I Love My Donor

As people are falling, they open their eyes wide and use both hands to catch themselves. I don't. I hike and snowshoe in steep hilly rocky terrain. When I stumble, I close my eyes tight, put my left hand over my left eye and use only the right hand to catch my fall. I am like a pregnant woman who instinctively protects her belly first. I will do almost anything to protect the corneal tissue I received from my donor.

The sparkle in my left eye is more than that, it is the sparkle of a great Jewel of Kindness. It is more precious than just eyesight. It is the remaining living tissue of my donor. It is his cosmic life force. The decision to donate the cornea is a manifestation of pure unconditional kindness.

In the month before my transplant, I repeatedly had a dream/vision - sometimes as I slept, sometimes as I meditated. In the dream, I was in a desolate gray concentration camp, standing before a twenty foot high wooden fence. As I stood there looking at it, without knowing how, why, or by whom, I knew that someone on the other side was going to toss a precious jewel, a huge red ruby into the air so that it landed on my side. They would toss it into the air without knowing who might catch it or find it, without knowing how it would be used.

It would be my new cornea. I would catch the jewel in my eye. At first I was disturbed with the image of this hard shiny object landing in my eye. And the dream would end.

Then a few days before the transplant, I changed in the dream. Instead of tense and afraid, my arms and heart opened wide, my face softened to receive the jewel.

When it pierced my eye, it turned blindingly white and clear. It was as bright and radiant as all the diamonds and stars of the universe. It was one great mass of all the stars that ever were. With the impact, the stars, the millions upon millions of points of light, radiated from my eye and throughout my body until I was a field of stars with the shape and outline of my human body. And slowly stars began to drift away from me into the world around me and into the universe. His life force would mingle with all that is the cosmos. A small concentration of his star light would remain with me.

I carry this concentration in my eye. With or without vision, I want to sustain it, honor it, and continue to carry it. It is more than eyesight. It is even more than the freedom and independence that eyesight gives me. It is pure unconditional kindness. It is a manifestation of our sacred human goodness.

A Crazy Old Lady?

I understand crazy old ladies because I had, at a young age, prematurely become one. It didn't happen suddenly, but it was in a sudden moment that I realized it.

I vividly remember the day. I was marching briskly around and around the outside of my house wearing an ugly, out of season, huge, floppy hat. Also wearing not one, but two pairs of sunglasses (large over-sized ones over dainty little ones). I was pumping my arms up and down with our portable phone in one hand and a can of beans in the other.

Faster and faster, I charged around the house, my face in a death grip scrunch of determination, intense focus, and mild pain. I was huffing and puffing and counting to see how many times I could circle the house in a half hour. My confused dog bounced along with me but occasionally just waited for me to march around to meet her. She barked gleefully "What a great game" as I I growled "Out of my way!"

I planned to do it all over again that afternoon. And I would see if I could beat my record.

My poor husband, uncomfortable with the word eccentric and certainly mortified by any such manifestation, didn't know this was happening. If he had known, he would be grateful that we have no close neighbors. Living on a dirt road in the country reduced the odds that anyone would see me. I, on the other hand, was beyond caring. In fact, I took some perverse pleasure in the possibility of a silent, invisible deer hunter gazing through his binoculars. I imagined the hunter oblivious to the buck that has wandered into his range because all of his attention was focused on trying to figure out this wild woman going around and around her house.

Crazy old ladies do odd things because they must. Let me repeat, 'because they must'. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Every detail makes sense once the context is understood.

Here's the context.

I needed exercise and fresh air in order to be in tip top shape for upcoming surgery. I was visually impaired due to Corneal Dystrophy and could not safely walk on our road by myself. My husband's work had taken him out of town and he would not be here to take me for a walk. Hence I did laps around my house where the terrain is familiar and memorized.

I was waiting for an important call which I could not miss. Cell phones didn't work in the hilly forested area I live in. That explains the portable phone.

The degenerative disease of my cornea causes intolerable pain in sunlight which accounts for the huge hat and sunglasses.

And the can of beans and pumping arms? That should be obvious by now. I could increase the value of this work out by adding weight to my free hand.

Michael J. Fox once said of his Parkinson's Disease, "Vanity is the first thing to go". It's hard to let go of it. But once released, you are comfortably free to do what ya gotta do. Without vanity there is room to focus on what is important, solving the problem at hand. Secondly, releasing vanity opens the door to humor - life's kindest gift. The ability to laugh at yourself walks right in, and will stay as long as you need a friend. And last, in the place once occupied by vanity, compassion blooms. We can stop holding ourselves and others to unhealthy and impossible standards.

