Morning view from my cabin deck.

For 25 years I spent 3 or 4 months a year living here, and loved mornings meditating with this view. It is a simple cabin, no running water (outhouse), wood stove for heat, no internet!
Most of my books were written from this deck.

 

Present day notes are at the end…

From the book chapter:
Now, 22 years later, much has changed for me, mostly growing out of maturing practice.

Gradually a shift happened for me. I asked not “what can’t I see,” but what can I see? I began to appreciate the light and vague shapes the better eye could see: light and shadow. I remember one morning sitting on my cabin deck cantilevered high up over a wooded hillside. I had been grasping to see the beloved familiar forest and small glimpses of the lake. Injured eyes could not see any details and I cried for a long time. Finally, I relaxed and looked out again into the dawn forest. I began to see the beauty of the play of light and shadow as the trees danced with the breeze. I could feel that breeze on my face. Then the sun rose high enough to break through the treetops. Brilliant light! Caressing breeze! Movement! It was exquisite, not the way it had looked before, not the way I expected it to look, but just as it was. Such a beautiful morning.

Tears came again not for what I had lost but for all the richness that was given. Tears of gratitude and joy. I remember my husband walked out to the deck and saw me crying. “Ohhh, Barbara,” he said with concern at my tears, folding me into a huge hug. I smiled at him and said I’m not crying because I’m sad. I’m crying because it’s so beautiful! I’ve never seen the woods this way before. So, we sat there together for half an hour, him holding my hand, just enjoying the beauty of a forest morning in the different ways it presented to each of us.

As a few years passed, useable vision returned to one eye. My left eye has good vision now, 20/30 with glasses. My right eye is still low vision, 20/200, which is considered legally blind, but I’m no longer terrified of that. I can close my normal seeing eye and enjoy the patterns of light and dark, and areas of color and movement, much as I saw the woods that day. I’ve learned to trust that I DO see, rather than focus on being blind and what I miss.

There’s no partial hearing with the ears so I’ve had to learn to hear in new ways. I call it hearing with my heart. I focus on facial expressions, energy, and whatever words I can lip read. When talking in depth with someone, I do appreciate the gifts of new technology that allow for voice to text dictation. What a blessing. Vital here is that I am relaxed and knowing I can hear in new ways. I can receive the incomplete information, rather than becoming stuck in the “poor me” mode in which I lived for some years. I had to learn to let go of the old, linear way of seeing and hearing and allow mind to open to something new.

Today Tuesday May 12:
As I read the material from the book chapter, to prepare for my May blog part 3, looking at photos of the lake and cabin, I could see how hard it is to let go of what has brought so much joy in the past. I have my new places of joy now right here in my home: sitting under my giant spruce, sitting beside my little pond and waterfall, floating on my big swing under the high tree branches.…. Inevitably everything changes. Grasping and clinging lead to suffering but I can’t just tell myself no grasping, no clinging. What tools have my practice given me to deal with those emotions?

I need to acknowledge there is sadness, missing those old parts of my life. Sadness missing the strong body that could run up and down the steep path to the lake, could swim 2 miles to the far end of the lake; sadness missing the gift of deep conversations with Hal, before his stroke silenced him, …I need to honor what those years, really decades, meant to me; the joy of the solitude of those months spent at the cabin, the quiet hours when Hal and I sat at the cabin deck together, Hal working on his book as I worked on mine. Finally, we’d take a break and walk down the steep hill trail to swim, seeing the new wildflowers emerge…come back up have lunch, maybe take a nap or a walk, then back to our writing.

The days, even weeks, alone, with silence and deep practice, just squirrels and birds for company, and always a beloved collie. And to acknowledge how memory plays tricks. There were times when i was very lonely up there.

Perhaps the most important lessons for me are to remember I can’t. hold on to anything, and to cherish each moment. Sitting here in my office, looking out at my giant spruce, brilliant green with new growth catching the sunlight, there is joy! Can that be enough? This moment is really all we have.

To be continued:

My granddaughter joyfully climbing the spruce!