Thanks Facebook Memories 🙂  A year ago I posted about this email my mom sent seven years ago. She was always ahead of the curve, because man is this ever useful at this particular time of the world.

“It’s an excerpt from one of Martin Prechtel’s books that mom typed out and sent me in March of 2009:

“… Art is no longer what we want to do, we now do out art to bring the world back to life. The more the scientist investigates, the greater the evidence of the overriding complexity and elegance of what makes the universe happen.

Healers decide to farm to make the bodies healthy, instead of always fixing what is broke.

The hero of this story is the story itself.

So often the artist is sacrificed for the art and the art is what lives.

This story tells us that our art must be sacrificed, turned into a magic that puts us back together in a new way and hatches the world back to life.

This story tells us that living the life of an artist is not as useful as living our lives as a work of art.

What we love and what brought us into the world must together hatch us into life, but this time not into what we were, but into a never-before-seen thing, all its own, whose voice cries in ecstacy, whose form goes even beyond our own imaginings.

The hardest part of being a parent is to sit like a mother bird on our children’s egg of possibilities without meddling or peeling or having anything to say as the young person is allowed to go through all the painful, mysterious, unexplained and even toxic changes necessary for them to arrive at their true form.

 

 

Though at some point your daughter’s desire may drive her, like the Tall Girl speaking beautiful words to her short, unseen lover, to read the poems of thirteenth century, ecstatic Persians out loud to the lonely walls of her bedroom in secret hopes that some lover would mistake her for God and come in through the eaves, it could be that somewhat later when the harshness of the jealous world has taken her tenderness apart, it will be her art, her poetry, her desire to be seen as someone who “sees” that will reassemble her into a real person with a grief-tempered joy in one eye and a fierce compassion in the other.

Like it or not, a million moltings occur in a fully lived life, and the story says that all the fights, conniving, fleeing, crying, dying, grief and confusion are the tangled roots of the tree of life upon whose branches our adulthood must come to fruition.”

~ Martin Prechtel, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, pp. 86-87

(A secret: it’s really all the same Story.)