“This has been a Braille year” Alice said as I braided her hair. I leaned in, looking at her face. I worked as a volunteer at the convalescent home where Alice lived, and with the acceptance that sometimes comes with youth and old age, we had stepped into each others lives and quickly adapted to intimate moments, like my braiding her hair as she sat on her bed in her nightdress. I searched her face, her hands covered her ears, and moved to cover her eyes, as if she did not want to see, but Alice was blind. I was too young to think to ask what happened, to ask for her story, when or how she had become blind, how she had lived her life. But she did tell me what she meant that day. She said her son had passed away six months ago today, that she had outlived her only child, the contract was broken unexpectedly; he was supposed to outlive her. She had not spoken much in the two months I had known her, but I understood then why she had been so quiet. Today he should have been bringing her flowers (it was the weekend of Mother’s Day), he should be alive, calling her every week to see how she was doing, even paying for her living in the home, like a lot of the kids did. The Braille year was one in which she felt there were no words to say out loud, no words that could touch the experience, call it mourning, grief. She took my hand and asked me to sit with her, she said, "Though I feel lonely or isolated at times, I pray in the silence before breakfast, it's the time I feel at peace". I have always remembered that.
This has been my braille year. I often feel I'm living backwards, something always seemed to relate to something that happened before; my words had too much context, an overload that blinded me. How can I renew my relationship to the world, and feel again out of the darkness of my own Braille year? In my Braille year I can only reach forward and feel what’s right in front of me: the laundry needs doing, I’m about to run out of gas. I do not want words either, they are paper maps, I long for silence, for the no word world.
It is the practice of meditation that has saved me in my Braille year. Sitting in meditation, in the quiet before breakfast, I feel the mystery that underlies all of life. I hear the sound of joy buzzing in the very air, and despite all of the suffering, I know the nature of life is inherently blissful, and meditation allows that flower to unfold in the mind, it awakens the sleeping soul. The silence before breakfast is often the best part of my day, the part that cultivates the most important thing in my life, the connection to my own spirit and soul.
