The Vanishing Point and the "Blind Curve:" Exploring Cousins Island After the Vernal Equinox

On perspective, unexpected sightings, and what waits just past the visible edge

The recent vernal equinox has turned our attention to the way spring changes what comes into view. Light falls differently and familiar routes shift. A path we know by heart can suddenly direct us elsewhere. Sometimes that altered line leads beyond disruption and into recognition, generosity, and small but unmistakable signs of connection along the roadside.

From Madeleine Point, the dock becomes a study in perspective, a straight line leading into distance, where sight narrows but the world goes on.

Cousins Island after the equinox: what entered the frame

This past week, the trails to the north on Cousins Island were closed to protect the tender ground from overuse. That small interruption changed the shape of my runs. Instead of turning north as I often do, I headed south.

On one intersecting road, I passed a red box holding books from the Little Free Library. I loved the generosity of it: a trailside shelf for story, exchange, and chance encounter. The island neighborhood trusted that someone passing by might retrieve a volume and carry it forward.

Beside the road, this small library held more than books. It offered a different type of perspective: that what is passed along can keep traveling long after we leave it behind.

On the next intersecting road, I found this weathered sign, as if to emphasize the intentions of the island inhabitants.

Seen again and again along the altered route, this roadside heart gathered meaning through repetition, bright against the muted edge of early spring.

Farther down, at the turnaround point near the end of the Westside Trail, I reached a memorial plaque that read “David Adams: Friend of the West Side Trail from Beginning to End.” I had seen his name there before, mounted on a bench, but it had slipped from memory. Encountering it again at the end of those southward runs brought it back with unusual force. My father and I (both family physicians practicing in the greater Portland area) knew David well. He had been a cardiologist with deep roots in Maine, and Cousins Island specifically; a man honored for his volunteerism and for his work with Physicians for Social Responsibility. He was also a kind man for whom our shared patients had much respect. He died just over a decade ago, yet seeing his name again drew him so sharply into the present that the intervening years thinned almost to nothing.

That turnaround surprised me the first time I reached it this week. I usually run north. This southern endpoint, though not unknown to me, felt newly visible because I was now arriving there every day rather than only occasionally.

Once I had reached that turnaround and started northward again, this time along the streets of Cousins Island toward Madeleine Point, I noticed a sign on a tree that read, “Blind Curve.”

I have been to Madeline Point countless times. I knew there was a blind curve there. Yet the sign itself seemed new to me, or at least newly noticed. That was part of what made it arresting. The words carried more weight than a simple roadside warning. I remember thinking, as I had on an earlier run, that I knew perfectly well the road continued beyond what I could see. The curve was not the end of the road; it was only the end of the visible portion. Even so, there is something about the moment when a road slips from sight that can stir uncertainty in the body, even when the mind knows better.

Seen in the context of this week’s rerouted runs, the sign gathered the whole sequence into a single image. Books shared without ceremony. A remembered life at the trail’s end. A route altered by necessity. A road bending out of sight. A red heart passed again and again until it began to feel less like decoration than emphasis. What lay beyond the expected line had not been emptiness. It had been presence.

Coastal Rivers Walking Trail by

Jane Dahmen

Vanishing point: where sight narrows, but the road goes on

In art and design, the vanishing point marks the place where lines appear to meet at the horizon. It arranges depth. It steadies composition. It tells the eye where distance tightens.

It also tempts us toward a false conclusion.

When lines gather in the far field, the mind can read that narrowing as an ending. Yet the vanishing point does not record the end of the road. It records the limit of sight from one particular place.

That distinction feels essential.

A curve that blocks visibility tells the truth about vision: from where you stand, you cannot see what comes next. It tells only part of the truth about the road itself. The road continues. Sometimes it carries difficulty. Sometimes it yields something unexpectedly welcome, something worth seeing for the first time or seeing once more with changed eyes.

The vanishing point is not an ending. It is merely the place where visibility gives out.

