Being in the blind community, I’m often told to continue doing what I love to do. Just do it differently. Hearing that mantra hitches on to the ‘old school’ mottos of ‘get yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again’. Those youthful jingles sometimes push us, sometimes encourage and sometimes bite.

With years of High Sierra hiking under my belt I went to Nature to understand how to carry on with my passions in the face of dramatic changes to my abilities. I now hear, ‘look at the creek racing down the mountain. Last year in a massive storm with high winds, a blow down’ of a tree community clogged the creek’s path with debris of loose rock, dirt and branches. What did the creek do? No pondering or hand ringing. The creek kept moving, right? Or, in this case, the creek made a pond and then flowed over the top of the debris.

One of my struggles in adapting my baking style is the rhythm of my moves about the kitchen. Flowing from recipe to gathering and measuring ingredients to mixing and baking. with much experience a cadence develops and is memorized by my soul. In my blood in other words. With low vision the rhythm has slowed and the cadence revised through new steps taken to ensure I’ve not missed an important point in a recipe or that I’ve measured correctly, gathered all the ingredients, mixed just right and baked to perfection.

In conversation, the creek changed its rhythm, adding steps: a pond, overflow over a dam. As an ancient example I tingle realizing the connections as I stand in a fast current in a wild river casting a fly to a spot behind a large boulder. Because I walk the river understanding better its features. Its riffles, eddies, pools and all the rest. The understanding that change is forever and my changes in vision and body function are simple and natural and I must simply let loose and be in my flow. as it changes throughout the length of a river, of a life.