Whatever we do in our lives, we make a text of our lives. Whether or not our stories belong to the shared patterns of the great, true stories — the myths — they are the texts from which we find out our relation to the divine, to one another and to the self.
Long before writing was invented, human beings read their world. They interpreted their dreams and the flights of birds. They read the intestines of sacrificial animals and the memories of their ancestors. They read the things that surprised them, or the things that reminded them of something else. Most of all, they read in the places where there were holes — spaces — gaps. They filled up the blanks of the universe, as though they were pages, with writing. Leonardo advised aspiring artists to "discover" the pictures to be found in the cracks in walls; Chinese sages were conceived as their mothers stepped into the footprints of unicorns; all of us make up our lives out of the cracks in the walls or our past memories and the unicorn footprints of our futures. The making of a life is similar to the making of a text. We live by reading our own stories.
Linda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred
2 comments:
I like the concept of the "shared patterns"
Was walking through our woods and found ferns poking out through the leaves just like your lovely photo.
What a gorgeous photograph! It says so much.
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