“The place where your vision ends may be the place where possibility begins.”

Getting Reoriented: when the visible edge is not the whole story

That reflection kept circling me back to our recent Radio Maine solo episode, Getting Reoriented.

There are periods when nothing is obviously wrong, yet something no longer fits. The days still move. Obligations are still met. Work still gets done. Beneath that surface, however, a quieter truth begins to press forward: the inner line has shifted.

The vanishing point offers a useful image for that experience. We assume we are reading the whole road when we may be seeing only the nearest stretch. Blur can masquerade as finality. Limited sight can harden into certainty if we are not careful.

“Getting reoriented doesn’t mean starting over. It means checking in.”

I see this often in medicine. People will say, “I don’t feel like myself,” even when familiar measurements suggest stability. Their lab results and body metrics might look fine. To the person in front of me, something central has drifted out of alignment nonetheless. It was our responsibility, together, to ask the right questions and better understand how to reorient toward wellness.

Leadership and perspective: each person carries a different horizon

This matters in leadership because no one enters a shared moment from the same place.

Each person carries a past, a present condition, and some sketch of a hoped-for future. One person attends to the immediate foreground. Another remains braced inside an earlier loss. Another has already fixed their gaze on a distant possibility others cannot yet make out.

Leadership falters when we mistake our own vanishing point for everyone else’s.

What looks like hesitation may be context. What resembles resistance may arise from grief, exhaustion, or a different relationship to risk. What seems self-evident from one angle may remain obscured from another.

Good leadership asks for patience, curiosity, and the discipline to ask what another person can see from where they stand. Some of the most consequential turns in my own leadership life have come not through grand pronouncements, but through recalibration: slowing the pace, widening the conversation, and returning to purpose before pressing ahead.

Photo by Sean Thomas

Off the Wall: David Moser and the shaping of form

The vanishing point has also been in my mind while reflecting on Portland Art Gallery sculptor David Moser’s work in this week’s Off the Wall feature, Form in Motion.

Artists know that finished form often conceals long labor. A line that appears inevitable may have emerged through revision, restraint, and repeated return. David’s movement from furniture into sculpture carries that rigor. He studies posture, surface, and weight. He works until form begins to hold more than structure alone.

“I am first an artist; I see the potential in all material things and coax form from the innocuous.”
David Moser, Off the Wall

That sentence reaches well beyond the studio. It speaks to how we shape a life, a practice, a relationship, a community. Much of what matters begins in rougher outlines than we would prefer. What appears unfinished may simply be waiting for the right angle of view.

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Radio Maine: seeing value where others pass by

Another version of that truth surfaced in my recent Radio Maine conversation with John Kuehnle of Partners for World Health.

Partners for World Health collects surplus medical supplies and equipment and redistributes them locally and globally to people, communities, and health care facilities in need. They uncover worth that was present all along, though not fully recognized.

“You have to be patient focused and you need to put the client and the patient at the center of everything you do, and then you build a system around the patient or the client.”
John Kuehnle, Radio Maine

Vision is never purely visual. It also shapes judgment, care, inclusion, and responsibility.

A Healthy Conversation: trauma and the inner blind curve

This week on A Healthy Conversation we focused on post-traumatic stress and trauma, drawing on Dr. Jeff Barkin’s experience as a psychiatrist and my own work as a family and integrative physician.

Trauma changes the inner horizon. It influences what feels safe, what feels reachable, and how far ahead a person can look. An ordinary bend in the road can feel loaded with danger when the nervous system has learned to brace before the turn arrives.

My conversation with co-host Jeffrey Barkin MD DLFAPA about trauma and post-traumatic stress required context, clinical understanding, steadiness, and respect for the ways earlier experience continues to contour present life.

That is part of why I return to a line from another recent episode with a Maine gubernatorial candidate on A Healthy Conversation:

“Everybody has to be engaged for the community to work.”
Hannah Pingree, A Healthy Conversation

Healing does not happen alone. Neither do community resilience, wise governance, or meaningful public life. We need language strong enough to hold complexity and clear enough to support movement.

