December 6
The wound is the place through which the light enters. Be grateful to the one who grinds you — it is on the rough stone that the mirror comes into being.
Masnavi (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The wound is the place through which the light enters. Be grateful to the one who grinds you — it is on the rough stone that the mirror comes into being.
Sometimes you catch yourself testing a piece of your own work against someone else’s remark. It wasn’t a kind remark. Someone said it to you once, curtly and without paying attention to how it would land. Back then, what you mostly heard was the slight. Today it helps you spot a weakness before anyone else notices it.
Gratitude would be a strange word here. It would approve, after the fact, what hurt you back then, and attribute to the other person an intention they may never have had. At the same time, it would be dishonest to claim you had kept nothing of it.
Perhaps it comes down to whom the gain belongs to. The remark was someone else’s. That it is of use to you is down to the work you have done with it since: how often you have applied it to yourself, weighed it and sometimes discarded it, too.
By now the remark sounds a little like you. The voice it was first spoken in you will probably never be entirely rid of.
