Sunday, June 5, 2016

Wisdom emerges extracted from riding the waves



     Sometimes, without looking, you find a birds’ nest.  Wisdom has us collect things. We don’t know why. If it is a natural thing it is a way for us to connect with the world that is not manipulated.  Are we guided by the animal still faintly alive in us? Claire collects birds’ nests.  Mrs. Scattergood might wish for the secrecy of the egg.  Up in the trees close to the sky, the world of becoming.  The eggs direct from the fecund fertile darkness of yin. Encased in the yin night.  It would almost be insane not to want to collect birds’ nests.
    
 Wisdom is like water; seeks its own level beyond the consciousness we know, beyond the scope of language. Most is always unspoken and some comes in a language we don’t know. “My mother’s first language was Yiddish and mine,” Mrs. Scattergood followed, “was the ocean.”  Even as Mrs. Scattergood was living her life in Newark she was waiting for the time she could go down the shore. 

Years later, missing her mother, she would write the River Lena, for if her mother was not named after the river, surely the river, was a metaphor for the connection she felt to her – flowing when she was alive, and though frozen in the winter since her death, a road she could travel on to be with her.   


No comments:

Post a Comment