Life's weavings

My office floor is littered with books--poetry collections, anthologies of wisdom stories. Small white cards poke out of the pages, a road map for finding my way back to pages, poems and readings that will be woven together into Sunday's worship service at the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on giving and receiving.

While I wish I could work a little bit more in advance, I like this process of going through resources, immersing myself in the wisdom of others, and mining bits and pieces that will make up a new whole. Sometimes I think that it would be a joy to write all of the pieces of a particular worship, from opening words, prayers, homily and benediction, but I am equally attracted to the process as a weaver, threading words, thought, story and song together through a warp of a particular topic and a specific lens of meaning.

I always find useful pieces in the story collection in the “Kitchen Table Wisdom” by Rachel Naomi Remen, and this afternoon I was touched by story about Rachel herself. She tells of a time when she needed to make a choice between accepting a promotion through her hospital work where she is feeling alienated and following her instinct to go into a less conventional form of healing. She receives the gift of “The Prophet” from a new friend and finds herself taken by one of the illustrations of an eye in the middle of the palm. It seems familiar to her.

She learns that it is the traditional Hindu symbol of a healer.

Soon after, on a visit with her mother, she hears that as a child of four, she would take her father’s fountain pen and draw eyes in the palms of her hands. Then she would hold her hands up on either side of her face, palms facing forward, close her eyes and say, “Now I can see you,” and laugh.

“Sometimes you wouldn’t let us wash your hands for days,” her mother tells her.

Rachel realizes that in her role as a pediatrician she washes her hands thirty to forty times a day and surmises that she has long washed away the healing symbol. Soon after that, she quits her hospital job to find her lost eyes.

While the story seems to mimics my own journey right now, and I spontaneously sob for a few moments, it is not apropos to the topic and I move on.

Sometimes we have a plan and collect the pieces that we weave into our endeavors or into our lives. And sometimes, we simply stumble upon the treasures that we didn’t know of before and a whole new form takes shape.