Vision Statement

I have been pondering vision.  This is largely because I got contact lenses a week ago, and because of who I got them from.  There's a vision care office in Taos called RealEyes, which, at my editor's suggestion,  I recently wrote about for my newspaper column.  You can read that here. From the inspiring conversation I had with Dr. Ratzlaff and his wife Fiona, I decided make them my eye care providers.

I wore contact lenses from the age of 14 until I was pregnant with my first child at 23.  Since your eyes change shape when you're pregnant, contacts became too uncomfortable, and I just never went back to them.  But now I'm ready for a change.  I'm tired of glasses, of the weight on my face, of the tiny little field of vision.  (And part of it is vanity, I'll admit, although glasses have sometimes afforded me the "sexy librarian" compliment.)

Dr. Ratzlaff told me things I've never heard from an eye doctor in the 33 years I've been wearing glasses.  One fascinating thing he told me was that with correction my eyes are much better than 20/20, which apparently is pretty unusual.  And then he said that with my current prescription I was actually overcorrected, which is not such a great thing.

So now I have contact lenses, and my prescription is slightly weaker, and it's like living in a different world.  I'm so used to being able to see at great distances that it's strange, for instance, to be driving and not be able to read all the faraway signs.  During my followup appointment, I found out that even with the weaker prescription, I still have 20/15 vision.  I had always thought that 20/20 equaled "perfect," but it turns out there is no such thing as perfect vision.

Because you always end up sacrificing something.

If you can see at great distances, you generally don't see as well close up, and vice versa.  So by having great distance vision with a stronger prescription, I was straining when reading and such, and ultimately weakening and stressing my eyes.

I can tell the difference now.  In the normal range of vision of say, a space the size of an average room, I can see much more clearly and my eyes feel more relaxed.  It's also very nice to not feel like I'm looking at things through a small window.  So in this sense, my world is bigger, more immediate.  (And things that are right in front of me appear almost startlingly larger.  I went shoe shopping the day I got my contacts, and they all looked too huge to possibly fit my feet, but then I'd pick up a pair and they'd be two sizes too small.)  But in terms of the world-at-large - well, it's less large, at least the sharp edges of it.

This is not a complaint.  My point is that it's fascinating to see from yet another perspective, another angle, how relative and subjective the experience of being alive in the world is.  To confirm to myself yet again how on the one hand, the least little shifts in circumstances can have a great effect, and on the other, how it makes no difference at all to how I feel at the deepest level.  Does being able to clearly see my legs while I'm shaving them in the bathtub make my experience of taking a bath better?  Yes and no.

The real question is, does being able to see my body clearly make me inhabit it more fully?  Does clearer vision make me more present?  Does improving my physical vision make my spiritual vision clearer?  I don't necessarily have any articulate answers, but these are the questions I'm holding at the moment.  This is the adventure I'm on.

One of the things that Dr. Ratzlaff eagerly talked about during our interview, and that totally sold me on him, was how the eyes are an extension of the brain.  When he later did my eye exam, he commented on the saying, "The eyes are the window of the soul."  It's true not only on a metaphorical level, but in the sense that when the pupil is dilated and the doctor shines a light into it, he can see the blood vessels in the eye; he's literally seeing into the person.  He pointed out that this is the only time you can look directly at blood vessels without cutting a person open.  I had never thought about it that way.

Because I'm a grant writer, I'm also now thinking about the meaning of a "vision statement."  And because I'm a poet, I'm thinking about how that would apply metaphorically to my life.  Do I have a personal vision statement to make and stick to?

According to Wikipedia, a vision statement "defines the desired or intended future state of an organization or enterprise in terms of its fundamental objective and/or strategic direction. Vision is a long term view, sometimes describing how the organization would like the world in which it operates to be. For example a charity working with the poor might have a vision statement which read "A world without poverty."

My immediate response when I ask myself what my vision statement would be is "To see and love what is."  Which is never about the future.  It's a goal in terms of "distance" of depth, not of time or space.  My "desired or intended future" is to be fully, deeply in the present.  My "fundamental objective" is to not be attached to objectives.  My "strategic direction" is within.  The world in which I'd like to operate could be described as "beautiful, interesting, kind, and intimate."  And when I am fully, deeply present, seeing and loving what is, that is the world I get.  So.

