A Sense of Wonder

                       Photos by Charles Elliott

Wonder
This is not the moment for a long face or frown,
Throw your fears out of your mind and let the joy in –
It’s like finding a piece of jade in the middle of a dung heap:
The workman stands and wipes the dirt off it in wonder.

Kuan Yin Poem #16
~translated by Martin Palmer and Jay Ramsay
with Man-Ho Kwok

Last weekend I visited a sacred place in the desert. Just outside of the small town of Adelanto, California, in the middle of the high desert, stands a 60 ton, 25 foot tall white marble statue of the Chinese Goddess of compassion, Kuan Yin, The One Who Hears the Cries of the World. She stands at the end of a walkway of other white marble statues. How they are still white I don’t know. A rather large dust devil blew through and engulfed me briefly. I was coated in grit. Luckily I saw it coming; I turned away and covered my head until it passed.

This past year has felt like that, a year of being engulfed in windblown dirt spinning about me so that I could hardly breathe. All I could do was wait for it to pass. The cloud of dust came upon me when my husband came home from a doctor’s appointment. I knew the news wasn’t good when he said sit down before telling me. The C word was mentioned and from that moment on we were both caught up in the whirl wind.

The dust devil that was last year has now passed. My husband is doing well now, but I feel covered in grit like I was last weekend. It’s like I need to wash off all that fear and stress that built up over last year. But as the poem says, in the midst of dung the workman finds a piece of jade; such a wonder to find something so beautiful in a dung heap. It’s so surprising to find the jewel in our seemingly negative experiences, but if we look back we see that we’ve changed, usually in a good way. I know I’m stronger and I feel closer to my husband now.

  

Last weekend’s experience with the dust devil may have left me coated in dirt, but I also felt blessed by the wind and earth as I stood in front of Happy Buddha and watched the dust devil spin on into the distance. And I know Kuan Yin has heard my cries and has led me to find the beauty within my trials.

Change Your Conceptual Metaphor Change Your Life

Metaphor has the power to shake you up or rock your world or _________ (insert metaphor here). It’s a great tool in literature. It helps make something more meaningful and real to the reader.

Let me show you what I mean. Below is a line of a poem that is written literally.

“I love him so much.”

We understand it, but do we feel it? Do we really understand what the poet means by “so much”?
Let’s transform this line:

“My love for him boils over.”

Not great poetry, but now we see and have a sense of what the poet is really feeling. We understand now what they mean by “so much”. We feel the heat and how overwhelmed by emotion the poet is.

Metaphor not only makes better literature, it can make for a better life. This tool is how we understand our world. How else can we communicate the unseen?

We associate love with a warm feeling because as a baby we were embraced in the warmth of our mother’s arms. From this stems metaphors like “burning love”. The unconscious conceptual metaphor of “love is warmth” translates into many of our conscious metaphors like "you give me a warm feeling".

Not only are these conceptual metaphors hard wired some are also cultural like “time is money”. Though we may consciously say this we take its meaning to heart, it is deeply imbedded into the collective unconscious. This particular one is so powerful that it has taken over our way of perceiving the world in the past few centuries. How’s that for rocking your world.

Know the power of metaphor. Use it to make a better poem. And really know the power of conceptual metaphor. Dig into your unconscious mind for them and see what rules your world. If you don’t like what you see all you need to do is change it. Come up with some new metaphors for your life in 2010. See what kind of life and art you can create in the coming year.