Awestruck

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
—Albert Einstein

Each time I leave my four walls, my senses scan for spectacle and transformation: a pink bud bursting into a white blossom, a vertical tulip-tree branch forming a chartreuse-and-orange-patterned wall at a busy intersection, the heady scents of lilac and pear giving way to roses, the newest placement of the stars. Every day brings new color and texture and fragrance to my small world that wasn’t there the day before.

And each day I try to absorb everything Nature offers—to be alive and open to it, to capture its Spring wonders in my heart and memory.

Take a moment today to see—really see—one thing Nature is trying to reveal to you.

Going Blind Is No Biggie

On my last trip to the library, I picked up Coping with Vision Loss: Understanding the Psychological, Social, and Spiritual Effects from the New Arrivals shelves. Here’s an excerpt from page 3 of the Introduction by authors Cheri Colby Langdell and Tim Langdell:

“Losing one’s sight does not resemble losing a limb. One is not disabled in quite the same way, and in fact, as we shall show in this book, one need not think of oneself as disabled or challenged at all. The blind person is not constantly conscious of any sense of loss; instead, the personality changes somewhat, but the person is still the same whole person as before.”

Now, dear readers, what do you think of that assessment? Please, please tell me your thoughts and I’ll tell you mine.

In Which Miss Lill Greets Her Favorite Day of This Year

Today is the last of a horrible, no-good, awful, rotten string of days called 2009.

Yet, as fraught as the year was with villains and crises, I am delighted to report on two good things that occurred recently which will set the stage for a much-improved 2010.
1. My eyes have recovered from surgery and I can get new glasses, after which I should have no trouble with my vision.
2. Mr. Slimy’s lawyer accepted our offer to leave our lease 8 months early. We paid our August rent—for the third time—and have 8 months in which to organize/pack/sell/move our lives.

We now begin 2010 with a time frame and a goal. We will continue to be under the jurisdiction of the court until September 1 of this year. The benefit of this oversight is that Mr. Slimy can’t try to charge us extra for using the Dumpster or collecting our mail without landing in court again. He’s stuck with our lease and our rent until we go.

Mr. Slimy will continue being who he is and probably thinks he won the case. So the outcome wasn’t justice, but it’s palatable and it was on our terms rather than Mr. Slimy’s.

All in all, this dreadful year is ending on a high note. I’m packing it up, tagging it “Emotional Baggage,” and leaving it at the station. I’ll never forget it, but I’m not carrying it with me into the future.

We rarely do anything out of the ordinary to celebrate New Year’s Eve. But one year my husband cut out brown-paper people on which we wrote our regrets. We took these to the beach and burned them as fireworks ushered in the New Year.

I’m thinking of doing that again, only this time, instead of regrets, we’ll detail every yucky thing that happened to us and describe every smarmy bully who tried to make us miserable.

Oh dear. I have to run; so much to do. The old pen and scissors are going to be quite busy in preparation for tonight’s cathartic ceremony.

Burn, Baby, Burn!

[Sculpture by Frederick William Pomeroy; painting by Salvador Dali.]