I also need to tell you the green colander story, without which this post would not be complete.  Without further ado:

The Green Colander Story

The colander I had before the green one was, frankly, crap.  It was too big, and it had slots that were too big, so that whenever you drained spaghetti in it, half of the noodles slipped through into the sink.

So I told the universe that I needed a new colander, and found this cute little green one at a thrift store for a dollar.  It was perfect.  And I loved that it was green.

And then one day I went to pull it out of the cabinet to drain some potatoes for mashing, and it was gone.  I looked everywhere for it, even out in the yard, thinking my three-year-old may have absconded with it, but alas, it was nowhere to be found.  For two or three weeks, every time I had to use that other big stupid colander, I'd ask whoever was around, "Are you SURE you didn't do something with that green colander?"  And they'd all say no.  Because why in the world would anyone make off with a colander?

Until one day, while I was searching in the refrigerator for something, I noticed the overripe apples a friend had brought me.  I had rinsed them and put them in the fridge, planning to eventually make applesauce in the crockpot.  And there they still were, right in the middle of the middle shelf of the fridge, two or three weeks later, right where I'd left and totally forgotten about them.  In my beloved green colander.

Sheesh.

I doubt there is a need for me to point out the significance of this story.  But you can believe I've been pondering it ever since.  Although I still haven't made applesauce.  

Setting Scraps of Light on Fire

Scraps of light through the adobe ruins next to the grove

Today is my one year blogoversary.  It is this and only this that has finally gotten me to sit down and write a post.  I have missed blogging and think about it almost every day, but my life has become so full of other things that I haven't had the inspiration.  To find some, I walked over to the church today, but there were too many people around so I ended up in the grove, where I sat and wrote this post by hand.   I have found myself sitting in the grove more often lately than in the church courtyard.  It's green again, although the mass graves of trees are still untended.

So much has happened since I last posted, that I don't know where to begin.  Should I tell you about my busy life?  The immense sense of loss and sadness I've been feeling?  Should I talk about how disconnected I've become from my writing?  

Or maybe I should try to be more positive, and tell you about my discoveries about bats, or the white cat I keep seeing, or my lemon tree dream.  But all these things are moments that have passed, inspirations that have faded in the face of too much work.

I'm not happy.  I know I need to just accept the way my life is right now, surrender to it.  Believe me, I'm working on that moment by moment, but there is a very sad little girl inside me who wants to come out and play.  And I don't know what to tell her to make her stop banging on the door.

And I realize how much I miss you all, my blogging friends.  It's not only the writing that I miss, it's the community, the support.  I feel very alone in my life these days, very much like I'm carrying a heavy burden by myself.  Stumbling and faltering under it.

But life goes on, and I just keep taking the next step.  At times I have glimpses of all this as a journey of significance, but mostly it just feels like stumbling in the dark.  I get tired of trying to hang onto the scraps of light that are tossed me.  I get mad at God for not giving me more, and then I'm ashamed for feeling that way.

And that's why I need - NEED - to write about those scraps, because it's the only way for me to hold onto them as guides, as reminders of the greater journey, the better story.  I need to tell you about last week when I had both a butterfly and a dragonfly on my finger in the same day.  They were both trapped in my house at different points, and I freed them.  

I need to tell you about dreaming of a sugarlaced lemon tree so glorious that gazing up into it was like eating the sun.

I need to tell you about the lessons bats have been trying to teach me about surrender and rebirth, about echolocation, in which bats navigate in the dark by using their voices to create sounds that reverberate off objects - the ability to see with the ears, to hear with the voice.  Because by telling you, I have a greater chance of really learning the lessons, internalizing and integrating them.  I too hear with my voice.  I learn by teaching.

And now, just by writing all this, I feel lighter, happier, inspired, free.  It occurs to me that this post follows a similar structure to some of the biblical psalms that start out with a lament and end with praise because by writing the lament the psalmist has seen the joy again.

Now I see that the writing I haven't been doing had hardened around me like ice, that scraps of light left unshared leave me cold, and once that happens, I have to write into the cold to break through it.

The fire must be tended or it dies out.  The fire must be fed, and for me that means writing it. 

Bellamy Brothers - Let Your Love Flow