I've been slowly reading Annie Dillard's
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which might be viewed as one small stone after another. Her observations of nature are astute and cur to the very core of what a daily small stones practice is about for sure. I've been thinking more and more about how we see other people, about how what we observe on the outside, what we experience of people good and bad, is often never quite what is going on inside. We rarely know the full story so that even the most prickly of characters has a soft spot, a degree of vulnerability which that prickliness is hiding. Dillard writes:
'The general rule in nature is that living things are soft within and rigid without. We vertebrates are living dangerously.... [M]an alone, poor wretch, she [nature] hath laid all naked upon the bare earth....'
Well, maybe. She is right that physically we are ill equipped. The tree has tough bark to protect it and plants and animals generally have all sorts of protective strategies. But what about us? Soft on the outside? That's where we all, at times, put up our prickly protection, create a carapace and hide from the world. Inside though, that's where the softness is, where we are vulnerable and what we need to show. It takes courage to expose our vulnerabilities, but when we do others often reciprocate. That's when Robert Burns' famous line 'Man's inhumanity to man' is turned on it's head and 'man's humanity to man' builds us up, perhaps making us a little less vulnerable, a little stronger.
So, I'm still looking, but I'm trying to look beyond the surface for that soft spot that makes us all human, that makes our fellow human beings so interesting.
