By Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt Let’s set the record straight. I do not claim to know what god might be, nor do I entirely get gestalt. Being neither religious nor German (though my maiden name means Messenger of God, my married, German name, Heart of God),I, an ordinary, unemployed English major from state-funded schools, graduate in education with a too-expensive writing focus made trivial by an increasingly “complex landscape” made even more needlessly intricate by devising “complex challenges” that require more and more “innovation,” well, what could I possibly have to offer besides a bit of Transcendentalism, where Nature, God, and We Each are one? I mean, come on. Next to the Big Guys, what am I other than someone who has decided what they have in common— that it is their moving, shiny, simple parts that make up the aggregate? That all you need to do in order to understand anything is break it apart and put it back together? That when you take out the watercolor pencils and see there are only nine or ten or twelve variations, it’s time to buy a bigger set, each with their own easy-to-understand name? And goodness me, how did I not flunk Shakespeare when, upon having to read the literary critics and write a paper on one I chose, I responded with my own criticism of critics and might have annoyed the professor who wrote, “Then why pick this article in the first place?” And I think what he was getting at, I think what I’m trying to say, is there are so many aspects to anything we might choose, so many objects in motion, it’s no wonder people get confused, thinking they need select a single source, mistaking the elephant hoof or tail or trunk for the entirety of the thing, when we were blindfolded into believing these were the totality of experience, the one, the way, the truth. And so I return to my friend Thoreau, my buddy Emerson, to their roots in Eastern thought, tracing as best I can these tributaries through history and philosophy, only to end up here: Simplify, simplify, simplify. Return to the woods to live deliberately, to front the essentials of life and learn what it has to teach. And when you reenter, ready to take that beautiful, individual, self into a world gone mad with extras and unnecessaries, tell us what you discovered when you peeled back the bark of all you had discarded. That’s where wholeness lies. Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, copyright March 26, 2024, all rights reserved
Posted in Katherine's Coffeehouse
