You know, last I heard about him, things didn’t sound so good - that from several years back, though. I hope his circumstances turned around. In the meanwhile, if I hear something new, I’ll post it here. He definitely played a huge role in making my vision improvement possible.

Thanks again Brian, wherever you find yourself.

A toast to seeing the moons of Jupiter, in the not too far off future! Exciting. It still makes me laugh; as the Tradition Chinese Medicine types say:

One disease, Long Life
No disease, Short Life

Long life to the eyeballs!

A couple of things.

I think the looking-through-eyelashes thing runs on the same principle as pinhole glasses: it cuts out extraneous light rays to make the image that much sharper. I used to do the same thing by making a pinhole with my almost-closed fist.

“What are the limits of human vision?” Dr. Bates reported a girl who was able to see the moons of Jupiter with her naked eye! But when confronted with a school subject she hated (I think it was math), she became myopic.

I’ve also seen a connection between a willingness to grieve wounds on my part (tears), and the ability of my eyes to recover from chronic dryness (lack of tears). Everything seems connected, working this muscle works that muscle over there, bringing back unexpected gifts of ability, capacity, strength.

Interesting. I’ve been saving the Big Grief Project for a while now, and still have a strong tendency to power through my wounds, sometimes without even acknowledging them until after (a large, weepy blister still on the palm of my hand a week after somewhat overenthusiastic use of a digging stick attests to this…) ‘Dry eyes’ was my first complaint to the optometrist back in the day, not ‘blurred vision’ or ‘lack of focus’. Maybe I was trying to tell him that I’d not been able to cry since around the age of 12. But the message didn’t get across: grief doesn’t sell prescription lenses!

I used to have a myspace headline which read “America’s Foremost Indoorsman”.

Haha - nice coincidence. I’m getting the feeling it’s time to move on from that though - narrows down my options a bit, doncherknow Wilco on the skies, though they’d clouded up a bit by the time I got round to posting that.

cheers
Ian

I mentioned in the podcast, that this particular vision training method probably best served those with a similar lifestyle to mine, for the exact reasons you mention; diet plays a role, stress plays a role, following your heart plays a role, actually wanting to see plays a role.

I don’t think I mentioned in the podcast - I’ve also seen a connection between a willingness to grieve wounds on my part (tears), and the ability of my eyes to recover from chronic dryness (lack of tears). Everything seems connected, working this muscle works that muscle over there, bringing back unexpected gifts of ability, capacity, strength.

All in all, an exhilarating, terrifying, life-affirming adventure. Nice to have your company! Say high to those blue English skies for me.

p.s. I used to have a myspace headline which read “America’s Foremost Indoorsman”. Funny to see your “rugged indoorsman” moniker! Too cool.

Thanks for this. I have a similar history of late-onset myopia and only started wearing glasses toward the end of my teens. Funny you should mention inner city schools, as I was also struggling with a similarly disorienting ‘transplant’ to the one you describe - from posher, more middle-class suburban surroundings to decidedly meaner streets - at the time, and I eventually recognised that, along with the physical ‘disorder’, on a different level I needed these little squares of glass, or something, any barrier to hide behind in everyday social interactions. So it delighted me to hear that somebody else understands this as a valid, storied reaction to unavoidable circumstances - our bodies self-preserving by dulling sight to things that cause us great pain to see.

I think there’s a whole topic of ‘rewilding eyesight’ in here. The Wikepedia article on myopia comes with this tantalising paragraph:

One 2002 article suggested that myopia may be caused by over-consumption of bread in childhood, or in general by diets too rich in carbohydrates, which can lead to chronic hyperinsulinemia.

… and links to an old BBC article where we hear that:

Short-sightedness has been shown to progress more slowly in children whose protein consumption is increased.

But they point to trends seen in Inuit and Pacific Island populations.

Under 1% had myopia, or short-sightedness early in the last century.

Rates are now as high as 50%.

The increase has been linked to literacy and compulsory schooling leading to an increase in reading. […]

But the researchers putting forward the starch theory say focussing on reading does not explain why the levels of short-sightedness are low in societies that have adopted Western lifestyles but not Western diets.

Studies in animals are now planned by the team.

Loren Cordain. an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University, said: “In the islands of Vanuatu they have eight hours of compulsory schooling a day.

“Yet the rate of myopia in these children is only 2%.”

He said the difference was that Vanuatuans ate fish, yam and coconut rather than white bread and cereals.

As well as benefits possibly linked to the Paleo diet (and, having managed to wean myself off milk, I still eat way too much white bread and other grain-based produce), I’ve found that fox-walking also profoundly affects the way I look at things: without the *clump* *clump* *clump* of heels going down and sending shockwaves all up the body it seems my eyes don’t have to put a renewed effort after every footfall to readjust their focus. This leaves them free to wander in a way that allows a steadier kind of attention on my surroundings. It’s like I can look at an object and feel it pull me forward towards it on a constant, steady thread of curiosity and through layers of progressive satisfaction before spotting the next thing down the trail: a whole new way of being drawn through the landscape. Perhaps this could tell us something more about how to relate to that landscape so we don’t turn it into something from which we have to forever avert our gaze (and something about how this sorry, sensorially deprived state of affairs came about in the first place…)

This stuff excites me. Your idea of a journey from Myopic to Hawk-eye reminds me of something I got from reading one of Ran’s old essays - that we, as members of a culture that has purposefully forgotten everything about what it’s like to be a human being, have the delicious opportunity to relearn - in full consciousness and from the ground up - all the wonderful potentialities of our species: like replaying our own evolution!

Right, that’s enough for now. Off into the hills with me - England’s skies haven’t looked so blue in a long time

Ian