Category Archives: Gary T Knutson

Learning to See Again

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“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

—Marcel Proust (1871–1922). French novelist, essayist, and critic, best known for In Search of Lost Time, his monumental meditation on memory, perception, and the passage of time.

In my mind’s eye—somewhere on the outer edge of memory—I can still see the garden in all its pristine beauty, bright but fading at the edges, a photograph rather than the living scene.

What I’m seeing had to be a few years after I bought my cozy weekend cabin—in a clearing in the midst of a forest. The lower yard was little more than red Virginia clay speckled with red ant hills–a blank canvas waiting to come into focus. And I was determined to have some plants that would add a touch or two of civilization.

My neighbor, though, was amused by my vision:

“Only a city-slicker,” he quipped, “would move to the mountain and then decide to tame the wilderness.”

His ridicule didn’t bother me one whit. I kept my sights on turning the lower yard into a garden–something bold enough to make even the wilderness take notice.

I started with Paeonia lactiflora–the common garden peony, ironically crowned the King of the Flowers in eighth century China. It seemed perfect and impervious to ants. I triple dug curved beds in the midst of clay, lightened by little more than hope.

But what I’m seeing in my memory’s eye must be after those peonies that became the garden’s backbone were in place. Maybe, even, after I had incorporated into the landscape a triumphantly angled row of three Norwegian Spruce, their weeping branches cascading to the ground. It seemed to me that my mountain needed evergreens every bit as much as it needed civilization.

While that’s close, what I’m seeing must have been a few years later, still. The weeds and briars are gone, and in the very middle of the garden where an oak once stood is a totally civilized black pine, pruned into a cloud-like form, in Japanese niwaki-style, with a stone wall surrounding its stateliness.

And the entire garden is mulched o’er with crisp and clean pathways connecting mulched beds, edged with stones, suggesting order and intention. Even the trees are well-mannered—young and small and respectful—never daring to cast shade on the glamorous peony blooms below.

That vision was when it was new, and so was I, in more ways than the calendar would show. Helping me fulfill the grand design sketched in my head was Allen—my partner at the time and also an avid gardener. We worked together to turn that wild slope into something neighbors would praise as a “mountain oasis.” We hauled soil, set stones, and dug hole after hopeful hole, seeing nothing but promise in every shovel of dirt and imagining a garden that would last forever. It did. For a while. Allen had an artist’s patience, and, together, we believed we could hold beauty in place—keep it from slipping away.

I guess I believed that if I worked hard enough, beauty would freeze in place. I believed I had carved something permanent out of the slope. Something ideal. Something that would stay.

But here’s the truth. Time has a wicked sense of humor, and nature doesn’t do nostalgia. Its light keeps changing; the old scene grows dim, and new growth blocks the view you thought you’d always see.

As the years slipped by—teaching, conferences, a pandemic, Zoom, and Allen’s unexpected death—I realized that just as the seasons kept on turning, the garden kept going, too. The dogwoods shot skyward, spreading like ballroom skirts. The Weeping Spruce filled out and took up more space: “We live here now,” they said with every widening limb. And the weeds? They formed a governing council. They didn’t just visit. They settled in until the once-clear paths vanished from sight.

Every spring, Ruby and I would gaze down from the deck into the garden, and I’d make the very same promise, always aloud:

This year. This is the year I’ll restore it to my original vision.

Restore—it’s such a loaded word. It assumes the past was correct and the future is suspect.

Each year I’d march into the mess with gloves, tools, and determination, trying to resurrect a moment that existed only in my mind’s eye on the outer edge of yesteryear. But no matter how many briars I hacked back or weeds I shamed into submission, I could not get back there. Because there no longer existed.

Somewhere between one spring and the next, I realized the harder I tried to resurrect the past, the less alive it all seemed. And get this. The garden wasn’t asking to be restored. It had never asked to be restored. Instead, it was begging to be reimagined.

Reimagined. Imagine that.

I thought that insight would vanish by morning, but it didn’t. It lingered, like a seed waiting for rain. And sure enough, a few years later, when time seemed to have stopped, I found myself on the deck no longer alone with just Ruby, but now with Gary. We stood there, staring down at what had once been a garden and now looked suspiciously like wilderness—three slightly bewildered land barons trying to determine where the paths used to be.

I announced, with calm and certain confidence, that maybe the best plan was to clear almost everything except the evergreens that had stood their ground—cut it all back, seed grass, and mow it like a civilized lawn. Ruby, ever hopeful, wagged her approval. Gary nodded, already thinking his way silently through the logistics. We were so certain that grass was our destiny that we went ahead and bought a lawn mower—because when you’re unsure what to do, the obvious step is to buy machinery. And we already had a head start: the area below the old peony bed was grass-ish, though it had only ever known the loving snarl of a weedwhacker. We had already agreed that patch would become a smooth little lawn—with a small croquet court, because if we’re going to reinvent life when we’re 78, we might as well do it with wickets.

