Back on July 31, 2018, I wrote a post called "The Eyes Have It," where I talked about my serious nearsightedness, and how my eyes in recent years have started to improve. Yes, I wear bifocals, but my actual level of nearsightedness is diminishing. I went to the eye doctor again yesterday, and the improvement is quite marked. The glasses that I got three years ago are really, really wrong for me now, and I cannot wait for the new ones to come in.
As I just said to a friend, to be 65 and have any aspect of your physical body improve is just simply miraculous. The powers-that-be in this world may be hoping that we older women will just disappear off into the sunset, but fortunately I can at least see more and more clearly. And understand what I am seeing. And trust my own instincts.
Of course, that still leaves me often "seeing things" differently. The news item that currently seems to me to be the most metaphorically important is the container ship crisis, both at U.S. ports and overseas. Most of the news reports I have heard or read about this development seem to place it in the context of how people had better buy their Christmas gifts early because many items will not be available. Various entities are getting into place to resolve this problem, to make the supply chain "flow" which will make our life easier so that we can buy more things. What stuns me is that as a culture, we haven't started to question the core wisdom, economy and ecology of this crazy consumerist model. It stuns me that we don't see these bird's eye views of anchored container ships, and say, "there is something so wrong with this picture". Could the "problem" be that we are consuming (and then discarding) so much stuff, rather than that the shipments are stuck in port?
My eyeglasses were a big purchase, and strictly speaking, in buying them, I "bought into" consumerism. Actually, I had even considered just living with my old glasses for a few more years. But these glasses are simply wrong for my current eyesight, to the point where I can barely function with them. So I am grateful when our system makes available the things we absolutely need, like glasses, clothing and food. My hunch is that the container ships are mostly filled with things that are, by my simple standards, nonessential. And of course, we all have a different definition of "nonessential"... My question for the day might be, what does the Goddess think is essential for human life on earth? Is it found in these container ships?
