Impermanence

Half Light

Fail, fail again, fail better. Samuel Beckett When I lost all vision in my left eye in mid-December, everything got harder, and I was making all kinds of mistakes, but the overriding issue for me is having half the light. It’s like one of my windows is boarded up. I assume that down the road I’ll get used to this, won’t remember what full illumination felt like, but not yet. Pema Chodron used the Beckett quote as the title of a commencement speech published in book form with the same title. Understanding the importance of failure as well as success needs a broad view of failure. All my harshest life events felt like a failure at some level. Self-judgement chases me around like an angry terrier. Chodron defined failure as when things don’t work out the way you want them to and losing sight in one eye is a big one, not a part of my plan. I was painting a detail when suddenly I had trouble focusing, distracted by a series of flashing patterns made of light with big splotches of color bursting all over. It felt like there was a film over one eye distorting what was coming in. I tilted my head to the left hoping the film was on the surface and it would slide off. It didn’t. I thought if I lay down maybe the fireworks would settle. Most of it settled down into an empty grey area with one tiny patch of image coming in which gets smaller every day. The next day the ophthalmologist said a stroke in my eye had starved the receptors and the vision wouldn’t be coming back. Learning how to live with one eye wears me out. Just like expecting Michael to come in the door after he died, I keep expecting the vision to return, keep having the urge to save a certain part of the painting until I can see better. Daily life is darker, my sense of vulnerability stronger. Adapting will take longer than I originally thought. Loss of normal depth perception makes it difficult to judge how far my brush is from the painted surface and I lower it very slowly to avoid a big splotch. I still catch myself waving my brush over the work thinking I’m already there or making a mark where I didn’t intend thinking I was farther away than I was. Frustration over my many mistakes is daily. But I’m learning techniques to compensate. If I turn my head to the left my good eye can focus on the details. Unfortunately, the instinct to turn the head towards where I’m focusing keeps fighting my efforts. So I move the piece to the right. I begin 2026 and the rest of my life blind in one eye. The process of adapting to this is my opportunity to fail better. It’s challenging. I always look at life’s hardships as having something to teach me, I hope as I learn from this it will increase my compassion for other people’s challenges.

Bookmak 2025

Afterlife

When I was a very small child, I didn’t understand the fact of being a separate person. I repeatedly asked my mother “Why am I me?” who never really understood what I was getting at, but being a separate individual confused me, and I thought there had to be a reason. Though I never found an answer or an absolute reason for being, I have thought about the idea that being separate felt unnatural to me which feeds my current sense that we’re not as separate as we think, and that our consciousness may return to its original unity. In an interview about his recent novel “Secret of Secrets”, Dan Brown stated firmly that though once he was sure there was nothing after physical death, after researching this book he was convinced that individual consciousness survives the death of the body. He said that interviewing people that had had Near Death Experiences, they “walked the talk”, that the experience changed their view of death completely and restructured their lives accordingly. Having watched many videos of people talking about their NDE’s since my husband died, I’ve been impressed with their sincerity and desire to help others understand that we are more than our physical body. Sri Yogananda stated that “Death…is an experience through which we are meant to learn that we cannot die.” One reason I’m receptive to that idea is because I always felt that what looked out from my physical being was the same consciousness as it was when I was a child, an unchanged witness within that lies beyond this particular personality and physical body. No scientist has been able to locate a place for consciousness there. Basically, science can’t prove there isn’t anything after bodily death any more than that there is. In his novel Brown reviews the many factors that suggest a non-local consciousness and studies that support the idea of the brain as more a receiver/transmitter, a vehicle for consciousness to use what we learn, a portal to a larger stream of consciousness. In an article published in Frontiers in Psychology the authors suggest that none of the primary materialist theories explain consciousness as well as a non-local approach. To think of consciousness as fundamental, pervading everything, makes room for experiences that don’t fit materialist models. A growing number of scientists are looking at the intersection with quantum non-locality in their exploration of consciousness. What creates subjective experience is one of the hurdles a materialist model can’t get past. Art as the expression of subjective life is testimony to the importance of the qualities of being and not just the facts. Though the brain is involved in what we experience as consciousness, it can’t explain everything. Consciousness as the foundation of reality is an area to be explored that would benefit from more art to help us see it.

Nudge

Recognition

Seeing depends on recognition. We need to have seen something before to know what we’re looking for, to lock on to the sense of known. Even when we can’t identify something right away there can be a feeling of familiarity that draws focus. After more than a decade since neuroscience’s discovery of the importance of feelings to thinking, it is finally being acknowledged in media. Feelings come first, providing incentives regarding what needs attention. Feelings accompany vision as an initial assessment of what we’re seeing. They are far more nuanced than words can express, think how many different ways a beautiful day or a wild ocean can look. If we’re looking at another person, the inner mirroring of face and body language help us feel what another is experiencing. Besides our experience of our surroundings, we have art to show the deep movements of the heart. Artists throughout time have shown what’s it’s like to be human, to appreciate beauty, shudder at horror and gasp at what’s ugly beyond human understanding. Art is our vehicle to witness what’s not within our own experience and enlarge our understanding of feeling and intuitive judgment. Looking at the art that attracts you trains that sensitivity. Building faith in our response to what we see can strengthen our moral judgments to hold up against the flood of verbal justification. Realizing the importance of visual judgments could guide us in better understanding what is happening in our world. Vision shows what’s harmonious, what’s in conflict, where something valued has been defiled. Many of us felt heartsick at the demolition of the east wing of the White House, a place that belonged to the country, not an individual, and provides a recent example of how what is wrong is felt. The machine bites off a piece of building we care about and we feel it in our chest. Likewise, we recoil at human beings being thrown to the ground, treated with disrespect and carted off to cages. Destroying small boats and the people in them without evidence of wrongdoing is another ugly scene in our current reality horror show. The words and explanations don’t carry the weight of witnessing and feeling the truth of what we see. Understanding how powerful our vision is in seeing right and wrong, goodness and cruelty, comes with the responsibility to look. In a world full of distractions, it’s too easy to ignore what’s actually happening around us. Making decisions about where to give our attention is the first step in active awareness.

Joy in Action