AWARE!

I've not posted for a few days because I've been trying to process what has happened in the American South as a result of Katrina.  I needed to process that event through the prism of other things I've been thinking about the last few days.

I've long wanted to do an entry on the importance of being AWARE when we write.  The recent hurricane has given us all a lesson in awareness.  Certainly, many who were in the hurricane's path--before and after--felt America had no awareness of them.  Was the president aware of the misery of the people when he gazed down at them from Air Force One?  Was he aware when he hugged the two little girls who said they'd lost everything in the storm? 

My friend Beth recently did a wonderful entry on awareness.  In her entry Just a Vignette, she writes of stopping to help a young university student in need, a blind student whose awareness  surpassed that of his sighted counterparts. 

There is also a wonderful Sufi story about awareness that I'd like to share now:

Junaid had a young dervish he loved very much, and his older dervishes became jealous.  They couldn't understand what Junaid saw in the young man.  One day, Junaid told all his dervishes to buy a chicken in the marketplace and then kill the chicken.  However, they had to kill the chicken when no one could see them.  They were to return by sundown at the latest.

One by one the dervishes returned to Junaid, each with a slaughtered chicken under his arm.  Finally, when the sun went down, the young dervish returned, with a live chicken still squawking and struggling.  The older dervishes all laughed and whispered among themselves that the young man couldn't even carry out Junaid's orders!

Junaid asked each of the dervishes to describe how they carried out his instructions.  The first man said he had gone out and purchased the chicken, then returned home, locked the door, closed the curtains over all the windows, and then killed the chicken.  The second man said he returned home with his chicken, locked his door and pulled the curtains, and then he took the chicken into a dark closet and slaughtered it in there.  The third man also took his chicken into the closet, but he blindfolded himself, so he himself would not see the slaughtering.  Another man went into a dark, deserted area of the forest to sacrifice his chicken.  Another went into a pitch black cave.

Finally, it was the young man's turn.  He hung his head, embarrassed that he couldn't follow Junaid's instructions.  "I brought the chicken into my house, but everywhere in the house there was a presence.  I went into the most deserted parts of the forest, but the presence was still with me.  Even in the darkest caves, the presence was still there. 

There was no place I could go where I was not seen.

I interpret the presence in this story as awareness.  It's a reciprocal act, I think:  we are aware of "something" and "something" is aware of us.  This reciprocity is something Beth gets across so well when she describes the young blind student putting his hand on her shoulder.  It's the reciprocity of feeling and awareness that the president couldn't feel until, perhaps, he spoke with those two little girls and embraced them.  It's the reciprocity only the youngest dervish felt when he couldn't kill the chicken.

I think that, for many of us, real writing can't take place until we feel this kind of presence, this kind of awareness.  And it's an amazing experience.  I know that without this awareness, my writing is glib, boring, and dead.

I'm not sure how much sense this entry makes.  I only know I had to somehow knit all these thoughts together because they are important to me.