On My Wife’s Eyes

My wife has beautiful eyes.

Having eliminated most readers fearing a burst of Kinkade in prose, I shall now continue.

My wife has beautiful eyes.

As a result of this fact, I have spent twenty-six years looking at them. Close attention to any beautiful object is an education to the soul and so a good student should be able to summarize what he has learned. I have noticed that people review other great works of beauty and so consider this a review of the art that is Hope’s eyes.

The first consideration of course is whether they are art at all, products of creation, or merely natural beauty. Early in our marriage this was a more difficult question. No man decided her eyes would be blue (one must avoid Victorian references to twin pools of starlight here) or that her lashes would be short and curly. God allowed genetics to work out her eyes and like many great works of nature there is much to appreciate in His plan.

However, my wife has carefully worked to make her eyes more interesting in the last twenty-six years. She has endured pain and pleasure and those have improved her eyes by carving laugh lines and adding shadows. These constantly remind the observer of her character and the man knowledgeable of her history of her choices.

My wife has bright and not dull eyes. Years of music and devotion to her children have left her interesting and interested. Not for her the dull eyes of a Television drone or the empty weird eyes of CG magazine images. Hope’s eyes look forward and always will. They say Socrates at the moment of death faced it with his eyes wide open and I imagine that Hope will do the same.

She never stops looking ahead, even when she would rather not.

if you know Hope, her eyes also reveal much about her mood. If she is happy, her eyes are clear and tend to look straight at you. If she is sad, not so much. There is a whole set of instructions about how to best love her in just a flicker of her eyes. When she squints, and she rarely squints, I know I have done something pretty foolish.

Hope’s eyes work well compared to mine. This is no virtue in herself, but it still amazes me. I love watching her see, frequently things too fuzzy for me to grasp. It turns out this has been an outer sign of an inner reality. Hope’s spiritual eyes have learned to work as well as her physical eyes What I must find by labor, she often sees and can be frustrated to have to use words to explain what is obvious. “Look!” she wished to say to me, but I cannot see so well.

Hope’s eyes have taught me that seeing well is often better than speaking well.

Hope’s eyes often avert from evil. She will not “notice” someone who wishes to be hidden or the folly that would shame them if she saw. She can send a subtle signal to me, but to others she has a charitable gaze. Her eyes are not censorious to evil, but pitying. She will look at ugliness plainly if she must in order to provide help, she could have been an excellent nurse or doctor, but she will not stare for novelty.

My wife would never gaze at a “freak,” because to her eyes there are no freaks, just souls in bodies created in God’s image.

My wife’s eyes continue to teach me, but like the David or other great works of human art I am unable to capture all I wish to say. Words fail me.

My wife has beautiful eyes.