Thanks to everyone who responded to my questions about sight.

This intrigued me because I'm in the process of trying to understand what people do and why, especially as relates to the environment (as many of you have figured out by now)! In these studies I've come to realise that I need to try to understand people's relationships with the environment and other people not through my eyes but through their eyes. Except that some people rely on their hearing! Or their touch. This was what got me thinking... Anyway, your replies confirm what I'd learned from others, especially, of course, as Morning Rain says, how can we even begin to imagine not having all our senses - they all add so much! Like Morning Rain, I've had a few close calls. I also thought I was going to lose the sense of touch in my left hand due to a small fight with an angle grinder (it won), but in fact, I've recovered most of it. This was very worrisome for me as above all else, I'm a musician: I love playing blues and folk music. Nevertheless, five years later, I play less and less because I have the beginnings of an arthritis that slow me down a lot - so I'm very thankful for such wonderful guitarists as "Old Slow Hand" (Eric Clapton for those who don't know), and B. B. King, who proves that a few, brilliantly chosen notes can make a world of a difference. For these reasons, if I had to lose a sense, I would pray that it not be my hearing...

So, not to wish that any of us lose any of the senses, this is what I learned...

Despite being the most ‘popular', sight was the least elaborated, tending towards perceptions that it's absence inhibits one's capacity to function.

Jane, an 82 year old widow, close to the end of a long struggle with lung cancer, chooses sight, which is, for her, essential for communication: "If it were my last sense, I could still give and receive little notes", she says. This aspect of communicative dialogue extends to being able to see the faces of friends, the ocean, trees, or a blue jay looking for food. Without this communication, she would miss more that half "the pleasure of life".

"Reach out, and what you get is more honest that what you see", was an insightful justification for touch. More surprisingly, Sara, a Norwegian painter reflects that without being able to feel the canvas, brushes and paints, she could not be an artist. She often paints with her eyes closed, "to free myself from what I think I see as opposed to what is really there".  

Isabelle, a French teacher, considers the spoken word to be the "soul of society". "If you listen very carefully, the voice cannot deceive", she says. There is a sense of the sacred in sound. We connect with sounds to understand ourselves; we are both a resonance with, and reflection of, these sounds. A Gregorian chant ‘elevates' us to the divine when we open ourselves to its myriad subtle harmonics, she argues. The darkness of a monastery is not to minimise the sense of sight, but to invite us into a total immersion of silence and sound, the sense of the divine, where sound becomes a healing energy, its low frequencies harmonising with the natural vibration of the Earth. "Sound is the heartbeat of the Earth".

Heather, a florist, says that smell immediately "conjures a mental picture... as good as any of the other [senses]". She thinks this is "strange"; perhaps not. It is the smell of the flower, not the shape or colour, which instantly connects her with it. She can work in her garden even with her eyes closed and still smell the divine connection to the earth and what it sustains.

None of our senses provide the whole story: it is through the combination of senses that we construct our environment and our dialogue with it. We experience a multiplicity of realities, different for each of us, yet all equally true; just as I cannot possibly feel an emotion in the same way as someone else, I cannot sense something in the same way. To understand someone's preferred or expressed reliance on a particular sense is to understand that individual's personal connection with what gives him, or her, reason to live. While each sense lacks a total coherence, combined as they are within the human entity, they create a dialogue, true and real. This is how we ‘see' the pain of a fallen tree, ‘hear' the cry of a ravaged Earth, ‘smell' the violence of sufferance, ‘taste' fear... or even ‘touch' the divine.

Peace