A Path That Has Heart

I recently read all three of Sue Bender’s books –  Plain and Simple, Everyday Sacred, and Stretching Lessons.  One of my favorite quotations is from Plain and Simple:

“Following a ‘path that has heart’ offers many lessons.

I saw the old, folk-art image ‘heart in the hand.’ That’s a fine guide, I thought.  As an artist I started by using my hands, making things out of clay.  Clay needed patience and respect.  I could not will it to harden if it was a damp day.  The clay took its time, and I had to learn to watch and listen – to yield to its timing.  My task was to reconnect with my nature, a nature that had been bent out of shape.

If I had asked myself at a age 20, 30, or 40 what matters most in life, I would have said being independent and having many choices. But there are lots of things I didn’t get to choose: the decent and loving family I was born into; the social, religious or economic circumstance of that family; or to be 5’10” tall, have brown hair, a thin frame, a heart constitution, or a questioning nature.

When I stopped resisting, when I stopped trying to change, when I trusted that there was nothing missing inside, that I didn’t have to choose between one part of me over another, I rediscovered me.

Reclaiming my past, knowing where I came from, getting to know and love my brother and cousins, wanting tradition, rituals, needing to have Thanksgiving dinner at my home every year for thirty years, and being an active participant in a culture that forever romanticizes change is what I am.

‘The first principle of a warrior is not being afraid of who you are,’ a wise Tibetan leader once said.  I was beginning to feel what he meant.

And I have another choice – to accept what I didn’t get to choose.  I could have wished for a calmer nature and on and on, a very long list, but what I finally get to choose is that tiny space between all the givens.

In that tiny space is freedom.”