We deafies are often referred to as “people of the eye” because we seek and gain information in life mainly through a visual mode rather than an auditory one. Whether we have some residual hearing or not, most of us are primarily visual learners with eyes fine-tuned to detail — details such as facial expressions, hands, words, pace, distance, environment, breath, or the myriad of shades and colors within the world around us.

Lately, there has been a plethora of artistic and poetic expressions up on DeafRead, Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere by people of the eye — those within the d/Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Late-Deaf and Deaf-Blind community, the latter being people of the inner-eye. There have been ASL Poems on vlogs, written poems about ASL on blogs, ASL music with lyrics that express what lies deeply in our hearts, and photographs that glisten the eye and stir the soul.

There is even a blog entitled “People of the Eye,” written by Patti Durr, a hard of hearing Associate Professor in the Cultural and Creative Studies Department at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, whose stories and comments I always find rather profound. Patti’s most recent v/blog celebrates the creative ASL wordsmithery of Laurent Clerc, as well as her own colorful creation, inspired by Clerc’s bi-bi message, which she painted on an old window as a form of creative or poetic self-expression.

By now, some of you are aware that I have been posting a colorful blog each Monday. For the last 5 weeks, I’ve chosen a creative way to express the gift of my eyes and my love of words by paying tribute to a different color. Using colorful images and my own wordsmithery to bring out the color’s unique essence, I am able to share my visual-detailed world from my own creative point of view. I love photography, light, shades and color as much as I love writing, so this project, like those of other poetic deafies lately, has been tremendously enjoyable for me (even if my Mondays of Color posts do not always make it on the front page of DeafRead.)

The photos I post are carefully selected from Flickr, and are among the most interesting and most inspiring to me. The photos I choose often deeply touch my spirit, and I’m hoping you’ll find them moving as well. So far I have paid homage to Blue, Orange, Brown and Green. (Click those links to take a peek if you haven’t already.) I will continue my Mondays of Color until the last Monday in December of 2007. I call this project: The Eye of my Heart — a play on words from the title of my blog.

This week, I pay tribute to Black & White. But wait… are black and white colors? It depends on how you look at things…

When you look at these pictures, what pops out to your eye first? The black? The white? Or can you see the million shades of grey? How about the yellows, blues, purples and pinks?

How is it possible that black and white photos can hold so many different colors? It’s a mystery… just like Life…

Life is not merely black or white, right or wrong, deaf or hearing, dark or light… Life is full of diversity and color, even in the darkest, bleakest or brightest of times. We just have to look for the myriad of shades and possibilities in between the lines, and all around the edges of our days.

We just need to look at the situations and circumstances of life in a different way, from a different angle. We need to look at things, ideas, and people beneath the surface, for there is always something precious and luminescent beyond what the eye can see. Just as The Little Prince says, “One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

Try closing your eyes. The colors of the world might go dry momentarily, but within seconds, you’ll probably begin to see a rainbow of colors behind those thin, kaleidoscopic lids. We not only need to open our eyes to the hidden details of our world, but also open our minds to see how deeply beautiful and wonderfully, colorfully diverse the faces and places in our lives really are!

Posted by LaRonda on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 5:29 am.