“I am going to look around at all the flowers and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.”
Anne Lamott, author of “Traveling Mercies”
The surgeon said, “There’s a small surgical risk that you will lose your sight in your left eye. Without the surgery, it’s a certainty.”
As a child I dragged my hands over every surface I could find, the sense of touch was enthralling.
“Momma,” I said, “if I had to stop something I wouldn’t want it to be touching things.”
Momma replied, “Oh no, I’d never want to stop seeing things.”
Being told I might lose some sight brought a whole new level of appreciation. So much so that in the days leading to the surgery, I gulped in my surroundings with an unquenchable thirst.
Suddenly the crepe myrtles were neon fuchsia and the grass was electric green; the clouds were so white and puffy it was as though I could fall into them like snow drifts.
For the second time I was reading “An Altar in the World,” by Barbara Brown Taylor. These passages took on a whole new meaning second time around:
“In this culture, the point is to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, even if that means you miss most of the territory, including the packed dirt under your feet. Sometimes, this is because you are doing at least five other things while you are in transit, including talking on the phone, listening to the radio, drinking a mocha latte, checking your text messages, telling your dog to get back in the backseat, and checking how good you look in your sunglasses by admiring yourself in the rearview mirror.”
You know, somewhere along the way I had stopped touching things, like the bark on a tree, the grass between my toes, plucking “stickers” from my feet, jumping in the pool on a hot day — nowadays it’s more like easing in.
Taylor told of a woman who so feared dying in her sleep she’d stay awake ’til dawn.
“A friend who loved her said, ‘Since you’re awake anyway, why don’t you listen for the first bird to sing.’ The sound of the bird became the bell that woke her heart to life again. She named the bird. She discovered what such birds like to eat and put feeders full of seed in her yard. Other birds came, and she learned their names as well. She collected bird feeders until she became the ‘mayor’ of an entire bird village. The woman still doesn’t sleep well, but she’s no longer afraid of her life. She started paying attention.”
When I look around I wonder what people are paying attention to. Everyone has a little screen in their hand, or in their car, or on their desk, or a big screen hanging on the wall where the Olan Mills family portrait used to be. Nowadays you can go to the sports field and watch the game on the gigantic screen so that you don’t watch the actual players, or stay on the couch and watch “High Def.” It all seems a little crazy.
For a whole week I watched the moon, caught crickets in the yard or stared into the cat Harry’s deep green eyes. It was nice.
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