#WQWWC – #Writers Quote Wednesday Writers Challenge – “Faith”

by

Faith

BEACON

Imagine a world where you are trapped in a soundproof box with no light.

You learn what fingers are by feeling your own.  You recognize the sensation of a foreign hand around your arm, never knowing when that hand is going to grasp you, push you…strike you.

Imagine never knowing what is out there touching you, or why? For a person of lesser strength, those are the seeds of insanity.  

You learn to recognize “outdoors” by the sun’s warmth on your face, a breeze flowing by, the scent of flowers, the touch of odd veins on a leaf, and the wiggle of grass under your feet.  Wood burning, a hard floor, bumping into tables and chairs are a signal that you are indoors.

You can smell food, learning the scent is oatmeal.  Mushy.  You recognize the scent of different meats roasting in an oven.  Chewy.   You learn to stay away from the hot of a stove or fire and feel for the sensation of wool to wrap around you when you’re cold.

For one such person, she learned how to tell when someone was coming toward her by the vibration of footsteps.  She learned to understand language through signs on her hand and listen to voices by touching her fingers to the speaker’s lips.  And she became a writer capable of describing that which the eyes could not see and the ears could not hear.

But how do you learn to write if you don’t understand the meaning of words such as;  is,  am, were, the, which, or shall…the glue words that hold together a sentence?  

How do you express the concepts of color, bright, light, dark when their absence is all you know?

From Wikipedia: Helen Keller 1912

Helen Keller achieved that in the quote I chose to write about.  

Ms. Keller described the first time she understood an abstract concept.  She was learning how to string beads in a sequence, making one error after another:

        “Finally I noticed a very obvious error in the sequence and for an instant I concentrated my attention on the lesson and tried to think how I should have arranged the beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, “Think.”
         In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea.”

Brilliance is the potential to understand concepts greater than yourself. The faith that helped her accomplish it is what makes Helen Keller stand as a beacon to humanity. She is proof that we can overcome preconceptions and achieve so much more than our senses are capable of perceiving.

© Joelle LeGendre

 

 

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