Question -- how do you picture your world? As Einstein's little blue planet in an immense black cosmos? As Shakespeare's sea-of-troubles? How about my image of a giant Gothic Cathedral filled with hundreds of golden tabernacles?
Stay with me here.
The metaphor works if you think of your family, friends, neighbors and co-workers like so many sealed containers each holding an infinity of mysteries. All their life-long hopes and dreams, joys and terrors, success and failures, favorites and hatreds, loves and lusts. We all contain inner-sanctums like these, whose doors we part only when and for whom we feel it safe.
The tabernacles are hardly over-night affairs. They've taken lifetimes to build and seal. The task begins from our earliest consciousness as our childhood eyes and minds begin encountering other little tabernacles. We watch, we learn, we accumulate. We laugh, we weep, we hurt. And now here at our present age -- be it 21, 45, 53, 57, 79, 82, whatever -- we have become part of an exquisite network of tabernacles that adorns the cathedral.
If the word "adorns" seems pretentious, all right lets use "crowds." Either way, our finely crafted tabernacle co-exists with all these other tabernacles who we wish so passionately would understand what we hold so dear inside. Not surprisingly, they wish the very same. But here's where the metaphor turns dour.
Whatever the relationship may be -- parent, sibling, uncle, grandparent, teacher, boss, clergy -- they can never completely fathom my mysteries any more than I theirs. We all exist inside the same cathedral of life, and yet we all know one another so imperfectly. We take so little time to really look and listen to one another. The cause celebre' for a thousand torch songs, poems, symphonies, and grudges!
Now stretch the metaphor. Picture this cathedral housing billions of tabernacles beyond the ones you know. Far, young, old, white, black, friend, foe, Christian, Jew, Muslim. Why one wonders has, over all these eons, the great planet-cathedral grown so much, but our little tabernacles so little?
Could it be the planet-dwellers have watched their cathedrals flourish, but their tabernacle doors jam....?
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With your bubble theory does this mean you leave one world to start your own world and that you can'r revisit your original world? In contacting classmates over the past 3 years they have mostly left my world and I theirs, but in contact that window seems to open, first a little then the dam bursts and old recollections spew out timelessly until the day is over and you wonder where the time went. When in time do these worlds start forming?
ReplyDeleteKeith ~ You have discovered one of the great blessings...! I've MCed so many different reunions over the years, an I have learned the same wonderful truth. It's always thanks to guys like you
ReplyDelete"We take so little time to really look and listen to one another."
ReplyDeleteOur brains are wired to handle only so much. Autistic people are often said to be overwhelmed by all the stimuli each second presents them with. We are able to detect and deal with what we need to handle in order to survive. We can't peek into each "taberancle" and deal with or understand it completely - it takes too much effort and time that would impede our ability to survive. We do form ties and we do communicate with the "other/s" proximate tabernacles because we NEED these relationships in order to survive.
It can be comforting and pleasant to reminisce, it adds to our experience on the planet, But survival is the driving force.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-io-kZKl_BI&feature=related
Mr G ~ Well said! This evolutionary "driving force" is surely our most primal. I suspect as we age -- I'm 80 -- this drive segues into a more reflective one. So as I look back, I do regret that my drive allowed less time for my devotion. To the people that counted. Did you ever see the play OUR TOWN which addresses this notion...?
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