It was like a sea made of fur as Lisa placed her feet into her fluffy slippers, waiting for her on the floor alongside her bed, where she leaves them every night. She walks the same number of steps from her bed to her kitchen, making all the turns as she does every morning. She hears the humming of her fridge, waiting to offer her the ingredients she needs to make her daily breakfast burrito. She hears the sizzling of her coffee machine as it makes her hot cup of caramel coffee as it has been programmed to do for the last couple of years. She smells the laundry detergent emanating from her clean load, waiting for her to take them out of the dryer. She can feel her kitchen, living room, appliances — her house — functioning for her, rather than feeling disabled in her own home. Lisa describes it as an entity; as her beautiful, safe space. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, its in the hands of the beholder — it’s how we handle and perceive the beauty of the world around us, rather than how we see it. If the eye’s powers are appreciated by science [and normalized by society], so too are its limitations. Philosophers currently debate about whether sensory qualities are better explained in physicalist terms, or as a state of mind, less defined as a property of an object. Lisa describes her blindness as an essential aspect of the way she senses the world around her. “It is not about whether I can see that object, but rather how I can hear, smell, feel, and use that object for myself. I am not a victim of my own blindness and do not need to bend over backwards to accommodate the normalized seeing world.” 

1. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. University of California Press, 1993.

2. Barwich, Ann-Sophie. “A Sense So Rare: Measuring Olfactory Experiences and Making a Case for a Process Perspective on Sensory Perception.” Biological Theory, vol. 9, no. 3, 2014, pp. 258–268., doi:10.1007/s13752-014-0165-z.