What Does it Mean to Witness?

What does it mean to witness? To bear witness? To be a witness?
When I reflect on the word witness, I see a mental image of myself. In this image, I am standing looking up at the sun and its rays are overwhelming my senses. I look around me and realize that the sun is doing the same to everyone around me (even if they don’t notice). At this moment I am experiencing and acknowledging a commonality. I am bearing witness to something great yet so common that it is being overlooked, the sensation is not being noted. In this analogy, being a witness does not mean I am the only one feeling the warmth of the sun, but I am consciously experiencing the sensations that come with it, I am acknowledging how overwhelming it is and I am noticing that it is there for everyone to notice.

To me the word witness pays homage to stopping and looking, intentionally looking at the world around you; the people and the happening. Every day I am witness to every breath I take, I witness the rhythm of life in the hundreds of paths that are composed by those around me just to be forgotten and retraced unknowingly the next day. When I look up and my skin is witness to the sunshine, when I walk to and from class to work to home I am witness to the constancy of life which is pleasantly disordered. To witness is to stumble upon the common and encounter its irregularity, to bear witness is to observe and appreciate, to be a participant in the beauty that connects us all.

Victoria Prieto — Art Editor