Uprooter of Great Trees

I want to tell you a story — a very old story — that I heard from Laurens van der Post.* It speaks to the necessity of embracing paradox, and off the suffering caused by dualistic thinking: when things are either this or that; when you are either going to succeed or fail; when anything or anyone is either good or bad; when something is either right or wrong. Dualistic thinking renders us unable to deal with the difficulties and paradoxes that life inevitably brings. Spending most of my daylight hours painting, I notice that I need to hold the paradox of having structure alongside the need to be self-forgetting — the fool who jumps in.

I shared this story in a recent class in New Mexico. One of the students arrived at the last minute because of a family emergency. For the entire week she chose to remain silent in her grief, only saying: I cannot speak about it. And so she worked, allowing her hands to give shape to her grief.

Once upon a time, in a faraway place…..