The next thing we knew, we were down and dirty, creating a free-form stone island in the middle of it all, moving the peonies there where the sun could find them again. So we grabbed gloves and energy—fall being the perfect time to transplant—and began laying stones without anything resembling a plan. What we did have was a revelation. The garden could never be what it once was. And even if it could, it needed a new vision.

When I stopped staring at the old picture in my mind, the living landscape came back into view. What needed restoring wasn’t the garden—it was my way of seeing.

The more I looked and the more Gary and I talked, the more I realized that my original vision wasn’t wrong. It was perfect for then. Yet what once made the garden beautiful cannot make it beautiful now. The land, like life, grows up and changes.

As soon as I accepted that reality, I began seeing the truth elsewhere in my life.

Take my body, for example—it’s demanding a new vision, too. My Fitbit still dutifully tracks every bell and whistle, but these days I’m more interested in a restorative night’s sleep and a decent HRV score. I once carried a vision of myself as a younger man, more muscle, thinner waist. Now I’m content to watch the numbers on the scale edge downward even a little and not have to suck it in quite so much when I button my pants. I used to set goals to prove something; now I set them simply to be a healthier me. Even the mirror reminds me that the younger man I still hope to see there has already faded from the frame.

And my love life? It needed the power of a new vision, too. For years I thought restoration was the aim—to recreate what once was. Now, I know otherwise. In this new season, Gary is beside me — patient, steady, and speaking with a modest, humble confidence that somehow makes even weed-pulling feel like hope. Together we’re designing a new garden and a new future without trying to photocopy our past lives.

Then there’s faith—perhaps the deepest shift of all. The God of my childhood was one cool dude who loved and accepted everybody, including gay guys, even if others didn’t always see His capacity for love. I’m amazed, though, at how He’s grown up, down through the years. These days, He gardens. He celebrates the wild mountain yeasts that make a potent sourdough starter—proof that transformation still rises from what’s alive. He lets life spill over boundaries. He shows me that when I put doctrines, certainties, and old visions aside, mysteries will magically razzle-dazzle me with their brilliance.

Maybe that’s the real work of life: learning to see with new vision, not old memory. When the past dims, the present comes into focus—and as the old hums behind us, it rides in the backseat—useful for perspective, not direction. What matters is the focus of the lens we hold today. To honor what has endured while daring to imagine what might be next. To let our roots deepen while our dreams stretch further.

This isn’t just about one garden, one man, or one patch of earth. The truth keeps repeating itself—in every life, in every heart still clinging to an old picture. And maybe—quietly, gently—we begin to ask ourselves:

● Where in life are we still trying to restore something that has already grown up?

● Where do we need to let go of how it was so we can finally see what it could become?

I’m still sitting with those questions, letting them settle like morning light—revealing what I need to see, one truth at a time.

The garden that once blossomed when I was younger has had its day, and what a day it was. But now, it hums with a new rhythm, a new vision—one taking shape right here, right now. It’s rooted in what has endured, but it’s alive with what’s possible: the life Gary, Ruby, and I are growing into, one season, one heartbeat, one sunrise at a time.

The view keeps changing. So do we. And thank heaven for that.

Show Me What You Wrote

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“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.”

— David Hare (b. 1947.) British playwright and screenwriter, whose works probe truth, belief, and the human condition.

Sometimes in the hush of evening, when the lamp spills its amber light and the world grows gentle, I watch. His head tilts slightly, caught by the glow, and suddenly, the years loosen their grip. The lines that life has written across his face soften; the jaw loosens, light as breath; the mouth, so often set in quiet thought, curves with the ease of youth. His eyes, clear and steady, seem to brighten from within, carrying a spark that belonged first to a boy and then to a young man. Slowly, the present thins. I see him slipping into his past. Fifty. Thirty. Twenty. And then, for the briefest moment, the man beside me becomes the eighteen-year-old he once was—time erasing each layer, revealing what was always there: the young man, quietly returning.

As I glance elsewhere in the room, I see an artifact from his past—one that has crossed time and threshold to find its place in ours: the grand piano. Massive and unyielding, it took four men to wrestle it off the truck and ease it through the doorway. Yet here it rests, polished wood catching the lamplight, waiting.

At this moment, I still hear the sound as his hands moved across the piano earlier in the day—measured, assured, easy. And I heard “For All We Know” rise into the room, each note carrying a hush that reached backward in time. The melody was not just music; it was memory, and it wrapped itself around him, around me, around the room itself. Ruby retreated to the bed, but not fully at rest. She leaned forward, her body stretched long, her head angled as far as she dared—as though even she knew the swell of sound carried us into places layered and deep. She held herself at the edge, cautious not to tumble into the wandering past, into the chasms of memory, beckoning us toward knowing and truth.

