My early impressions of Helen Keller, filtered through my sister, stayed with me like a good childhood memory, as if Helen had been a playmate joining in on our afternoons of make-believe. She stayed a child to me even though she had died an old woman the same year we moved to Berkeley and my sister started haunting the library at the School for the Deaf and Blind up the hill from our house. And of course she looked more like Patti Duke in my mind than the real woman. Despite my flawed sense of the true Helen, the core of her heroism remained with me. She managed to find her way in the world and seemed joyful to be alive. If she could do that without eyes and ears able to help her, I should do fine. All my parts seemed to work fine. And her passion for discovery comforted me.

Heroes both inspire and shame us. With Helen, her joy in sensing things, the color of a flower by the feel of its petals, reminded me to cherish small things, cherish the fact that I can feel them, smell them, hear them, see them, taste them, watch them change through time. Inspiration. Yet to also know I do so much less with so much more than she had. Shame. While she devoured every scrap of life, I give considerable effort to blocking out sensory input. I can't handle it. It overwhelms me. This seems a waste of perfectly good eyes, ears, and nose.

When I feel closest to understanding how Helen might have perceived the world, especially after reading her tiny autobiography The Story of My Life, is when I'm in the garden. She had an intense love of nature, of learning about life--"The loveliness of things taught me all their use."--especially at an intimate scale:

"Sometimes I rose at dawn and stole into the garden while the
heavy dew lay on the grass and flowers. Few know what joy it is
to feel the roses pressing softly into the hand, or the beautiful
motion of the lilies as they sway in the morning breeze.
Sometimes I caught an insect in the flower I was plucking, and I
felt the faint noise of a pair of wings rubbed together in a
sudden terror, as the little creature became aware of a pressure
from without."

I feel that kind of intimacy when I take photographs with my macro lense, leaning in so close a flower or bug are revealed as if for the first time, like this flower shot I took last spring. The world opens up anew (and yes, how my heroes write can spill into my own writing if I think about them too much or have just reread their words, so I'm going with anew)