I just saw something a friend sent me in an e-mail about a young man who was born blind and crippled. He can play the piano so as to bring the most hardened stoic to tears. He claims not to be handicapped and he has a father whom only God could have sent. I won't go into his story here but I was so touched by it that I'm sitting here by the computer trying to express my feelings. I am in awe.
This friend, who often sends me inspiring videos on U Tube, is a gentle, quiet Korean Christian man I met in one of my writing classes. We're no longer in class together, but I'm getting to know him because of a book he's written. He too just started a blog.
Since I looked into the idea of blogs I've started following another by a middle-aged American couple, my former son-in-law and his new wife, who are spending a year in Italy. He writes in it every day. I'm hooked.
There are tines when I get stuck at the computer and have to tear myself away, but I try to avoid too many of those. Still, it is marvelous to be living in this age. Marvelous, yet scary. It seems to me that my quiet life can become overcrowded with options on this device sitting so passively on my desk. Between it and the other one across the room (the television) the world is closing in on me. I'm feeling almost like I'd graduated from kindergarten to being a space traveller. I can see the world, zoomed in or out,with the bare touch of a button or two. It makes me feel so small to know that what I see and all I have seen of life is a mere speck of all that exists!
Back to the young man I started this piece with. They say he is blind, but I think he sees better than many of the rest of us. He can't walk on his legs but he marches at half time with the college band, pushed in a wheelchair by his dad and playing the trumpet like the angel, Gabriel. Yes, his father? One look at him and you know this young man is blessed to have a father like that! Now, I'm thinking. If we all knew our Father, God better, how blessed we would be!
I've been sitting here for two hours and suddenly I need to escape into the refuge of sleep. There is a kind of bliss in sleep where I can rest my mind, and yet even there I'm apt to find other worlds, other people, other marvels. I'm still thinking of that young man whose eyes see, not as ours, and although they are made of marble, they look incredulous when he's asked what it feels like to be so handicapped. "Handicapped?" The word is foreign to him and he smiles broadly. You just know he is seeing something wonderful. How could he know the answer to that?
I completely relate to the struggle in adjusting to all of the high tech gagetry. I notice that when i take a impromptu picutre of my family, there are some on their cell phone , I-Phone, comuter, watching TV. Makes me want to flee to the country, away from it all but then i start to feel old fashioned. To be honest, i think you and i are onto something. There is too much dependence on technology . what is happening to quiet time? That is one reason i love to write. It is me and my mind(heart and soul) communing with feelings from the past and present and making sense of the world. Writing gives perspective. I don't see the computer as a hinderance when i use it for writing but keeping up with emails is a different story. The blind mind in your story has a perspective that we can only hope for -- as tragic as his disablitly may be. thanks for making me think , Joyce. See you in class :)
ReplyDeleteThere is a Christian Science Monitor Home Forum article recording that tells of a young fellow who was working for the Summer (something like the Peace Corps) in a small town near Lima, Peru, constructing small homes for the town folks to live in. His fellow worker, who wired together reinforcement bars where they joined to be cemented into the foundation, was blind. The writer tells how amazing it was that his blind friend could do such an accurate job of wiring the bars of steel into place. But the friend said, that while his eyes couldn't show him, he knew, from the clear picture in his mind, how the bars were supposed to look and fit into the building plan.
ReplyDeleteWhen their Summer work was over, they were waiting for their flight out at the Lima airport. The blind friend was returning to his home in England. He closed his eyes and began slowly swaying back and forth. After a while the writer asked him what he was doing? "Oh!" The blind friend told him, "I'm imagining myself looking over a vast landscape at my home in England!" When the writer asked why the swaying back and forth? He answered, "I'm hearing the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, his 'Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.' Have you ever heard it?" he asked. The writer had not. "Oh! When you get home, you MUST find it!" his blind friend urged him. He did find it, and it was so hauntingly beautiful, he listened to it over and over again. And, the music indeed took him far into the English countryside to imagine the solitude, and the dark beauty, and the mystery of England in 1567 when Thomas Tallis wrote the theme for the Archbishop's Psalter. A short theme written over 400 years ago. Would you like to hear it? And, like the writer's blind friend, by listening to the more modern Vaughan Williams interpretation, would you like to "see" it?
Copy the link below into your browser. Have your speakers on. You'll hear the dark Tallis theme, and then the Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia" which is written for double orchestra, and solo instruments. You can even follow the score if you like which breaks into three moving panels as the large orchestra, small orchestra, and soloists each play their part of this moving work.
It takes a little over 15 minutes, but you will see it! You will see, even with your eyes closed!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1ctkdCYzPQ&feature=watch_response