Who's driving?

The course I took on Metaphor last term did an amazing job of opening my eyes to the prevalence of metaphor in our daily lives, in our language, in our society, and in our views of the world.  But of course, once a class is done, we have a way of setting our learnings aside and either returning to previous thought patterns or giving our energy to whatever it is we're learning next. 

So it was fun to reopen the question of metaphor this morning, when I read what Parker Palmer had to say about it in Let Your Life Speak.  

"If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives.  But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture -- it comes from manufacturing.  We do not believe that we "grow" our lives -- we believe that we "make" them.  Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.


I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, "How does a baby grow?"  But an American child will ask, "How do you make a baby?"  From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that ... we can make whatever kind of life we want, whenever we want it."

"Transformation is difficult," he goes on to say, "so it is good to know that there is comfort as well as challenge in the metaphor of life as a cycle of seasons.  Illumined by that image, we see that we are not alone in the universe.  We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth.  We can, and we must -- if we want our sciences to be humane, our institutions to be sustaining, our healings to be deep, our lives to be true."

So how does this relate to this image that emerged yesterday?  I'm thinking that it is our illusion that we are in charge that is driving the most difficult and challenging aspects of life on this planet -- war, hunger, poverty, pollution, the growing water shortages...  And perhaps the most important message of the recent earthquake and tsunami is that, in fact, we are NOT in charge.  Perhaps if we could fully grasp that concept, stop the car, step away from this constant push to move forward, and awaken within us a sense of responsibility for and union with the rest of creation, we could begin to alleviate all that suffering and find our way to humanity, sustainability, healing and truth...