Expedition Kittens discussion
Let Your Life Speak ... Vocation
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Chapter VI
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Claire
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Mar 14, 2023 10:20AM
"But these personal metaphors do much more than describe reality as we know it. Animated by the imagination, one of the most vital powers we possess, our metaphors often become reality, transmuting themselves from language into the living of our lives."
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Oh snap."Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all - and to find in all of it opportunities for growth. If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture - it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we "grow" our lives - we believe that we "make" them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love. I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, "How does a baby grow?" But an American child will ask, "How do you make a baby?" From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere "raw material" that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it."
"Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer's abundance decays toward winter's death. Face with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? It scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring - and scatters them with amazing abandon. In my own experience of autumn, I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted. Instead, my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to tie … I am drawn down by the prospect of death more than I am lifted by the hope of new life."
"... painted a season of dying with such a vivid palette..."
Thomas Merton: "There is in all visible things … a hidden wholeness."
"When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off. Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. But if we allow the paradox of darkness and light to be, the two will conspire to bring wholeness and health to every living thing."
"If I try to "make" a life that defies the diminishments of autumn, the life I end up with will be artificial, at best, and utterly colorless as well. But when I yield to the endless interplay of living and dying, dying and living, the life I am given will be real and colorful, fruitful and whole."
"...times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things. Despite all appearances, of course, nature is not dead in winter - it has gone underground to renew itself and prepare for spring."
"But for me, winter has an even greater gift to give. It comes when the sky is clear, the sun is brilliant, the trees are bare, and first snow is yet to come. it is the gift of utter clarity. In winter, one can walk into woods that had been opaque with summer growth only a few months earlier and see the trees clearly, singly and together, and see the ground they are rooted it."
"If you live here long, you learn that a daily walk into the winter world will fortify the spirit..."
Oh do me!"Late spring is so flamboyant that it caricatures itself … Perhaps we are meant to yield to this flamboyance, to understand that life is not always to be measured and meted as winter compels us to do but to be spent from time to time in a riot of color and growth. Late spring is a potlatch time in the natural world, a great giveaway of blooming beyond all necessity and reason - done, it would appear, for no reason other than the sheer joy of it. The gift of life, which seemed to be withdrawn in winter, has been given once again, and nature, rather than hoarding it, gives it all away. "
:) "And when did we start to misuse that beeline metaphor? Just watch the bees work in the spring. They flit all over the place, flirting with both the flowers and their fates. Obviously the bees are practical and productive, but no science can persuade me that they are not pleasuring themselves as well."
"In contrast to the sensationalism of spring, summer is a steady state of plenty … this fact of nature is in sharp contrast to human nature, which seems to regard perpetual scarcity as the law of life … It is difficult to trust that the pool of possibilities is bottomless, that one can keep diving in and finding more."
"...we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them - and received them from others when we are in need."
"Community doesn't just create abundance - community IS abundance."
"Summer is the season when all the promissory notes of autumn and winter and spring come due, and each year the debts are repaid with compound interest. In summer, it is hard to remember that we had ever doubted the natural process, and ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in the powers of new life. Summer is a reminder … that for this single season, at least, we might cease our anxious machinations and give ourselves to the abiding and abundant grace of our common life."
