Street Level Zen: Home

"A man is never lost at sea."

Ernest Hemingway


(Photo courtesy of Paul Harrison and Wikimedia Commons.)

El remedio

I just read Isabel Allende's Largo pétalo de mar, a novel of the epic genre, in which a Catalonian family is cast adrift in the wake of their Republican stand against Franco, to wind eventually up in post-Pinochet Chile. In between is a lot of striving, living, and suffering.

Allende has a Hemingwayesque gift for trapping powerful unspoken emotion between terse, concrete lines. I'm not a big Hemingway guy myself, but Allende's command of the technique is effective here.

Case in point: at one juncture, one character tells another, "El mundo no tiene remedio." ("There is no cure for the world.") Being a more incisive take on that dilemma we anglophones dismiss as the "way of the world".

It's particularly à propos in this context, but as a Zenner, I feel the need to add, "Yes, but you can cure yourself."

The Spanish aphorism is exact: it's best to give up the "one candle in the dark" model, by which, given enough candles, you hope eventually to light the world. There lies madness.

But washing your hands of the cruelty here isn't skilful, either.

Instead, concentrate on fixing yourself; it's a prerequisite to changing the world, anyway. Worst case scenario: at least you'll have fixed something.

And that's what fixes the world.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Street Level Zen: Strength

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Ernest Hemingway

(Photo of welded saw blades courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)