Part 11 of MY STORY OF GOING BLIND

Is God the life force within us? The thing that pushes up through the darkness. Is He the sap that rises in the tree in the Springtime after the dark cold winter? Is He the green shoot that pushes up from a tiny seed through the darkness of the soil, and lives?

Since gettkng cancer and going blind I have been preoccupied with the practical and material problems of life. How was I to live as a blind wheelchair bound person and not merely exist? For me, it was not just a matter of the body and the flesh. I realised that we are made of more than that. There is something within us that makes us LIVE. This is something that I have, as I said in my previous part, struggled with. Some people do give the name “God” to this, but then that conjures up all sorts of other things as well. They are things that I would not want to be associated with. Having struggled for life, however, when I had cancer, I have to say that there truly is something very strong in us that makes us strive for life. I mean, here, not just existence, but life. I could quite easily have felt that my body was in such a state and that that was all there was for me. A mere existence. I could not accept my own that. What made me play music? What made me always dance? Even though I can no longer actually dance, my spirit still dances within me. I hear the music and I dance.

There were so many things that made me alive before I got cancer and went blind. One of those things was bird watching, and nature. Not being able to watch the birds is one of my greatest losses. I still grieve over it. To live in a world of darkness is a terrible thing, and in some way that darkness had to be redeemed. How do you live in complete darkness? This was and still is my challenge. Physically it causes many problems, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually it does too. How do I redeem the darkness?