Dear Tom,
Maybe it’s the water or the proximity to the Northwestern Tribes, but your part of the world seems to exceed its quota of story tellers. I believe I’ve written you before about Donald Miller, the author of – A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. He suggests we think about our life as a story and that we write our lives toward that end. I recently read an interview of Michael Meade whose most recent book is Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul. He sounds like a Sufi to me, and of course he’s from Washington state.
When asked why he wrote his most recent book he said, “ People draw some sense of self from the story told in the world around them. As poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Right now with culture unraveling and nature being rattled to the core, there is a little security to be found in existing institutions, and coherent stories are increasingly hard to find. The other place to find a coherent story is inside. That means going to the core of your own life and finding the story seeded within.”
See why I think he may be a Sufi or a member of a tribe? The concept of a seed planted deeply within each of us fascinates me. I draw images in my mind of God reaching inside each of us and planting a single seed. In grammar school we use to all plant a seed in a little dirt that was in a Dixie cup. We would water it, talk to it, place it in the sun, and ultimately a green plant would emerge. Perhaps inside each of us is a seed, and we should give a little more thought to how we can make it grow to be a healthy plant. I imagine that each of us have an idea of what represents in our life — nourishing soil, water, and sun. Maybe my story only needs me to spend a little more attention to providing the proper nutrients to the seed that’s already planted.
Your friend, Webb
“Something said well is something well-said, but something said superbly is a poem.” — Lewis Turco
Superbly phrased, Webster!