Myopia and Wide Open Spaces
Myopia and Wide Open Spaces
How the desert helps me see better
In 2012, we moved from our homestead in the mountain village of Penasco, NM to a rental house in downtown Taos, NM. We moved from a town of 700 people to 17,000, still small but sizable enough. What attracted us to our new home was the backyard. Nothing like the one we had in Penasco on a river with fruit trees, a giant garden and acequia. The new yard was a quarter of the size, but it was beautifully overgrown. Brush and trees towered over the property. An apricot tree larger than I knew could exist took up one corner of the yard. The crab apple tree was perfect shade for my hammock. We took full advantage of the apple and locust trees, adding a tree house, zip line, slack line and tire swing. There was a small field of poppies that made me feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Irises sprung up everywhere. It was overgrown with rose bushes, lilacs and plum trees that were unable to bloom and were only later discovered by accident. I went on to add even more flora to the landscape in the few spots that had sun. In the spring, the yard was pink with falling petals and the tulips and daffodils never failed to show.
There was only one thing missing from our mini landscape, the views. When the sun set, I might have totally missed it except for a glance in the right direction out our front bay window. If there was a rainbow, I had no idea. A meteor shower required us to stand in the road. I only saw clouds loom low over the mountains when I drove my daughter to school in the morning.
This seemed like a small thing, considering how beautiful our yard was and our proximity to the central plaza. We really wanted to be in town after spending six years driving 50-60 minutes over a mountain to run errands and see friends. We wanted to walk places instead. And Taos is the kind of place where there are always mountain views, just driving along the road to the hardware store. There is no shortage of natural beauty.
I want to say here that I tend to be myopic, both literally and figuratively.
For the majority of my life I have not had depth perception. My eyes do not function together to create depth. They do their own separate things and although it's frustrating at times, I have grown to appreciate their independence and tenacity. That is why when I began to lose my farsightedness, it took me several years, about 4, to notice. I thought my inability to see things far away was merely a symptom of missing depth. It became extreme before I was finally blessed with glasses and the beautiful clarity that they bring.
Soon after, I purchased my glasses, my husband discovered me staring up at the mountains and laughed when I said, "You can see everything, every little bump and crevice. I can differentiate the greens and rock and trees." I was amazed. I also realized that the reason I hadn't been recognizing people that I met in the last year was not because I had face blindness as I had claimed or that all pretty blondes looked alike as I joked to get myself off the hook, but I had actual blindness. I still apologized to people now who I bump into for not recognizing them. "I didn't have glasses then," I explain and they pretend to understand.
But I am also myopic in the figurative sense. I do not see the forest for the trees, so to speak. I struggle with the big picture stuff. I become obsessed with the minutiae.
My own self-esteem reflects this. Perhaps I am a perfectionist, but nothing seems to be enough. I struggle to find contentment with the way things are in the moment. I'll focus on mistakes instead of the overall beauty. I'll focus on challenges instead of recognizing my accomplishments. It's a mindset I continue to work to transform.
Fast forward to our recent move onto the Taos mesa on this raised plateau covered in sagebrush where we have no trees but can see 360 degrees in all directions and every window in our house has a view.
My fair olive skin has turned to a rusty olive with no shade to cover me as I work outside shoveling gravel but I can watch the sun traverse the sky. I wake early to the sunrise over the Sangre de Cristos in my bedroom window, bursting the sky into red and orange hues and watch from my kitchen window in the evening as I make dinner, the sun descend behind the gentle sloping horizon.
I hike along the ridge of the Rio Grande Gorge a couple of miles from my house and witness the storm clouds, rainbows and lightening bolts expand across the sky. And when I do, my heart opens as wide as my eyes. My vision expands and suddenly the world is large and what's important becomes clear. Not the little imperfections that I tend to focus on, but this large amazing planet that we all exist among, that connects us all to each other. For an hour or two each day, I can forget the news, the politics, the pandemic, my job, my to-do list, relationship conflicts, hormonal troubles, the laundry and my back pain and feel blessed and joyful to be alive.
For all those years in our other house, I didn't realize we were missing anything. It wasn't until I moved and felt the shift in my spirit that I realized how much my myopia was in dire need of wide open spaces.
