On Blindness - I

Oh my friends, so many of us, wonderful talented women all, are so unhappy. Is it our damnable society with its ever-increasing demands, its insidious insistence that we seek out the next and ever better product, activity, or high? What does it take to release ourselves from this? That is my true work now, and I think there is only one way to do it -- to strip everything bare, down to our very souls, and to reconstruct with only the good wood. Perhaps the trick is divining which is which -- the smooth finished mahogony that harbors a termite infestation on the verge of breaking out, or the old knotty pine, well used but solid to its core. Could it be that the trick is simply to take a deep breath and think of the incredible miracle, the minuscule odds, of merely being alive?