So Beautiful, Yet So Challenging: The invisible Becoming Visible

More excerpted from “Hot Pants, Motorcycles and K Street” – manuscript in progress.

How very strange, I reflected, that revealing the extent of my current eye problem crisis on this blog site brought a calm to wash over me; a lightness of such purity and subtlety that I felt lifted to a higher realm of being.

How could an experience like this bring such transcendence; simply sharing, openly, that which I, generally, so closely hold private?

It is not with any intention to be less than transparent that I have held the subject of my eyes and their ongoing threats of blindness, quiet . Only inadvertently has the subject;  not been shared more fully. And, yet in exploring my “Anastasia The Storyteller” blog site, today, for that which I have previously shared, I find I have written a fair amount on the subject. So my situation has not truly been kept secret.

(Check the labels on this home page for “Keratoconus,” “Blind/seeing“911,” "To See Or Not To See" and “Recovery from blindness” for these articles.)

Actually there has been more than enough about my past visual impairment to suit me to date.  Do you think, perhaps, that I have been too reserved on the subject? I have in the past and, thus, robbed myself and others of the growth possibilities that the sharing of sorrows and losses can prompt.

Please do let me know, if this is so, for you about me.

No matter, destiny seems to have pushed the issue, once again, to the fore so that I/we have another opportunity here, if we missed out before.

Journalist Mike Corrigan, writing under the name G.M. Corrigan, wrote a beautiful article about my experiences with and recovery from blindness in “Finding Light In the Darkness” (Frederick News Post, August 6,2006). I so much appreciate how he utilized his proficiency with words to tell my blindness story and capture the transformation that was also mine, along with my losses and challenges.  I hope you will take time to read the story, if you are so inclined.

Making my black-patched eye, half-blindness as big and bold as a Hollywood happening, my former press agent, Charlie Brotman, brought both my impairment of a time past (late 1960s, early 1970s) into the spotlight in tandem with the U.”S. “Male” Service. Charlie’s creative genius, also, gave immense dignity to my vision challenges.

The U.S. “Male” Service (circa 1966) is the entrepreneurial enterprise that serves as the foundation for “Hot Pants, Motorcycles and K Street.” It was purportedly the first reminder and gift shopping service known worldwide according to Voice of America (1967) and also offered an all-female, in hot pants, motorcycle delivery service to handle its deliveries. The delivery service was called "Special Delivery Messenger Service."

(See "Hostess For 'Eye Patch Party' Has A Personal Concern: Marcia Rosen, Who Had Unsuccessful Surgery Helps Those Who Helped Her," Washington Evening Star newspaper, November 21, 1969. Article to be posted, pending copyright permissions.)

With all this past, I was so surprised and happy that sharing my eye crisis, in my own words on this blog site, quickly brought me generous notes of caring and concern to fill my email inbox. I was touched!

Yet with this outpouring, questions, generally held in my personal cold storage vault, now arose; the central theme being around my dread of more public visibility than I can comfortably manage and the consequences therein. 

Thus, inquiries, most appropriately made, prompted me to seriously ponder my responsibilities to others as well as my personal priorities, present and future. 

Legitimate questions such as --

• ·         How recently did my present eye crisis arise?
• ·         Was the loss of my right eye’s vision a certainty?

To respond to these queries, individually or publicly on this site, I had my own questions to answer:

• ·     How big or how small is this present eye infection crisis for me, up against the backdrop of the overall framework of my life?
• ·     How big or how small is the situation in terms of how I describe my circumstances to others?
• ·     Is there a public version as well as a private version for the story of the situation?
• ·     Where does one draw the line between the two; the private and the public?
• ·     And, does that line drawing respect all concerned (not being too reticient, nor burdening others etc.)?
• ·     What is the potential fallout for me and for New Horizons from my being more transparent on this issue than I have been so far 0f now being half-blind?
• ·     How can I guide the effects of my transparency onto a positive track and, thus, offset the negative?
• ·     And, above all, perhaps, how can I now find my voice and be an active part of the co-creation of beauty in this often challenged world, especially when I, too, am challenged (i.e. how does one bring this into balance)?

What I actually yearn for most is the calm, washing over me; the lightness of purity and subtlety in everything I say and do that can bring healing to our troubled world.  As well as the healing of my wounded eyes, lifting me to that higher realm where all things are possible; the “universal awe” to which Murat, New Horizons’ community development mentor, so devotedly directs our attention, as his most recent book, "Ahmsta Kebzeh: The Universal Science of Awe, Volume II," so profoundly explicates.

Now, however, as fate would have it, it is time to light the first candles of Chanukah and to usher in Thanksgiving day.  So, for now, I will seek to find my peace in being thankful for what I/we have.