Olivia Bardo

ANDREW LELAND HAS been going blind since high school. In college, he was formally diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition. Leland, who is a writer, editor, and educator, named his memoir The Country of the Blind, after the 1904 H.G. Wells short story in which an explorer falls down a mountain and finds himself in a village where everyone is blind. But unlike the explorer, Leland does not experience a rapid descent into blindness. Instead, for decades he has traversed the blurry middle ground of “becoming blind.” He writes, “It’s so much easier to conceive of it as a binary — you’re either blind or you’re not; you see or you don’t.” The Country of the Blind breaks down the binaries of our understanding of blindness and sightedness, and takes us on a personal and historical journey through the culture of blindness.

Blindness has always been a part of my story. My father, who has both retinitis pigmentosa and Coats disease, started to lose his eyesight in his teens and lost almost all of it by the time he was 27. But his world was not lost when blindness set in. Rather, like Leland and others with blindness, his world was still there; he just needed to learn new ways to traverse it. Growing up, I observed my father navigate the world with intention. He chopped firewood to keep us warm in the winter. He identified different denominations of currency by distinctively folding the bills. He carried a special tool to guide his pen when he signed documents.

In the beginning, Ruth Handler created Barbieland. And Ruth said, “Let there be pink,” and there was pink.

WHEN I FINISHED reading Kendall Vanderslice’s By Bread Alone, I went into my kitchen and measured out flour, water, yeast, and salt. I kneaded the dough, let it rise and fall then rise again. Soon, three golden loaves were ready for me to bring to my pastor and his family. Bread connects us to each other and to Jesus. As Vanderslice details in her book, bread is central to the Christian story.

Vanderslice, who holds a master’s in gastronomy from Boston University and a master’s in theological studies from Duke Divinity School, is a professional baker and practical theologian. She seeks to create an eternal communion, much like the “taste of bread lingering on our tongues.”

IN THE DARKNESS, I heard a voice calling my name: “Hi, Olivia.” I couldn’t control my arms and legs enough to acknowledge the voice. Again: “Hi, Olivia.” At this point I was feeling sheepish. Finally, the voice said to me, “Olivia, I think you’re muted. If you want, you can turn your mic on.”

The voice was that of Steven Roberts, who serves as Life.Church’s online host team pastor. I was attending my first church service in the metaverse.

The darkness faded, and I saw the words “Life.Church” written on the face of a computer-simulated grey, black, and white building. I (or rather my avatar) walked through the building doors into a lobby with welcome signs and informational graphics about the mission and history of Life.Church. There was even a game room with a playable pool table and dartboard. I directed my avatar to the sanctuary.

Life.Church is a multicampus church in the Evangelical Covenant Church denomination. Led by Craig Groeschel and based in Edmond, Okla., it has 44 physical locations in the U.S. and has now ventured into the metaverse.

Lessons on life, staying afloat, and 10 articles our editors are reading this week.

In Genesis 2, after spending six days forming the earth, God rests “from all the work,” setting a sacred precedent. In Exodus 20:8-10, God instructs the Israelites to embrace patterns of rest. In Matthew 8:23-26, Jesus rests in a boat during a torrential downpour, despite tides rising and crashing against the boat’s hull, threatening to capsize the passengers. We can take comfort in this: If the son of God needed to take a break every now and then, so do we.

IN OCEAN VUONG'S latest collection Time Is a Mother, the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet reaches for depths of what was lost.

We encounter Vuong submerged in profound and compounding grief after the death of his mother. The book’s epigraph from César Vallejo reads, “Forgive me, Lord: I’ve died so little,” touching on the guilt that can accompany those left behind after a death. These poems hold the tension between looking back and moving forward, with the awareness of someone acquainted with feelings “that made death so large it was indistinguishable / from air,” as Vuong writes in “Not Even.” Those grieving search for comfort, while also examining life before loss—sometimes recognizing that grief was always present.

Time Is a Mother is full of questions that reckon with these past experiences. One of the first poems asks, “How else do we return to ourselves but to fold / The page so it points to the good part.” Other verses ask, “What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?” and “How come the past tense is always longer?”

My favorite place in the Sojourners’ Fellowship house is the chair by the window. Each morning, I tiptoe through the dark house, flip on a lamp, and turn on the kettle. I center myself in the lingering darkness of the previous night.

Novelist Edwidge Danticat expressed a similar sentiment in Create Dangerously, her 2010 memoir about making art in exile. Reflecting on the aftermath of the earthquake that had struck her home country of Haiti that year, she wrote, “I did what I always do when my own words fail me. I read.” We share this human practice of story sharing and story seeking. Danticat writes of her “desire to tell some of [her] stories in a collaged manner, to merge [her] own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others.” Through the transformative power of creating and remembering, we connect to the threads of humanity, discovering the woven patterns that are formed through our stories.