Wisdom

I remember one of my last conversations with a certain cousin.  We did wind up seeing each other again about five years later, but like everyone else in my family this one has completely forgotten me.  I was at a Thanksgiving dinner in his home and he was kind enough to give me a lift home afterward.  I was forty-one, just entering middle age.  I cannot remember what we were talking about but I did mention something that took me quite by surprise, as I am prone at times to blurting out something wise and profound without having a clue of what I am talking about.  This was one of those times.  To my cousin I said "We spend the first half of our lives learning what the questions are, and the second (last) half learning how to ask them."

I am now in the second (or last) half of my life.  I would like here to examine this homemade little proverb, perhaps test it a little.  What are some of those questions I spent my first four or five decades learning about?  Perhaps to start, how about, why am I here?  I never really asked that question because it didn't occur to me to ask it.  I was still learning how to ask it.  I was so busy coping with life and trying to survive and learn from my mistakes that I really didn't have time for a lot of existential angst, except for the lame college student version that really doesn't convey a lot of meaning.  And when we're in our twenties we really take ourselves and life way too seriously to be able to treat things with the gravity that they merit.

In my mid-forties, while going through one of my worst crises ever, while coping with PTSD and homelessness followed by inadequate housing and extreme poverty I found myself asking that question, why am I here, in a little, frightened, tiny little voice.  Then one day I was sitting up in my little room on the roof of a house I was sharing with four other dysfunctional men.  I was surrounded by windows and my room was full of my paintings, canvases and paints.  Even though I wasn't well, and not able to work, I was painting, showing and selling my art, writing a novel and writing letters for Amnesty International.  I felt a strange sense of oneness and connectedness with everything and everyone.  This was pre-911 and the tragedy of the attack on the World Trade Centre and its horrible fallout ended up shattering for me this sense of beauty and wholeness.  I have only recently recovered it.

So one day, I was up in my tiny room of windows, painting and asking, what is my purpose in life?  I was learning how to ask the question.  In a tiny, half-frightened kind of voice.  Then I saw through the window a little white feather floating on the wind and I thought of Hildegarde Von Bingen's words "a feather on the breath of God."  I felt so moved by this little insight that I wrote a letter about it to a friend and mailed it to her.  Even though the year was 2000 or 2001 I still didn't have internet so I wrote snail mail.  It was also during this time that I found a white eagle feather, and that was when I knew that, in the words of Julian of Norwich,  "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

I understood that joy was going to be the key word of my life.  The joy that no one could take from me, the joy of God, the joy of the wind of the Holy Spirit, the joy of the feather bourn on the breath of God.

I have not always remembered this.  I have often forgotten.  But now I am remembering again and I cling to the hope that this time I will be slow to forget.