I now see "crazy old ladies" as the brilliant, adaptive, resilient women they are. I once condescendingly saw them as cute and interesting, their odd behavior as irrational. Now I see them as creative and brave people who have flung aside vanity and a compulsion to be "normal" in favor of living life and embracing reality. They and lots and lots of people with invisible disabilities do what they do, dress how they dress, in order to live life to the fullest.

How Wide and Deep the Gift of Life!

Am I the only person in the world who finds dirty snow beautiful and fascinating?

I took a three mile walk today. It was just about this time last year, that I was finally confident enough to take a long walk by myself and able to take in some of the delicate detail that the end of winter offers. Four months after my corneal transplant, I could see detail that I had long ago forgotten existed. Now, a year and a half out, I wear glasses and the clarity is even better.

As I walked today, I remembered last spring and the first seeing of extraordinary textures and grays and browns of dirty snow. As the two to five foot accumulation of snow slowly melts alongside the road, it leaves bizarre and wonderful sculptures. Whenever I talk face to face about this I get blank stares. Obviously this enthrallment with dirty snow is not commonly shared. I'm so easily entertained. But maybe this is part of my good fortune. It's part of the reality that although I now have 20/30 eyesight, you and I do not see/experience the same universe. That which delights one of us, may yet elude the other.

This year I'm able to wander about in the forest. I first notice the patchwork of areas with snow contrasting with snowless patches. Standing still, I absorb the expectant quiet of spring-around- the-corner. I feel the boundless patience of mother earth. I hear her slow steady voice "Each bud, each shade of green will appear in its own time." Wisdom the entire forest knows. I alone need the reminder.

Deep in the woods, the only spots without snow are right around the trunk. I can see the warmth around the tree trunks. The matted leaves, free from the snow, are just beginning to decay, just beginning their return to the soil.

I'm fascinated by bits of nature's debris, small twigs and branches of pine needles scattered by storms; weight and warmth slowly embedding them in the snow. Had I ever seen this before? Is it something I had forgotten, something I never noticed, or a phenomenon unique to this year's pattern of snowfalls and wind storms?

Surviving under the snow, the moss on tree trunks and rocks is among the first greenery to reappear. It sings spring green.

The singing of green and the texture of snow is the reason I named this blog The Third Ear, The Eleventh Finger. Everything I see becomes an enhanced opportunity to explore texture and sound. I see the squirrel moving and the "sound appreciation" part of my brain responds. I hear the musicality of the squirrel's busy-ness is. The "texture appreciation" part of my brain feels the fur, the taught muscles, the flick of the tail.

I wish I understood and knew more about brain plasticity. But clearly my personal experience of deteriorating vision, adapting, and then regaining vision is that texture and sound (and motion and smell) became much more important, more receptive. Muted colors and blurry shapes did not provide enough detail. It is through touch , sound, motion, and smell that I was able to collect data. I know first hand how hungry the brain (the left brain) is for information and how hungry the heart (the right brain) is for beauty. And it is the brilliance of life that we adapt. Even though my eyesight is restored, I still organize data as if it were touch, sound, motion, smell. My transplanted eye is a third ear gathering enhanced auditory data and beauty. It is an eleventh finger collecting even more textures.


It's the texture of the bark that I'm drawn to. Twenty years ago I remember it was the sight of a sunset or distant mountains that made my heart swell. Now it is texture that makes me cry, "This is so beautiful!" The "texture" part of my brain is hyper receptive. It has become a favored pathway to beauty.

The gift of life is wider and deeper than we can comprehend. How diverse and plentiful are the paths to joy!

How lucky I am to live where there is such an abundance of dirty snow! How lucky I am to notice its texture!

The Space Between Change

"It's not so much that we are afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear. . . . it's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer."
~Marilyn Ferguson

Fresh Snow

May my life never be so sadly arranged that I can’t enjoy a fresh snow.

When I am able may I have a child to chase me around the trees making great pathways and snow angels.

When I have no child may I hike up the hill sweating and panting against the gentle resistance of persistent snow drifts.

When I am deaf and feeble may I set my chair before the window and marvel at the lace and crystal covered trees.

When I am blind and too frail to venture out,

may I rise up just once in the night,

open the door, and stand for a moment

to feel winter’s vast silence on my skin.

Naked Trees in the Moonlight

In the middle of these December nights

there are no voices.

And mine are the only eyes.

I listen

And stare at branches of oak trees in the moonlight.

An autumn storm blew away their summer frill and excess.

All that is left in the silence and snow

is that which the storm could not take away

eternal strength and beauty.

Surrender

When I surrender to winter

We are both surprised.

In the quiet absence of resistance,

she looks me in the eye.

And I look into hers.

No more energy wasted wishing she were spring.

I welcome her with all my senses, tasting and smelling the cold.

She wraps me in her clean white blanket arms.

Our hearts open. I see how beautiful she is

and she invites me to play in the snow.