It is 3:30 in the morning and I am up to let the dog out. When the door swings open the hot, sticky air cocoons me and tries to drag the cool air from the house outside to comingle with its heady warmth. The dog comes in and I plod back to bed. I cannot sleep. Thirty minutes after that, I am still to awake to go back to sleep. Not wanting to just keep up acting like a rotisserie chicken in my own bed, you know, turning over and over until I am done. Instead I turn to my Merlin and thumb through my book choices.

Finding one that I had started before, but never finished, I settle in to read. Alas, it does not hold my interest and I left that book in search of another one. There are lots of authors and even more books to choose from. My huge book repertoire offers many possibilities, so I start to read again. and settle back to begin the task of keeping the dark out and the storm clouds that are threatening to erupt outside from getting in my head. There is a storm a brewing both in a real weather pattern outside my walls and there is a storm threatening my mind as well. The outside climate I can do nothing about.. The cloudy, dark thoughts that now try to fill my mind are another matter. In the darkness of 3:30 I am in charge as to what the storms will look like. I know that I am in control of what thoughts I let to roil through my conscious mind.

There are things to think about for sure. Lots going on. Many things that could distract and wave a fearful banner over my life. I will have none of that.

I started cleaning out closets so that any excess things I have will not be a stumbling block to my departure. Even if I never leave here my things will no longer be the weight of a millstone. At a tipping point the things that I had to have now are the very things that now have me. Like taking off a slimming skin divers wet suit, I must peel off the things that now cling to me and threaten to overtake me.

I like storms much better when I am awake and waiting for them while sitting on my screened in porch. I am safe and just an observer of the magnitude of mother nature. When I am startled out of a sleepy night’s dream by the harsh advance of some wicked weather, I am unprepared and at first it throws me off balance. I huddle in the bed waiting for the sounds of the violence outside to move on and subside into stillness and just falling rain. After all, if it is just rain, how much harm can that bring? Think of pictures of great chunks of land with houses attached being washed away by just a little rain that accumulated. It is not just one element of the storm but the sustain, central pounding of the same thing over and over where the injury comes.
There are storms rising in my future. If I stand at the door and watch for them I am better equipped to handle them once they arrive.

I had always thought that my vision loss was the biggest storm that ever raged over me. Now I see that once vicious hurricane was in reality a gentle breeze blowing clarity into my life. The things that my life has been afforded because of my having the inability to see how most people see is the very thing that now brings me insurmountable pleasure. My heart sees with a vibrancy that I know I would have missed if I would have only continued to see what my eyes could picture. My current storm has nothing to do with me and it is very serious. One of the reasons it is a category 4 storm is that it is not happening to me but to someone I love very much. It would be easier to take on the burden and have it happen to me instead of my closest friend, my husband. We will all weather this part of our new reality and my being able to see deeply instead of what is on the surface will be the best gift I have ever been given.

Blessings, Denise