Spring New Moon (seed moon)
The notion of legacy, Frank’s question from last Woolly meeting, has rolled over one more time in my thought. While resuming watching the Mahabarata, Time (the narrator of this long epic) comments on family as a garland. A family is like a garland, made of individual flowers, but joined by a common thread. The thread, he says, should be invisible, and the flowers’ scents and colors, though distinct, must not clash.
It made me think of the thread in our family, rather than the individual flowers. In the West we spend so much time growing, cultivating, nourishing the flowers we often forget about, neglect the thread. In Chinese culture the family name comes first, then the given name. I mentioned a woman I called Ming Miao to a Chinese acquaintance who thought a moment, then said, “Oh, Miao Ming!” This difference is not subtle, it lies in the way we name ourselves.
To complicate matters even more the thread has become a cord in our 3rd millennial realm of shifting family ties, divorce, single parents and adoption. Perhaps the musical metaphor would serve better here, individual family members as notes and the link between them all a Wagnerian leitmotif.
This section of the Mahabarata has made me wonder about spending time nourishing the thread, the cord, the leitmotif. I’m not sure I even know where to begin. Two ideas pushed themselves forward at once. The first, stimulated by Roy Wolf, the host of our sheepshead game, involves regular communication in writing with grandchildren. He writes each grandchild a letter once a week.
The second came forward from another prod in the Mahabarata. The sage has a key role at this point in Indian history, especially in his role as teacher and as an advisor to kings and princes. In commenting on the purpose of the sage Dronacharya noted that learning alone has no purpose; learning must be shared. “The river,” he said, “cannot fit in one vessel.”
One of the links in my family, from both the Ellis and Keaton side, is a long tradition of teachers. My grandmother Ellis was a teacher. My mother was a teacher. Many of my cousins on both sides are teachers as are my brother and sister. Jon and Jen are both teachers. The teaching occurs at all levels from elementary school through graduate school, but teachers have a major presence in all my family links including Jon and Jen.
There is, too, the art of taking in knowledge and passing it on through different forms of vocational practice: medicine, military, clergy. That too is a mark of my family. These three are the oldest and in some person’s definitions, the only, professions. Professing and sustaining the traditions of medicine, warrior and person of faith also teach, but outside of the educational establishment.
OK. Let’s say that teaching or transfer of knowledge is somehow the link, or at least a strong part of the link. Now what? Don’t know right now, but this seems important to me.