Facing Challenges

This weekend was a surprise 70th birthday party for my father and all his children arrived to spend a couple of days with him. It was a two-ferry ride journey for me which allowed plenty of time to people watch and to read. Last night, on the return journey, I enjoyed ingesting more of Parker Palmer’s wisdom from his book The Active Life.

There is a great poem called The Woodcarver from The Way of Chuang Tzu. I won’t quote that here but suffice it to say it is a piece that requires many many readings in order to begin to digest the truth of it. But here are a few quotes that I will share with you, and they deal with conquering fear that holds us back.

The story of the woodcarver is instructive, not because he is fearless (which would make him very unlike most of us), but because he did not let his fears paralyze him. Instead, he walked into and through those fears that he could not get out of, and found freedom to act on the other side.
The process by which the woodcarver found his freedom is…a process of contemplation by which we penetrate the illusion of enslavement and claim our own inner liberty.
Chuang Tzu …opens up the metaphorical meaning of fasting by paralleling it with forgetting. The real fasting is his active refusal to ingest, to internalize, the poisoned bates that can kill the spirit of right action.
At every possible level the woodcarver worked to forget the externals so that he could remember his inner truth.
The word remember literally means to re-member, to reunite the hidden wholeness in us and in our world that is so easily torn apart by powers within and around us. The woodcarver refuses to allow himself and his action to be dismembered by the forces of fragmentation.

I have read it over several times and go back again. There are so truths here that I know are important to me here and now.