Pearls of Wisdom

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from http://www.sunsetshoesonline.net/index.php/catalogsearch/result/?q=pearl+bracelet

A friend read this aloud to me recently. When she sent me the link to where she had found it, I was delighted to see that its author is Rachel Naomi Remen, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom. 

It appears on the website, Living Life Fully.

-o-

Some of the oldest and most delightful written words in the English language are the collective nouns dating from medieval times used to describe groups of birds and beasts.  Many of these go back five hundred years or more, and lists of them appeared as early as 1440 in some of the first books printed in English.  These words frequently offer an insight into the nature of the animals or birds they describe.  Sometimes this is factual and sometimes poetic.  Occasionally it is profound:  a pride of lions, a party of jays, an ostentation of peacocks, an exaltation of larks, a gaggle of geese, a charm of finches, a bed of clams, a school of fish, a cloud of gnats, and a parliament of owls are some examples.  Over time, these sorts of words have been extended to other things as well.  One of my favorites is pearls of wisdom.

An oyster is soft, tender, and vulnerable.  Without the sanctuary of its shell it could not survive.  But oysters must open their shells in order to “breathe” water.  Sometimes while an oyster is breathing, a grain of sand will enter its shell and become a part of its life from then on.

Such grains of sand cause pain, but an oyster does not alter its soft nature because of this.  It does not become hard and leathery in order not to feel.  It continues to entrust itself to the ocean, to open and breathe in order to live.  But it does respond.

Slowly and patiently, the oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until, over time, it has created something of great value in the place where it was most vulnerable to its pain.  A pearl might be thought of as an oyster’s response to its suffering.  Not every oyster can do this.  Oysters that do are far more valuable to people than oysters that do not.

Sand is a way of life for an oyster.  If you are soft and tender and must live on the sandy floor of the ocean, making pearls becomes a necessity if you are to live well.

Disappointment and loss are a part of every life.  Many times we can put such things behind us and get on with the rest of our lives.  But not everything is amenable to this approach.  Some things are too big or too deep to do this, and we will have to leave important parts of ourselves behind if we treat them in this way.  These are the places where wisdom begins to grow in us.  It begins with suffering that we do not avoid or rationalize or put behind us.  It starts with the realization that our loss, whatever it is, has become a part of us and has altered our lives so profoundly that we cannot go back to the way it was before.

Something in us can transform such suffering into wisdom.  The process of turning pain into wisdom often looks like a sorting process.  First we experience everything.  Then one by one we let things go, the anger, the blame, the sense of injustice, and finally even the pain itself, until all we have left is a deeper sense of the value of life and a greater capacity to live it.

-o-

May 2015 be your best year yet!CAM00323

What Are Your Blocks?

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Photos courtesy of Ron Quinn

“Most of the time when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way.” (Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way, 30)

While composing this post, which was going to be, mostly, a quotation accompanied by a photograph of a logjam, I went on-line to find a good picture, and then I remembered the Lewis County flood of 2007 (7 years ago this week).

It was an epic time for my family. High water combined with timber and debris took out six or seven local bridges, and closed the bridge on Elk Creek road, the road where my parents and other family lived. Although my immediate family did not lose any property, houses of some of my cousins were flooded. The clean-up took months.

My youngest sister was, at that time, the Postmaster in Doty, Washington, and the bridge on Elk Creek road stood between her and home, completely buried in log debris. The back way, through Dryad, had its bridge swept away entirely. She was offered food and shelter, but it had been a harrowing day, and she wanted to be with her family.

Floods are a force of nature, but so is my red-headed sister.

A vehicle couldn’t cross over that bridge, but one could, if determined, climb across. A neighbor in the same predicament said that she’d go, too. Of course by the time the Post Office closed, it was dark, but my sister found a pair of old pants in the Goodwill box at the Doty Pentecostal Church, and, wearing her Clarks, she set out. (I don’t know what kind of shoes the neighbor was wearing.)

The logjam became their road home.

There’s a literary device, aporia, that teaches us this as well. It’s from the Greek (difficulty, perplexity, from aporos, impassable), but one way to think of it is as a signpost pointing the way.

