Image

Eye of Maria Miles Heyward, ca 1802, Edward Green Malbone via The Met

Mum always said sin enters through the eyes the quickest.

And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire.

Matthew 18:9

Much has been written about our visually saturated culture. At night I feel the irresistible pull of my little pocket screen. I sit huddled with a baby, international borders closed to me - heck, any travel is banned for me for rest or recreation - and I witness perfect bodies in Mykonos, fashionable youth, dazzling art, travel. I scroll through images of everything that I was once welcome to taste. 

Every cup I had; I drank from deeply. 

I loved foreign sun on my body.

Pluck out my eyes rather than have a jab and belong to it all again. Is that what I need to do? 

Anna Akhmatova said that she survived the Soviet Union because she was phlegmatic. That strategy doesn't work here. Either you buy into this new reality, or you resist. You can't simply continue to exist.

* * * * * *

I imagined this house. I conjured it from my visions. I wanted to pull bread out of the oven, bread shaped by my own hands. I wanted to slow down.

Tender young souls see this house - my life, the forest, the romance, the children, and they want to be homemakers, to sew and garden and home-school.

My hands are cracked from cold, skin splits. 

Our labours are not how we dreamed. A cut, or antibiotics, or being induced too. 

I don't have perfect anything and neither do the people on my little pocket screen. 

It all tears and wears. It's all just things they bought with their bodily autonomy.

Just images to resist.