"I have friends who recently moved to California after living in the same Manhattan apartment for thirty years. In New York, they lived nine floors up. To look out of their windows was to see only other tall buildings, steel, glass, and sky — unless you looked down, and then the taxi cabs and pedestrians were quite small. In delightful contrast, just outside the windows of their new ground-level home in Southern California are fruit trees, dahlias and fuchsia, small hills of green grass, squirrels scampering, and birds gathering around feeders. They are enjoying the change.

"In both places, they have always made it a spiritual practice to care for stray cats. They've fostered them, and they've adopted them. At times they've had a dozen cats at once in their apartment. When they moved to California, they had just three elderly ones left, but they deliberately picked a new home with a solarium that features floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on all of those beautiful things of the natural world that I mentioned. ...

"Their cats didn't even notice. Those giant windows seemed to be nothing but walls to them. When they were sitting in front of one, they never even looked outside. Their three cats were healthy and well, but they didn't seem to be able to see what was beyond the room in which they were living. My surprised friends began to grasp why this might be. All the cats had ever known was their ninth-floor apartment in New York City, they reasoned; and since cats don't admire skyscrapers or distant airplanes, they had been conditioned to see nothing beyond their immediate four walls of existence. Their senses were stunted.

"It wasn't the fault of the cats. It's not necessarily our fault; Francis knew that the things that stop us from meeting ourselves are all around, and they slowly cover for us the true story, the true green world outside, often without our noticing, and slowly over time. We no longer see what is there right in front of our eyes. It is as if we're in a solarium full of windows and there is so much to behold — but mostly we're blind to it. We don't see the world as it is; we learn to see instead what we want to see. We create our world with what we think, often unconsciously, that we need. Those are the 'clothes' that Francis threw off as well when he left his father behind that day in the piazza."