假的眼睛

I opened my eyes to a pink dawn today.  Yesterday it was a blinding yellow.  Each time morning comes it looks a little bit different.  I was throwing away my old contact lenses today, and replacing them with new when I thought about all that these lenses have seen.  It hasn't been a remarkable length of time since I first bonded with this particular pair of synthetic eyes but they've experienced so much.  I probably remember less than 10% of the wonders they captured and funneled into the sensors inside my head—then I threw them away.

These contacts were the first object to receive the light rays when I saw my sister for the first time in a year.  They flooded with tears when we summited Mount Antero together, as we thought about the day, 3 years earlier, when we'd stood on top with our brother.  They watched as clouds hovered, and gathered, and threatened to wipe us off the earth with their fury.  They wondered at the rainbow that completely encircled the sun like a halo.  They were still and silent as a herd of 23 mountain goats passed in front of them on the wisp of a trail overlooking our camp.

The most remarkable change in my eyesight comes--not from a new pair of contacts, but from the paradigm shift from behind.  These contacts didn't aid directly in that change, but they were witness to the constantly evolving that takes place in determining my perspective.  Every day I discover that something that I thought was black or white is actually grey.  I learn that from someone else's point of view, my way looks terribly wrong.  I learn that my eyes can make mistakes, and that things aren't always as clear as they seem.

Soon my contacts will be in a landfill somewhere, no longer enabling me to see.  But the changes that have taken place while they were with me will remain, and I'll remember what I learned with their help.  I can close my eyes and recall the exact color of terror the sky turned as the wind whipped a storm out of nothing high in Colorado.  I'll remember the sunlight on the note we left for Clifford as I folded it and put it in the register on top of 14,269 feet of rock and dirt.  I'll know that there is beauty on this earth and it's there for a reason.

Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now.

-Bob Dylan