Wake Up Call

 

Give It Away

“Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

          Back in 1974, a member of my Board of Directors gave me a signed copy of the newly published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I was twenty-seven at the time and filled with a sense of my own importance. I tried reading the book and just couldn’t relate to it, so it went on my bookshelf for decades. A couple of years ago, I set about purging books to take to my neighborhood library for donation. Tinker Creek went into a box without a single thought. It had been sitting there all that time—most of my life—without having been opened again. This morning, Annie Dillard was the name that came to me when I asked the usual question, “What shall I write about this morning?” When I went to quotes by Annie Dillard, I couldn’t stop reading ones from Tinker Creek. Now, 46 years later, I want to read that book. Perhaps it has taken me that long to grow into it. That long to reach the proper level of humility to learn from it. So, I ordered it this morning along with her book, The Writing Life.

          I am now entering the final one-third of life, and the developmental imperative is “give back.” Share what you have learned, what you have gained over the course of a lifetime, with others, especially, with younger people. They may not listen today, but perhaps they will remember when it becomes important to them. Just as I did at 27 with Tinker Creek and Annie Dillard’s contemplative transformation there, they will believe they already have all the answers and don’t need someone else to tell them what’s important. And that is as it should be. They don’t need my answers or anyone else’s now. They need time to make as many mistakes as I did and learn from them.

          Annie Dillard was not an old woman when she went to Tinker Creek, but the close bond with the natural world she formed there brought her the sort of wisdom that comes from experience. She developed a sense of kinship with every living thing that comes from sleeping in a forest, walking barefoot on moss covered rocks, stepping under waterfalls, smelling the earth after rain, swimming in clear, clean mountain streams. She learned that she is part of that earth, not above it, not separate and special. Here is what she said: “The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” Indeed! Wake up and be there!

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane