they morph and reshape themselves into words both comprehensible and incomprehensible to me.
Back to this word “face”. When I take even a moment to think about what it means to face the day, the obvious again becomes clear to me. Whatever, or whoever, I am facing, I am also “lighting”, as if I am lighting a torch in the dark. It is as if my world is an enormously complex light board – no it is as if what I call my world is an artifact of the lights I choose when I illuminate the stage that bounds my awareness or attention.
“My world” is this moment. It is an artifact, a kind of visual echo, of where I am choosing to thrust my torch out into the darkness. It is as simple as that. And perhaps because it is so simple, it often seems so mystifying to me. Can that be all there is to the world? Can it all just be a matter of perception?
Even when I was forming those questions, an answer emerged effortlessly. No, it is not just a matter of perception. It is a matter of attention. Why, then I wonder, is it that there are so many troublesome idioms about faces. Just now I searched for the origins of the phrase “to face the music”. Why does that phrase have such a charge to it? Seems like it is a fairly recent one to arrive on the scene. Evidently, most scholars attribute it to the British military where the person being court-marshaled literally faced the band, and while the charges were read drummers would tap out a beat.
There seems to be so many opportunities for shame and shaming connected to the “face phrase”. Face the consequences. Two-faced. Fall flat on your face. In your face. And not just shame, but anger and retribution as well.
At the same time I have had those wonderful experiences of seeing someone whose face is “beaming” with love and happiness. It literally appears as if some divine spark is lighting their faces. In those moments I really do experience them, or their face anyway, as a kind of torch. As a brightly lit flame.
So now, what of this word “torch”? The origin of this word turns out also to be oddly useful in this meditation on perception and attention. As it happens, the root of this word is torca, which in Catalan means “wisp of straw”, and from the Spanish tuenca meaning “a screw”.
There is a wonderful juxtaposition here that is somehow related to time, duration and light. An ancient torch probably was made of wisps of straw that would burn out quickly, unless that is, they were twisted into a screw, and then the torch would burn slowly.
A face, my face, when it is not screwed up into a “face”, or when I am not “making a face”, is much like that straw. Just wisps of attending energy that can illuminate only for a moment, and then it is gone. But the momentary light is enough. In fact once again the obvious comes to me like a blinding light from the darkness – I cannot actually face a day because this moment that I am facing right now is really all there is.