Perspective by Allen Bunker

Radio Maine Live: Emergence and Light

I’m looking forward to Radio Maine Live on April 16, centered on Emergence and Light, because the evening will gather people whose work helps us see how form, meaning, and connection emerge over time.

I’m also glad to share here, for the first time, three of the panelists and former Radio Maine guests who will help shape that evening’s conversation: Dr. Emily Isaacson, artistic director of Classical Uprising, whose work reimagines classical performance as a more collaborative, democratic, and deeply social artistic experience; Heather Shields, island-born real estate leader and longtime community-builder, who understands Maine not only as a market, but as a place where belonging, beauty, and human connection shape how people want to live; and Dr. Deirdre Heersink, board-certified family medicine physician and medical director specializing in post-acute and long-term care, whose work restoring life stories to elders reminds us that health care is not only about needs and diagnoses, but about identity, dignity, and being truly known.

Together, our panelists bring music, community, and medicine into the same frame, which seems appropriate for a conversation about emergence, light, and the forms of connection that become visible when we look more carefully.

A New Perspective by Sam Chappell

Why this may matter to you right now

You may be standing at your own vanishing point without naming it that way.

A role may be changing shape. A relationship may have grown harder to read. A loss may still contour your days long after others assume its edges have softened. On the surface, life may appear steady while inwardly something asks for reorientation.

That is why the vanishing point feels so useful to me right now, especially in these days after the equinox. This season rarely hands over the whole picture at once. It offers a changed angle, a brighter edge, a newly visible turn. The next part of the landscape comes clear only if we keep moving long enough to meet it.

The southward runs made that plain. A closed trail altered the route. That altered route brought books left for strangers and a red heart seen again and again, a remembered life at the trail’s end, and later a sign that named the limit of sight while also recalling something simple and easy to forget: the road continues beyond the place where vision stops.

Sometimes the bend itself reveals what the straightaway could not.

Closing reflection

The vanishing point tells the truth about what can be seen from where we are. It does not tell the whole truth about what is there.

On Cousins Island this past week, the southern route became a lesson in repetition and sight. The little library appeared first, followed by the heart. Dr. David Adams waited at the turnaround, familiar once more after slipping from memory. The sign near Madeleine Point, encountered after turning north again onto the streets, named the narrowing later on, while also underscoring what I already knew even if I had not paused to say it: the road continues beyond the place where sight gives out.

That feels true to the larger pattern as well. The curve ahead may close your view, yet it may also carry you toward what is worth remembering, what is worth receiving, what draws you back into connection.

Pause + Reflect

Where in your life are you mistaking the edge of your vision for the end of the road?

As the light continues to lengthen and the road ahead remains partly hidden, I’m reminded that this work too is seasonal. It asks for attention, patience, and a willingness to stay present at the curve. Whether you pause here for a few minutes, share a note, or pass this reflection along, I appreciate your making room for these conversations.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

P.S. Join us for Radio Maine Live: Emergence and Light on April 16, from 5–7 pm at the Portland Art Gallery. Attendance is free, but space is limited. The panel conversation will run about 45 minutes, followed by a social hour focused on conversation and connection among attendees. We hope to see you there!

Spring Virtual Book Circle

Awaken to the energy of spring and spend an evening with fellow readers who want companionship without homework.

Spring can feel like a threshold, with longer light, softer air, and the slow, steady work of thawing. We invite you to gather with us in that in-between space for the Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle on April 21

Meeting you along the Bountiful Path

We appreciate the opportunity to be part of your world.

If you’re wondering where to find us, here’s where we land during the week: Solo episodes on Monday, Radio Maine on Tuesday, Off the Wall on Wednesday, Books on the Boat on Friday, and The Bountiful Path Foundational Posts on Sunday.

See you on the path!

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.