As my friend Thom Lee says of bandaids: they show where the healing needs to occur.

Identifying your blocks is only the first step. Instead of thinking “impassable,” see your block as the very place where you must focus your attention. 

Armistice Day

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So here is Garrison Keillor talking about Armistice Day and reading from some of my favorite writers: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php.

Happy Birthday, Eric.

eric

What I’ve Been Reading…

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I have been reading two books that “talk” to each other. Each of the authors is learned in his or her field, witty and charming, a good storyteller. Sometimes, when I’m quiet and listen carefully enough, they break through the walls of the resistance I’ve been feeling lately (about my own writing, about my mother’s journey) and I learn something that I can’t quite pin on either author. It’s something that emerges from the conversation.

The books are THE POWER OF DREAMS by Jeffie Pike and OUR GREATEST GIFT by Henri Nouwen. Subtitles: How an American Quarter Horse Impacted the Life of an Aspiring Grand Prix Dressage Rider, and A Meditation on Dying and Caring. Both books are quite short and both are full of wisdom. Other than that, most readers, I think, would not see that they share much in common. Nouwen is a well-known writer and spiritual philosopher, widely published. Pike is an accountant, blogger, and horse enthusiast who lives in northwest Washington State. She is also the daughter of a friend of mine.

One of the things the books are saying has to do with how our passions define us. Nouwen’s fascination with the soul and the soul’s journey drew him into caring for the sick and dying.Pike begins her narrative with this revelation: “I’ve loved horses my entire life. I think it must be something that you’re born with. I remember very clearly sitting in an ice cream shop when I was 6 years old and for some reason a very strong thought popped into my head—you love horses. Ever since that time, my life has revolved around them.”

These books have much to say about how our relationships define us. Pike is writing about an American Quarterhorse named Justine; her subtitle gives away that this little mare defied classifications and competed with bigger, more elegant horses , but—perhaps more important—Justine taught the author how to, well, relax and enjoy the ride. Nouwen begins his book with a personal story about a friend with Down’s Syndrome, Maurice Gould (Moe), who, as he aged, developed Alzheimer’s. Justine taught her owner how to live; Moe taught his friend Henri how to die. But they turn out to be the same thing.

Jeffie Pike was obsessed with the German Warmbloods who she typically competed with in dressage. She had enjoyed Justine, who came to her by a happy accident, and when she decided she didn’t have enough room or time in her life for her, went to considerable trouble to find her a new home. When she learned that Justine wasn’t valued by her new owner, Pike went to great lengths, again, to get her back, overcoming financial and geographical difficulties. “How much sense did it make?” she asks more than once. What made sense was that she loved Justine and cared for her deeply, and, as it turned out, that was enough.

Nouwen teaches the same lesson on the human plane: love is always enough. We are not valuable because we are a certain height, or have eyes of a particular color. We are not valuable because we graduated from a certain Ivy League institution, or because of anything we, personally, do or can do. We’re valuable because we are beloved children of God.

One of the features I loved about THE POWER OF DREAMS are the chapter epigraphs, which Pike draws from Temple Grandin, Robert Greene, basketball coach John Wooden, and Star Trek. Again, I found numerous intersections to Nouwen’s insights. “It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life” (Captain Picard to Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Peak Performance”). As Nouwen might put it: “The mystery of life is that we discover this human togetherness not when we are powerful and strong, but when we are vulnerable and weak.”

Late in her book, Pike offers a quote that I, on coming across it, immediately wrote down in my journal: “Your fears are a kind of prison that confines you within a limited range of action. The less you fear, the more power you will have and the more fully you will live” (Robert Greene, The Fiftieth Law). While reading both of these books I thought, often, of the prodigal son; I thought, too, of his older brother who doesn’t understand why their father welcomes the errant son home. (I am still thinking about this.)

THE POWER OF DREAMS and OUR GREATEST GIFT also reminded me of something I’ve read about the bumblebee, that, aerodynamically speaking, it should not be able to fly. But no one has ever told the bumblebee this, so it flies.