The Queen's Eyesight and BODY MEMOIRS

The Queen realizes that without regular contact with the King she experiences a great deal of anxiety. That aloneness overwhelms her. That’s why she has the Queen’s Court. Who is there for her? This community and connection with others is so essential to her well being. To share in life and be intimate and care for one another -- friends, family, neighbors. It really does take a village, and what really is missing in the Queen's life is a village. The King sent her pictures of Italian Plazas with people congregating for no other purpose than to congregate and EXIST rather than to purchase something and go home alone and consume it in front of a glowing TV shrine with flickering Gods and Goddesses programming them about what to purchase and consume next. The Queen yearns for plazas and her soul yearns to start gardening again and eating with the village people. Yes, she’ d really like that.


I was reflecting on my eyes last night. I am so left-eye dominant, even though I am right-handed. The right eye is significantly poorer in sight. I photograph with my left eye and take pictures with my right hand. Inwardly I see my left half of my body lighter and brighter, and the right side dark and more gross and unaware, more solid. I lay in bed last night with my left arm over my left eye. I used to be the opposite, my entire life. I'd spend a lot of my time looking with just that left eye!

My left eye is smaller than the right, a little droopy. My daughter has the same characteristic and has been going through special education testing. She’s had trouble reading and writing despite intervention the past three years. Although as a child I excelled at reading and writing, I continued to fail math. I realize that I have the same problems as hers. Could the eyes be key to this issue?

We don't learn by auditory alone and we have poor short-term memory. It’s hard for her to grasp syntax and thus read and write. She is getting the info real fast, but processing it and understanding it are hindered. She is very visual.

I heard Carl Jung had the same problem with math. Are we so far into the right brain that we are in danger of falling into and being swallowed up by the unconscious? Like Pollack and Plath? I find it no small coincidence that Jung’s Red Book is being published now. Indeed, Mythic Yoga is an intuitive and collective grasp into his thinking and experience and is a continuation of his work, without my having ever been fully educated about his work beforehand. I have been a hobbyist Jungian ever since my psychology 101 class at CU Boulder.

I will be working on developing my right vision more. What is the story behind it? As a child growing up in the 70s, my six-years older sister, Nancy, wore glasses and hated them. I did palming exercises with her. By sixth grade I purposely flunked the eye exam so that I could get glasses. But then by junior high school I was so self-conscious and wanting to be pretty I stopped wearing them and couldn’t see the leaves on the trees anymore. It was just a Monet blur. But I could read so that was OK and in school I just squinted to see the blackboard by putting my index fingers to the edges of my eyes and slanting them Chinese-style.

I suffered through contact lenses into adulthood, having gotten some at age 16 and was amazed I could see the leaves on trees again. In my young adulthood I developed a conjunctivitis disease in which I could no longer wear soft lenses, because I slept in them so much. I endured the pain and irritation that comes with wearing hard contact lenses when of dust and dirt slip in. When my husband was still alive, I had Federico Peña help me search the dark floor of our box seats at the Pepsi Center during a Disney On Ice show of the Little Mermaid for a popped-out contact lens. I’m sure I was rubbing my eye or sucking on the lens moments before because of irritation, watching the show with one blurry eye.

I read Aldous Huxley’s book about his healing his eyes, and had prayed as a child that one day my eyes would be healed. I did eye exercises, palming. I wonder if my eyesight was an unwillingness to see the world ahead of me. Not to see the clutter and squalor and emotional chaos that was my childhood home. If I have a headache I focus on the eyes where a lot of tension occurs and make them relax deeply.

I remember when I had Lasik surgery on my eyes. I was told I had such extreme stigmatism that it would take longer with the laser cutting in my eye. I remember the smell of my eye under the laser. I remember the healing, protective eye gear during sleeping and around my then 1-year-old daughter.

Just yesterday while snuggling with my daughter she looked up at me and said, “I can see your third eye,” and she pointed right in the middle of my forehead. I had never spoken to her about that before until she said that, and I explained what the third eye was. I swear she has psychic abilities. We’ve played games where she guesses exactly what you were thinking. And a few days ago I was trying to place a movie actress and couldn’t verbalize it but had a picture of Sandra Bullock in my inner body. She said, “The lady in the Miss Congeniality movie.”


My daughter is getting the great team of educational help she needs. Yet the transition has been hard on her. She came to bed with me last night and cried how much she missed Creekside, her old school. She missed Lindsey, the after-school computer club teacher. How perfect I had childcare every day after school until 5 there, I also lamented. She misses her friends and knew everybody there. At the new school she likes her teacher a lot but is slow to find friends in established groups. I agonize with her all over again as I remembered my childhood experience of feeling on the outside. That deep emotional inferiority that arises. To really trust the self and have confidence. Sounds like I need to do a little yoga practice to affirm this new belief and myth in my life. To trust the self and remember my value and worth as a human being.

I told my daughter that her old school she wasn’t getting her educational needs met, as there were a lot of kids there not getting their needs met. How important it is that she must learn. And learn now. I must say it’s a disgrace that the children at lower-income schools don’t get the help they need like my daughter is at the high-income school. Such a disgrace. I had a dream once when I still lived in Arvada, because the local school had poor test scores. The poor woman in front of the school said, “What about my son? Doesn’t he have the right to education too?”
And as I teeter on the edge financially myself, is my child to be labeled poor and suddenly undeserving of education after falling through the monetary floor during the recession? The poor neighborhoods very well shortly be flooding the streets and starting a revolution, demanding health care and education for children as a focus of priority in this country and the world.

As I get ready to leave for Pine Ridge and a long week of travel, I must remember this. We shall see.