“Open your Eyes” Jim Dubinsky, published in CT

In her essay "Seeing," Annie Dillard tells an anecdote of newly sighted patients, blinded

from birth, who have had cataract operations that restored their sight. Contrary to what you

may expect – that the experience of finally seeing after many years of blindness will be a

beautiful and almost ecstatic one – some of these patients find the "tremendous size of the

world" oppressing, and it may take weeks, months, and even years to adjust to the dramatic

increase in stimuli; some even choose to “lose” or not make use of their newly acquired sense.

For them, seeing is traumatic: what they see doesn’t match what they had imagined.

While few of us will ever experience such a dramatic change in sense perception in our

lives, many of us may encounter moments when, in William Wordsworth’s words, the “world is

too much with us.” Wordsworth’s sonnet is a work of art, but it is also an admonishment and

perhaps a request for us to return to common sense or to use our senses more fully and for very

different purposes. He follows the opening words with others that are equally relevant and

powerful: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste

our powers; / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid

boon!” In this opening stanza, Wordsworth suggests that when we focus on the material, when

we spend too much time “getting and spending,” we lose both our ability to “see” and our

hearts; our emotional and perhaps spiritual connection to others and to the world around us is

“given away.”

In the past two weeks, two new staff members of the Center for Student Engagement

and Community Partnerships (CSECP)—both AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers—have written

articles for the CT. In those articles Alexia Edwards and Tara Milligan outlined some of the work

they are doing in the New River Valley and presented opportunities for interested people to get
involved, to put aside “getting and spending” and connect with and to others through

volunteerism. My hope is that many of you who read this paper will take a moment to pause

and realize how easy it can be to be blind to or to lose sight of the world around you, a world

that is far larger and often more complicated and oppressive than the cocoon that you can build

while living on the Virginia Tech campus or even in Blacksburg. If there is any doubt, simply take

a ride to Pulaski, Martinsville or Danville, a ride to visit towns in Virginia where the economic

downturn has left many people out of work and resulted in true hardship for families. Re-read

last week’s essay by Tara about families facing impossible choices concerning how to use their

limited funds. You do not have to travel to Haiti or to the Sudan to find poverty or hardship.

You can find it right here. Even in Blacksburg there are hundreds of homeless children, a fact

that many may find nearly impossible to believe. But, as New River Family Shelter Director Carol

Johnson says, "Our homeless population looks different. It's not as visible because you don't see

a lot of people living on the street."

One of our missions at CSECP is to work in partnership with organizations such as the

YMCA at VT, NRV Cares, New River Community Action (NRCA), Second Harvest, the

Christiansburg Institute, and New River Family Shelter to “see” the needs in our community that

are not easily visible and then work with students, staff, and faculty who have the talent, time,

and energy to address those needs. Sometimes I’ve found that seeing isn’t easy; it is, as Dillard

speaks of nature, “very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair.” Our eyes are not

accustomed to notice the signs of rural poverty or homelessness. We need a guide, which is an

important role the nonprofit organizations play. But usually, in my experience, with just a bit of

guidance, the veils over our eyes lift quickly, and we start to focus on obligations to fellow

human beings and to society.

But focusing on obligations and acting (in word or deed) often require time or
assistance. Late in her essay, Dillard explains that at first most of the “newly sighted” do not

perceive shadows and spatial relationships; they only experience patches of color. And, with the

sight of colors and shapes also comes the requirement to learn a new vocabulary before they

can articulate what they see in terms that are understandable to the sighted. In essence, they

not only need to learn to see, they also need to learn to verbalize what they see. Such a

process takes time, and for those patients who are not overwhelmed, the world can be a truly

beautiful place, which when seen and described by them might “teach us how dull is our own

vision.”

At CSECP, we encourage you to enter very different environments and gaze upon

everything as someone newly sighted, so that you may see, with clarity, what is possible. With

possibility comes hope and growth. As Alexander Pope, a 17 th century English poet, once said:

“This kind, this due degree / Of blindness, weakness. Heav’n bestows on thee. / Submit—In this,

or any other sphere.” If you recognize your “blindness, weakness” and submit to it through the

“operation” of higher education, you may become “newly sighted.” If you do, my hope is that

you will not refuse your new vision, but instead be astonished by what you see, and be both

willing to learn a new vocabulary so that you can share what you see with others and to give

yourselves over to acting on what you see. In so doing, you would be acting in concert with a

key principle of our university expressed through “Ut Prosim – That I may serve.” Our motto is

much more than words; it is an expression of commitment, an invitation to a way of being, an

opportunity to acknowledge that service is a privilege, a gift we receive, not give to others.