Ever since the miners were trapped I've been thinking about them. Worrying. Following the saga. And taken over by the idea of an experience like that, of indeterminate length or outcome. In those conditions.

For seventeen days after the collapse they were lost, eking out light, food, air, water. Hope. Unsure if they were already in their graves.

In some ways that would certainly have been the hardest time – those hours waiting to see if they would be found, or slowly starve or asphyxiate. But I'm sure being found would have added its own new urgency. A new terror that having been found, the rescue might fail and they would have to be buried all over again.

I've imagined what it must be like to lay in the dark all those feet under ground. So much rock above. The idea that it could collapse at any moment. The constant heat. The abject black. A rocky bubble at the bottom of the sea.

When I was hit by a car on my bike I remember the sense of post-trauma, lying in bed directly under a wall-mounted air conditioner that had stayed put for years but suddenly felt to me as if it could fall and crush me at any moment.

And so I've pictured those thirty-three men laying in the dark at night, with all that potential energy of rock above them, all that dark uncertainty.

I'm writing about blindness these days and the trapped miners and blindness are holding hands in my mind. It feels to me that both are a deep submersion inside your own body. Vision-impaired readers may be shaking their heads now. But as a new and ignorant visitor to their world, I'll allow myself my dramatic misinterpretations as my research progresses.

It strikes me that those miners have been buried inside their own bodies. That they were subject, in that dark (it must surely have had to be dark from time to time) to an immersion into their feelings, their worries, their corporeal ebbs and flows. Nothing to distract them from it. They were at the coal-face of themselves. More of a submersion than an immersion.

Nothing but them and the cruelty of consciousness.

Which is how, to me, a new severe vision-impairment would feel. Until you adapt, and there are many full adaptations, you would be in the coffin of your own experience. Almost certainly an opportunity for emancipation or destruction. Or both.

And so today, as the miners climb up out of that pressing experience and see the sky again and see the agony of love on their family's faces again, I'm shedding happiness for them. But also thinking about those blinded or suffering other submersions into something difficult and unavoidable, because today they are not climbing up out of that to greet the sky. They are still underground.

Here's to the miners, then. And here's to those still buried. They have nobody but themselves to dig them out.