Wisdom Waits
Award winning poet and author, Linda Hogan, who shares my dual Chickasaw-EuroAmerican heritage, has written: "It's not that we have lost the old ways and intelligences, but that we are lost from them. They are always there, patient, waiting for our return to their beauty, their integrity, their reverence for life"(from The Woman Who Watches Over the World, 2001, New York: Norton). I've printed this thought on the back of my business cards.
Wisdom – found in keeping the old ways and being conversant with the indigenous intelligences -- waits for us. This is an incredible thought. It means that wisdom is not something that can be achieved or possessed. It's not a high score on the SATs or the MCATs. Wisdom is a path, and a way of walking through life.
We, the postmodern positivist-empirical evidence-based societies, have indeed gotten lost----seduced, really, by a strange consortium of our senseless fears and our mindless fascination with bright shiny high tech toys. But, all is well, for wisdom waits for us with patience, and has given us a map for the return trip. And here it is:
1. Create and respond to beauty, in all its imperfect, chaotic, natural and genius-produced forms as well as its precise, everyday, human-made versions. Creating and responding to beauty lifts the spirit and connects people in shared awe-full experience.
2. Practice and demand integrity, even to the extent of being vulnerable enough to admit mistakes, or to be visible in not knowing everything, and in extending what used to be common courtesies, and keeping commitments to ourselves and each other. Maintaining personal integrity establishes the self-trust that allows us to be open to the subtle intelligences nested in non-human sentience.
3. Demonstrate reverence for all life, by right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, and by understanding fully what it means to abide by a do no harm ethic.
Wisdom waits. Are you on your way back home?
Wisdom – found in keeping the old ways and being conversant with the indigenous intelligences -- waits for us. This is an incredible thought. It means that wisdom is not something that can be achieved or possessed. It's not a high score on the SATs or the MCATs. Wisdom is a path, and a way of walking through life.
We, the postmodern positivist-empirical evidence-based societies, have indeed gotten lost----seduced, really, by a strange consortium of our senseless fears and our mindless fascination with bright shiny high tech toys. But, all is well, for wisdom waits for us with patience, and has given us a map for the return trip. And here it is:
1. Create and respond to beauty, in all its imperfect, chaotic, natural and genius-produced forms as well as its precise, everyday, human-made versions. Creating and responding to beauty lifts the spirit and connects people in shared awe-full experience.
2. Practice and demand integrity, even to the extent of being vulnerable enough to admit mistakes, or to be visible in not knowing everything, and in extending what used to be common courtesies, and keeping commitments to ourselves and each other. Maintaining personal integrity establishes the self-trust that allows us to be open to the subtle intelligences nested in non-human sentience.
3. Demonstrate reverence for all life, by right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, and by understanding fully what it means to abide by a do no harm ethic.
Wisdom waits. Are you on your way back home?
Dr Deah's Musings
Copyright 2005-2006 by Liminal Realities
a personal growth education venture
Deah Curry PhD, publisher
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
posted by Dr Deah @ 11:47 PM
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