The eye

What is a powerful bond? I asked myself last night. I think of an example that uses the eyeball. If you take the general anatomy of the eyeball as seen in daily life, you see the iris, pupil, and the whites of the eye. Sometimes in older people you see the cloudy lens of a cataract. People with jaundice have yellowed whites of their eye. We are struck by the colors of our irises- so blue, we might say to ourselves. Exploring the anatomy of the eye further gets me every time. The eye rarely falls out of its socket- thank goodness. Clearly there is the optic nerve and the muscles that hold it firmly in place. But remove the entire anatomy of the eye and spread it out before you. The eye has four huge muscles that hold it in place. They intersect perpendicularly at the eyeball. They are a strong safety net that seem to almost cradle the eye. see figure here. The muscles abduct, adduct, lift, and lower the eye. Sometimes these muscles are weak and the eyes are unable to misalign. This is lazy eye. Sometimes the nerves paralyze and then the eyelid droops, the eyes cannot abduct and thus a person cannot climb the stairs or read as they used to. The muscles and nerves are everything to a structure that, in daily life, looks so striking and independent of itself.

So what is a powerful bond between people? I believe it is being able to look at the same document with a person who knows you well and be able to mourn and cry at the same parts as though they are in the same skin, cosmic alliance, and emotion as you. It is their ability to predict exactly where you come from. And exactly where you are going. The ability to abduct, adduct, lift, and lower you gently and smoothly to where you need to be and where you need to go. A powerful connection can be obvious like an eye jerked to the left visual field at the sound of a startling noice. Or it can often go unnoticed- as it does when it passes over the text in a book. Careful & minute but working with you one hundred percent of the time.

So here I am: singular in one sense. Out there blue & blinking. But I swear to God without my muscles and nerves I am nothing. I thank you over and over again.

"These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds and incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, it is deep" -Audre Lourde. Thank you Megan for this powerful writing.