Elsewhere in the room, near the piano, another layer from the past peels back. Hanging on the wall is a sepia-toned etching—Salena Gazebo, number 8 of only 200, signed by the artist Carl Johnson. The lines are delicate, deliberate: the curving path, the quiet trees, the pavilion standing open like an invitation. It feels less like a structure than a memory, as if the paper itself breathed it into being. When I look at it, I sense not just the gazebo, but the moments once lived beneath it—the warmth of gatherings, the hush of twilight, the whispered vows of past lovers who lingered there. Dream and truth blur, as though the etching had captured not a place at all but a pulse of longing and a flicker of knowledge, carrying us softly toward knowing and truth.

In another room, on top of the chest of drawers, rest family photographs. Portraits, a chorus of faces gathered through years, smiling, standing, caught in stillness. They look out across the room with a quiet weight, less about who they are than the collective feel they give: belonging, continuity, the insistence that life moves forward even as it circles back. They do not need names to speak; their presence alone is enough.

Nearby, on a table, sits something smaller, more ordinary yet no less enduring: an iron toast holder. His grandmother’s. On his mother’s side? Or, maybe, his father’s? The lineage matters less than the fact that he kept it, carried it through moves and years, never discarding, never forgetting. The metal holds more than memories of bread he may never have seen toasted. It holds a thread of persistence, a reason to keep even the smallest objects close.

In the dining room, on a side table, another artifact gleams in silver relief: The Last Supper, framed, gifted to his maternal grandparents on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Sacred and commemorative at once, it shimmers with devotion, not only to faith but also to family. The silver has traveled down through generations, carried into his keeping, held as though letting go would diminish more than memory. It is a marker of continuity, of reverence, of love that lasted long enough to be honored.

And then there is the little boy riding a dog—a keepsake that belonged first to his father when his father was a child, before his life was cut tragically short. A small porcelain figure, a child astride a loyal companion, frozen in time. Yet in that figure is more than innocence; it is a bridge across absence, a way of knowing a father he never met. It survived when the man did not, passed on to him as both wound and inheritance, loss and gift. That little boy on the dog rides still through the years, carrying ache and legacy.

Through these artifacts, I glimpse the man I already know and love, his story unfolding in fragments that matter. In the little boy riding the dog, I see both wound and inheritance, a bridge across absence. In the Last Supper, I see reverence, devotion, love honored and passed along. In the iron toast holder, I see endurance, the instinct to keep and carry even what is small. In the family photographs, I see continuity, lives pressed together across generations. In the drawing of the gazebo, I see invitation and hush—the twilight blur where dreams fade into memory and truth. And in the grand piano, I hear the melody that threads them all together—still rising, still echoing, ever playing in the quiet of his soul.

These artifacts matter to him and, now, to me. I could point to others. But I won’t. Yet one more remains, quiet and insistent, the truest of them all—not carved in silver or pressed into porcelain, but carried in ink and idea. His 1965 high-school graduation essay. He was co-valedictorian. He was eighteen.

It rests inside his high-school yearbook, the Bluejay, its cover deep blue and gilt, its pages a mosaic of faces, cheers, and world events already turning into history. And there, slipped carefully between those pages, lies his speech—typed, carried through six decades of moves and seasons. The paper holds its shape, and the words stand sure, preserved as though waiting for their moment to be read again. In its keeping, I see more than memory; I see devotion—the instinct to preserve not only what he did but who he was becoming. It is an artifact, yes, but it is also a testament, held safe in the place that marked his youth and carried forward into the man he is now.

I smiled and whispered:

“Show me what you wrote.”

He lifted the page, holding it in his hands, just as he held it onstage sixty years ago. Soft at first, his voice grew firmer as he returned to the beliefs that had steadied him even then: that learning gives life its shape, that responsibility gives it weight, that hope gives it breath, and that perseverance gives it endurance. Sixty years have passed, yet as he read, I heard not only the boy addressing his classmates but the man beside me—the same convictions intact, the same spirit enduring.

In those moments, as his voice stretched back and returned to me across the decades, I realized that of all his artifacts, this was the richest. My partner, Gary T. Knutson, wrote those words in youth. They carried him into a future he could not yet imagine. And they anchor him still—steadying him in the present, guiding him toward tomorrow. The piano may sing, the photographs may remember, the silver may gleam, the porcelain boy may still ride—but they can only point, only hint. His own words, fragile on paper yet alive in spirit, opened the door wider. They revealed not just what he kept but who he was becoming, and who he still is.

That is the power of words—not just Gary’s words, but all our words. They outlast objects, outshine heirlooms, outlive even memory. In them can be found who we are when all else has been stripped away—values, beliefs, longings, the essence of self, laid bare. And more than that, words do not simply keep; they move. They persuade and console, ignite and endure. They reveal who we were, and they shape who we might yet become. That is their gift, and their power—becoming, in a way, stronger than stone.

Show me what you wrote, and I’ll see who you are—then, now, and still becoming. For words outlast memory and outshine the heirlooms we keep. They carry the essence. They carry the longing. And they proclaim the truths we’ve always held.