Wednesday, November 30, 2011

On bravery

A friend emailed and said she thought I was brave to open myself up in my blog and in my books, but you know what? It doesn’t feel like bravery to me.

This is brave: driving SOLO from San Francisco, out of the city, over the Bay Bridge, and up to Yosemite 200 miles away. And then doing the return trip three days later. I was driving out of the city in what felt like hundreds of lanes of hurtling traffic and gripping the wheel as tight as I could and thinking “What’s the worst that can happen? I might die. Well, I’m not afraid of dying, so that’s all right.”

Here is a quote I like which seems to me to relate to this, but you may think it’s a little abstruse:

"We don’t have to hate ourselves for our own vulnerability. We don’t have to hate ourselves for what life has done to us. We don’t have to hate ourselves because hurt or loss or longing has gotten to us. Our desires will always be with us in some form, keeping us firmly attached to a world that will hurt us. We must come to love ourselves, love our life, in its vulnerability, in its impermanence, not in spite of all its flaws, but because of them. Because the vulnerability, the changes, the flaws make us who we are."               Barry Magid

2 comments:

Thea said...

Love the quote.

Reminded me of the Seamus Heaney poem published this year:

'Of all those starting out
High-horsed and spirited
Instepped in their stirrups,

Who will stay young in the end?
Who'll be the merrymen old,
Weird sisters, the mockers of mockers?

Be poet enough to survive........'

Sue Hepworth said...

Thanks, Thea. I like that.