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)

Sensing Helen

Have you ever played the game "would you rather. . ." with your senses? If you had to give up one of your senses, what would it be? When I've been plagued by noise, small sounds, Styrofoam squeaks or a drippy faucet, I give up my ears. If the world has been particularly smelly, men's cologne, a cigarette, fabric softener, the nose goes. When the tags on my shirts or sock boogers seem unbearable, touch wins. If I'm feeling morose and food goes bland, I sacrifice the tongue.

When I was a kid, my eldest sister became obsessed with blindness. Her own sight challenged by extreme myopia and a hatred for her horn-rimmed glasses, she spent most of her time in a blurred world and sought refuge in the clarity of her thoughts. She had what grown-ups used to call an "active imagination." Meaning she dreamed more often than she didn't. She lived in a land of make-believe and as her kid sister I tagged along whenever she would let me. When she was obsessed with witchcraft, I had to prick my finger and eat lemon peels in order to join her coven. We tried to conjure the spirits of dead relatives in seances, read Tarot cards, and asked the Ouija board about our future. But the blindness obsession seemed to last the longest. We spent hours wandering the backyard with our eyes closed, feeling the textures of plants. She'd run her fingers gently over my face to try to tell me from my other older sister. And she made us watch The Miracle Worker, the 1962 version with Patti Duke as Helen Keller and Anne Bancroft playing her teacher Anne Sullivan. All I remember of the film was the scene at the water pump, Helen's ah-ha moment. We felt a lot of spilling water in our hands after that, making awkward cries for "Wa."

My sister went on to teach herself braille, she even got a little braille punch, and she taught me how to read the tiny bumps with my finger tips. She taught me sign language, spelling words into my palm. I learned to cherish every sighted moment. Helen Keller and my sister, through their faulty eyes, taught me to really look at the world. So later on, when I'd play the "would you rather" game, I'd never offer up my sight. There is always something beautiful to look at. Even when I'm standing in the middle of a mall parking lot, surrounded by ugliness, I can look up at clouds in the sky or find a beautiful face in the crowd marching to buy something unnecessary. By playing at blindness, I gained stronger perception.

I'm a person often described by others as "sensitive." In another game--which Star Trek character would you be?--I'm always Deanna Troi, the ship's counselor and half-betazoid empath. I lead with emotions, feel too much, making me difficult to get along with. Or at least that's how it feels. So I wonder what it would be like not to be so hyper-sensitive, or to lack sensation. I joke from time to time with my husband that we need to build a sensory deprivation chamber for me. A nice quiet, dark place for me to go when the world is coming on too strong. Maybe I was just born this way, lacking adequate sensory filters to block out incoming signals. I'd like to be able to block out the itch on my arm right now that makes me pause every few moments to scratch. Or the hum of the computer fan, the cat crying in the other room, an airplane flying over head, my itchy scalp, the dog jumping at the back door, refrigerator knocking, a drip, somewhere a faucet drips. Sight is the only sense I can never get enough of. So today, I offer up my ears and I'm keeping the eyes.