Never Be Puny

'The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.’ 

Meister Eckhart 

This past year I stumbled upon the daily newsletter by Heather Cox Richardson. Richardson is an American historian and a faculty member at Boston College. Her writing is simple and straightforward in explaining topics I have not fully understood. (I highly recommend signing up for her daily newsletter.) Recently she explained the uneventful yet courageous way in which Frederich Douglass escaped slavery. Douglass stepped onto a train with the identity papers of another man. As Richardson writes in her newsletter: 

'Douglass's step was such a little one, such an easy one... except that it meant the difference between life and death, the difference between a forgotten, enslaved shipyard worker and the great Frederick Douglass, who went on to become a powerful voice for American liberty.' 

This seemingly small step one hundred and eighty-three years ago has dramatically affected the world today. Douglass's inner world was 'not puny,' as Meister Eckhart says,  and we remember Frederick Douglass today.

This quarter's reading for the Great Books of the Western World project has led back to Herodotus's book, 'The History.' We are reading about the Persian Wars. Previously I have read novels about these events and watched the movie '300 Spartans'. Even though I am familiar with some of these historical events, reading Herodotus, the historian who documented these events, has been a wonderful experience. Herodotus recounts individual heroic deeds and the successes of being united,

'if they quarreled among themselves about the command, Greece would be brought to ruin. Herein they judged rightly, for internal strife is a thing as much worse than war carried on by a united people,' 

Individuals had to give up certain rights and desires for something greater. He understands the work of the inner world for the outer world. 

My brother recommended that I listen to the book 'West with the Night' by Beryl Markham. Markham's book is a brilliantly written memoir. She, at the age of four, and her father moved to Africa from England. In her memoir, I could sense her aloneness but never being lonely. The stories of her life are riveting and speak to her inner strength. What she accomplishes in the outer world is remarkable.  Through her writing, she creates poetic images of her experiences growing up in Africa, training racehorses, and flying from Europe to North America. This is what Ernest Hemmingway says of her writing:

'Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ...She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pigpen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book.'

There are two spaces we all inhabit: our inner world and our outer world. My reading has made me pause and wonder about my inner world. Could I, would I step onto the train?  

The picture is of me in Oslo. It was the day I was granted permanent residency in Sweden.

 

Currently reading:

• Psalm (5th Century BCE by King David and Solomon
• The First Four Books of Poems (1995) by Louise Glück
• The History (425 BC) by Herodotus
• Kajsa Kavat (1950) by Astrid Lindgren
• Every Thing is Sacred (2021) by Richard Rohr and Patrick Boland
• The Abominable Man (1971) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Completed:

• The Wives (2019) by Tarryn Fisher
• East of Eden  (1951) by John Steinbeck
• The Universal Christ (2019) by Richard Rohr
• The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (2020) by Erik Larson

• Let Him Go (2013) by Larry Watson