WHO STANDS BESIDE YOU?

"A self is made, not given. It is a creative and active process of attending a life that must be heard, shaped, seen, said aloud into the world, finally enacted and woven into the lives of others."

Hi Friends!

I won't bore you with my ups and downs today. This is a story from Barbara Myerhoff in Remembered Lives.

"My grandmother was a tiny woman, shrunken as if some of the juice had been sucked out of her. But her hands, her timeless, precious hands, were an entire landscape, the veins risen to the surface, a network of rivers that flowed from her heart. Her long white fingers were rooted in the wisdom of escorting babies into the world and dying people out of it. When she was telling stories to explain things to me, these root-fingers seemed to point to what was buried beneath the surface of ordinary things. One Sunday she drew a large spiral slowly in the air and called it the Wisdom Trail.

'Each of us travel this path, round and round the spot of grace at our core. As we do, we come to the same intersections, the same challenges, over and over,' she said softly.

Transfixed, I saw what she spoke of in the air in front of us. The taxi horns, the pigeon wings flapping outside the window, the pizza smells from Esposito's restaurant downstairs all disappeared as Grandma's words carried me into the middle of this spiral.

'People walk this trail shifting from one foot to the other -- first a step of risk to learn something new; then a step of mastery so they can live what they've learned. If they use only their foot of risk, they spend their lives hopping nervously from thing to thing. But if they use only their foot of mastery, they get stuck and stagnant.'

Kneeling on the floor next to her in the kitchen while she made bread for the Sabbath, I watched my grandmother's floury hands leave prints on the red oilcloth-covered table as they walked across, illustrating the story.

'Sometimes people might thing they are going in circles, never making progress, even moving backward, but that's not true. It's just that each pass around, you gather more wisdom, so your trail is wider and you travel it with more grace from risk to mastery to risk again.'

She leaned toward me and whispered, 'What's important,' -- Grandma tapped the end of my nose with one dusty finger and then continued -- 'is that, whichever foot you use to walk this path, remember that there's no way to escape from yourself or what you came here to do.'"

Hope that helped you as much as it helped me, friends! I often feel for every few steps forward, I take several back. Now, I'll look at it as gaining more grace and wisdom!

Much Love,
Michele