Beloved Empath
It’s fitting that my second ever blog will coincide with my first ever book! Yay Me!
I had intended for this blog to be about something else – it was all quite serious and getting down to business and all that. And then other things happened. So let me share a little story about the word SPIRITUAL – it seems to haunt me.
When I started The Selful Soul on YouTube I was very proud of my new logo and by-line. After a few attempts, I was finally able to put my banner up and proudly display my new channel.
I write and I edit and I help others write and I help others edit…so you can imagine my horror when, months down the line, I spotted that my by-line was in fact, “The SPIRtual is Political”! It had passed many beady eyes, including mine, and none of us had picked it up. But I survived that mortification – I live to tell the tale.
Cross oceans of time to the final copy of my beloved book, Gentle Like Water: a path for the selful soul and days after the final print run has been done, I randomly open a page and I see that cursed word – only this time it’s the SPITual is Political. And not only is it just a grammatical error in one place within the text, it’s a header for one of the chapters! Absolute horror of horrors!
And even more, as I begin to read my book as a reader, I see a grammatical error jump out at me and I cringe! However, we do move on from such and I’ve decided that it is actually a lovely story in the vein of being bewildered and embracing it.
I’m reminded of the Japanese art/culture of Kintsugi – which is described in Wikipedia as
Golden joinery:
Kintsugi (金継ぎ, “golden joinery”), also known as kintsukuroi (金繕い, “golden repair”), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum; the method is similar to the maki-e technique.
What a beautiful concept. All that is broken can be made whole and even more beautiful by its brokenness. And aren’t we all works of incomplete and imperfectly perfect art.
So this book – which I’ve decided is a first edition (implying you lovely souls will support me and buy and buy and tell others to buy and buy) has an extra story of its imperfectionate beauty and those who buy or are gifted this edition will have that story to remind them that even when things seem dire – when we’ve made a mistake or something passes us by or we do something that we can’t turn the clock back on – that we can recover and in some ways uncover even more beauty.
So, join me in embracing the concept of bewilderment in the lines of Rumi, that great mystic:
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition”.
