Walking the Talk

Child of God

“The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery.  The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead.”

                                  Barbara Brown Taylor

                                  An Altar in the World

         I’ve been reading a book about Earnest Hemingway’s first wife, The Paris Wife.   The author describes Hemingway’s intense manner of encountering people, learning everything he could about them, and then turning them into characters in his books.  Friends, family were all fodder for the mill of his quest for fiction greatness.  Granted, he wrote some very compelling books, and every writer does this.  How else would characters be created if not from someone real, or a collection of personality traits known by the author? 

         It is our tendency to look at others differently from how we look at ourselves.  Speaking for myself, I sometimes study others as I would a specimen in a Petri dish, picking apart their quirks and idiosyncrasies, and giving them a critical going over.  I look at the way they live and how they behave and decide whether what I see has any pathological implications.  I remind myself of a tailor, measuring body widths and lengths so that I will know how to cut the cloth of their story.  And based on my gleanings, I judge whether they will be part of my life and how I will relate to them.  I wonder whether you do this, too.

         Training myself to see another person just as they are--a child of God, whose life story is unique and rich and has nothing to do with me, is a learning curve for me.  I am fascinated with teasing out all the meanderings and missteps that led them to this particular moment in time.  When I can do that with an open heart and simple caring curiosity, then we have a meaningful encounter.  When we confront another in a loving way, without the tape measure and pins, their being shines forth; they enrich our lives and we theirs.  We see ourselves in them, as fellow human beings who dance and lurch and make wrong-turnings, but end up where we’re supposed to be anyway.  Soft heart, soft eyes--contentment.

                                  Shalom,

                                  Jane