Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Memory

A friend recommended a book, Good Night, Irene, a Novel by Luis Alberto Urrea.  I knew what it was about but didn’t expect how personal it would become.  My father flew a B-17 out of the base in England where the first part takes place.  The author describes the drama and tension of the planes taking off and the wait to see who returned.  

I sit here now caught in memories and sadness at the loss of my father who passed away in an accident in 1969.  I feel memories of his experience, of how families share a history.

His crew completed the required missions, and then flew out of Italy.  The B-17 he was piloting was shot down, and the crew parachuted out along a route that landed them in Austria.  My husband and I went to the village where he landed, and met people who saw him land, who fed him, and turned him over to the SS as the village was small and undefended with only women and children left.  

Seeing me they knew he lived.  They wanted me to know they had no choice, and I understood.  They talked of how tall and handsome he was which was true.  He was half-German and half-Norwegian, and so again how strange this tragedy of war where depending where one lives determines what side one is on.  

Oddly the village was so small, it had no jail or cell so he was held in a small room in which I then stood.  The room is in an art center now.  The exhibit in the building when I was there was of California landscapes so I felt myself caught in a melange of time travel. I was in the present, the past, and though in Austria seeing a landscape of where I live.  I was disoriented and felt sick.

I sit here now absorbing it all.   I know that life is impermanent, is always moving, and we honor the flow, and yet, there are places in us that, like stones, create the river’s song.  

An Egret and Great Blue Heron observe the change in tides – Abbott’s Lagoon
Along the San Andreas fault line near Parkfield
Until recently, there was a bridge across this expanse and then it fell. Impermanence. Change!

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

A Gift

I’ve settled into wearing glasses and am loving the fun of it.  I’m playing with eye exercises, trusting what a delight it is to have air touch my eyes directly rather than through a contact lens.

I hadn’t realized all that is involved with contact lenses but now fluids are put away to give away and I’m adjusting to new ways of seeing.  I’m using pinhole glasses which I only learned about recently.  I paid $20.00 on Amazon for plastic ones with round holes.  Using them, beginning with five minutes and expanding the time period stimulates peripheral vision.  

The idea is to wake up the visual system and develop a sense of the visual pathways.  I’m visualizing fluidity, movement, and expansion in my eyes, in my life.  

In learning that pinhole glasses stimulate the retina and the pathways to the thalamus. I checked out the thalamus and I’m enthralled. I’m enjoying participating in healing and health as I await what the medical world can do when that world and I coincide.

In my pause, I reflect on and absorb these words of Eknath Easwaran:

To love, we need to be sensitive to those around us, which is impossible if we are always racing through life engrossed in all the things we need to do before sunset.

Tennessee Valley with its opening to sea and see