Speaking Truth

In the mailbox this Moon-day morning...

Why do we think we have a right to certainty or complete clarity? This is the necessary poverty of all symbolic behavior. Symbols are shapes that behave like signs which only “point” to the objects they represent. Even mathematics, as precise as they portend to be, are fixed to probability which, although usually overlooked, embraces error.

The struggle with our own inner feelings, beliefs and judgments about how things ought to be amid the “isness” flow of the Watercourse Way, is akin to swimming against the stream. That stream is eternally pulling on us to embrace who and what we truly are.

When writing A Doll’s House Ibsen said that he hadn’t “consciously worked for the women’s rights movement” but rather for “the description of humanity.” His view speaks to the larger issue: the longing for authentic selfhood as a yearning for full humanity. Nora doesn’t say, “I am a reasonable woman,” but “I am a reasonable human being.” Her desire to leave the doll’s house is like Gautama’s wish to go beyond the palace walls, to break free from the life he’s living and discover the potential of human existence. – Ann Tashi Slater writing in Tricycle online.

Experience and reason are the best tools we humans have discovered on our path of “yearning for a full humanity,” yet they too are fraught with potential misunderstanding, sourced in the babble of our languages. We might be well-served by spending some of our time sitting on the bank of the brook listening to its sounds more than trying to figure out what it means.

You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say. – William Stafford