Seeing Through Blindness

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."--Proust

I am blind, as many of you know.

It has made me the writer, photographer and person I am. My blindness, and it's root Coat's Disease, has defined and terrified me, humiliated and strengthened me, tore me up and rebuilt me my entire life. For all of my life, for good and ill, I have struggled with what I have often called 'the dead seeing", my 'dead eye.' When I was a child and a teen and into my twenties, I dreamed of being normal, to see myself whole, like others (or so I believed)-- not in any aspect except to feel normal, to be unscarred. It wasn't the blindness itself but the disfiguring aspect of the disease that haunted me as a child and through much of my adult life. It is a superficial and seemingly insignificant issue. As a mature and accepting and forgiving adult, I have always understood that.

It is not so easy to forgive the suffering that life entails, however.

I turned my blindness and my self-perception and awareness into skill: it shaped my photography (all of my black and white work is about my attempt to reconcile the pain and the ideas to the question what does it mean to 'see', what does our 'sight' really mean and what is the truth, veritable or otherwise, of picture taking and making. It has informed my writing and poetry and has inspired me to think and to look beyond what we see, in life and with people. What began as a cross carrying and a shame to hide, i have learned to turn it toward craft and awareness. I learned from the disease and the attendant challenge.

However, this is NOT about my past, it is about the now.

And since I am also a teacher as well, I wanted to share with others what my eye looks like. Because, though it took me nearly 45 years to understand that my dead and diseased and troubled eye is beautiful, maybe even is the sibling of my once-troubled, broken and mended heart, it is only in the last few years have I come to love and care for the me inside the I of who this eye and I am. They say that organs and body part are sympathetic, just as loved ones. So too my eye and my re-formed heart, so too my adult self for the frighten and overly-hoping little boy I once was.

The propinquity of love and necessity of its attendance.

So, today, I had my first eye exam in 10 years and ordered my first pair of eye glasses in 4 years. Just as with my new sunglasses, I went to Dr. Kelly Lee's office and store Tonic Eye Care & Vision Therapy.

As Dr. Lee knows that I'm writing a book about 'blindness' and my photography, including the medical pictures of the inside of my blind eye, I was thrilled when she offered to set me a new set of pictures of the eye.

The pictures, the first time I was given them to me by the hospital, in 2009 were a miracle and set my navigation in a different path as to what my eye really was. A planet and a cloudy galaxy filled with untamed stars, milky clouds, internal fires, lost veins and broken-river arteries, a diminished sun and all the nebulae of unknowing beauty called by scar tissue, broken drifting, blood, detritus and torn nerves.

In short, a world.....

I hope it points to each of you the remarkable way we are made, the extraordinary chemistry and construction of our makeup. From stardust to a galaxy.

Celebrate that as I have learned to do.

Our eyes so much more than organs of sight, just as you are so much more than chemistry and electricity and muscle and nerve.

Guardians and a cosmos, to yourself

anew....

❤