"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from
that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its
yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on
earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And
when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death
brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples
falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you
tasted as many as you could." -- Louise Erdrich
I fell for fiction-writer Louise Erdrich after reading
her wonderful novel “Love Medicine” and have since gobbled up her short stories
in The New Yorker. I’m overdue to read another novel by her. I’m not sure where
this quote came from; I found it in the Facebook post of a good friend today.
I love the imagery of eating and food Erdrich gives us.
After bluntly stating that “life will break you,” she reminds us that the
reason we are here is to be swallowed up by life, even to the point of being
broken and bruised. Next she calls us to notice that the earth’s bounty also
often experiences the same cycle, the same falls, the apples “wasting their
sweetness.” We are like that bounty. And as we become witnesses to the apples
in both their deliciousness and their sad fates, it makes our own suffering
somehow more natural and bearable, even lovelier. We have companions in the
sweetness “in heaps” all around us.
Finally there’s another turn: we’re not only like the
apples, but we get to taste them – taste each other. So the thought comes full
circle – we taste, and we are tasted, and it’s this experience that swallows us
up. Life is the grand eater and we are its food; and at the same time, we are
grand eaters of life.
As a diabetic I love being told to engage with sweetness
– to listen to it, to notice its natural source, to tell myself about it, and
to taste as much of it as I can.
Of course the apple means knowledge too, knowledge that
is both sacred and inextricably involved with the body. No perversion of the
story of the Garden of Eden can erase that. The golden apple shines in the
stories of many cultures, promising divine information and immortality. How
tantalizing that timelessness is offered in such a savory, physical package,
one so transitory as it is devoured.
Diabetes gives me similar tantalizing knowledge –
glimpses of the precious gold of the present moment in all its physicality, and
of the spirit (that is, me) who chooses to savor that moment, over and over.
Taste the day, and enjoy.
I love the Louise Erdrich quote you cited - so powerful and applicable to all kinds of life journeys. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jill!
DeleteWhat a lovely meditation, Lisa. You are uniquely gifted with both insight and poetry. Thank you for sharing. And the little photo of fruit-in-hands makes me smile. Thanks for the thoughts and inspiration. I look forward to more. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm glad this reached you! More on the way...
DeleteThis post appeared not long ago on my blog on www.lisabintuitive.com. Here are some comments that folks made there:
ReplyDeleteFrom A. | On February 05, 2013 @09:29 pm
Lisa, Reminds me of a recent discussion of MFK Fisher. AAS
From irene silver | On January 30, 2013 @09:29 pm
God communicated with the Israelites with sound and fury-a voice heard in the desert and at the mountain. The first sound of God is the breath.
From John | On January 14, 2013 @11:41 pm
golden apples! for more, see Robert Graves. also, erdrich's newest "The Round House" is worth your attention. thank you for this, inspirational.