Yesterday morning I walked around my house for a couple hours blinking and rubbing at my right eye, trying to clear its fogginess.
Now, I am of an age where every symptom probably could be, but maybe isn’t, a reminder of mortality of function, organ, or body. My right eye has a small “drusen” that could indicate, and progress to, macular degeneration. Thankfully it has not changed at all in the three years since diagnosis during a routine eye exam. But yesterday, when my sight was blurry in that eye, I wondered.
Human beings look for patterns, we look for cause and effect, and then we project those patterns into the future and onto others. Sometimes those patterns become assumptions; sometimes those assumptions hold true, often they don’t. Either way, they blur our vision and we stop wondering, we stop being open to seeing what is actually there; instead we begin to see only what we expect to see: for good or ill.
When my right eye was blurry and I could not blink or rub the blurriness away, my mind began to construct a story based on a pattern, on some facts I hold as true and predictive: on what I assumed might eventually happen. This is my modus operandi. Sometimes this helps me prepare for difficulty, or anticipate joy ahead; always it steals me from the moments I am actually living.
Stories draw us in; we are wired for their telling. We all live in stories about who we are, and who we might, or ought to be. We have family stories told to us, and encoded in our DNA. We hold stories about our parents, and grandparents, the land, God, our personas and shadows, and what comes next.
Our bodies, which are really just consciousness made into matter, hold all sorts of collective stories. Our body-politic, also consciousness made into matter, will grow meaner, sicker, and smaller when held within a contracting, cruel, and violent consciousness. Likewise, our body-politic will become more generous, healthy, and inclusive within an expanding-consciousness. We get to choose that course.
My personal-body, consciousness made into matter, took a moment away from its story-telling yesterday morning to remember that I wear corrective lenses over my eyes. I sat down, breathed in and out, took the lenses off and examined them; there, on the right side, was a smudge which I sheepishly cleared with a tissue.
The human-made world (culture, history, politics) is much like a pair of alternate-reality glasses. They project stories our brains will believe as true, though they are made of nothing Real. Most of the stories we are told by others about history, humanity, and “the way it is,” are untrue. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are not true either. They are not real, they are only what we want, and don’t want to believe, and they have no substance outside of what we say they have.
It is time to expand our consciousness. It is time to take off the lenses crafted by others to maintain a reality they believe benefits them. It is time to see the essential, and stand in grace within it.
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Courage my dears. May we see clearly. May we love one another and recreate our human world accordingly. May it be so.
