Heaven (by which I don’t mean the sky above us) sends us different gifts. Some gifts we may believe to be curses that don’t allow us ever to raise our heads to see that sky (by which I don’t mean heaven); some gifts we don’t think of as gifts at all: we take them so for granted. Gifts from heaven, as another writer wrote in his blog, are what we come into the world with or what comes down into our lives like rain, often in summer under a cloudless sky when we least expect it.
Two gifts for me are two loves—for words and for images. Some days I wish my gift were for persons, a love that takes passion into the realm of intimacy and personal sharing. This does not seem to be my gift this lifetime. For gain or loss my passion is for words and, later again in life, for images to expand the scope and power of mere words.
As a child I used to take the pencil I was learning to use to shape letters so that I could read and write to draw lines, circles then rudimentary images from what peopled my inner world. I was terrible. I could not draw a straight line or a perfect circle. Those early failures soured images for me. I turned my efforts to words and grew skills to express those inner images. In the process I honed thinking and earned compliments for academic achievements.
An indifferent student in grade school, in high school I discovered how to make use of my limited intelligence simply by putting more time and effort into my studies than my classmates did. I found glory by sheer force of need. Passing tests and showing off what I knew made up for deficits in social graces that years later I had to attend to or live life an emotional cripple.
My difficulties with identity and personal images drove me to sharpen skills in thinking and words expressed thinking well. When in medical school I encountered another deficit, this time my lack of ease in mechanical manipulation, I threw myself even more into the world of ideas. I became a psychiatrist whose tool was words to reach into my reservoir of experience to help others connect to their own reservoirs and make peace with gifts and curses.
Only in my fifties did images sneak back into my life as intellect began to feel barren, like bone-dry deserts when no rains came. I went to a film-editing seminar in New York City and fell into Circe‘s arms: images can be manipulated to reconstruct identities and lives and the results are potentially more powerful than words.
Heaven’s gifts are unpredictable. One might even say that unpredictability itself is heaven’s chief gift. If everything went according to the plans we generate from our limited experiences we’d all be cripples. Our worlds would be so small we’d be living our whole lives like Plato’s cave dwellers—in darkness live in cramped universes that belie the hugeness of It all!
I didn’t go into film editing. I shot a model and rediscovered the energy in images—in color, lines, shapes, and the message altogether they convey that seem to me not as direct or limited as thoughts are, as words harvested solely from a vapid, mechanistic life.
After a few years of tooling with images I’ve come to realize that neither words nor images alone can draw all that living gives us. These twin loves no longer contain me.
Sometimes we must simplify chaos into equations and sometimes must throw out those potent formulas and reconnect with their primordial sources. No wonder that ancient peoples evolved myths about a Creator God. Creation is inherent in humans if we only risk taking time to let the god within us speak.
We don’t need to stop purposeful activity. In the midst of our business, if we keep our ears alert, our eyes or whatever sense we’re gifted to prefer at the moment or over a lifetime, we can sense an Other from which we take new gifts to refresh the old, to sow new energy in the old, to rediscover that we are not who we think or feel we are but something more alive, more dynamically linked to the ever-changing universe, what Buddhists refer to as anicca.
In the end, heaven’s greatest gift might well be another passion I’ve had all along: creativity. Creativity or the gift for uncharacteristic invention is expressing ourselves in surprisingly new but authentic ways, beyond what we can strategize to produce but within the strictures of what we call “me” or “mine.”
The greatest mystery (if by mystery we mean that ultimate source of power and life) may be right here in our heart of hearts, in our neurotic, limited selves. If we but learn to listen or see we might find in the drought-dry landscape of our barren lives that precious nectar of immortal life.
This to me is heaven’s gift this morning: that we are not doomed to live only in that blasted cave of Plato but that living there we see we don’t need to live anywhere else. Right here is where heaven is, if we but have the eyes, the ears, and the heart to live it!
Ah freedom… and how sweet the freedom of thought. In our studies, rationality plays an important part. But sometimes a summoning up of an extra gulp of air is enough to lift us up… above the plane of rationality, for a view of a new perspective… I lift my glass to salute you, and wish you a beautiful new year.
Thank you, Shimon. Writing can be a vehicle to another “plane” of mind, a new way of looking at what may have become staid, dead and uninspiring. Inspiration wraps objects into something like life i.e. inherently changing, surprising, mysterious, unknowable, inviting, exhorting, a kaleidoscope of activity atop the in-and-out of breathing!