LABYRINTH OF UNFAMILIAR WAYS
For years I had heard of pâté: French, fancy, expensive. For people of discriminating taste I guessed. Out of my class I supposed.
Then one day I tasted some and realized it was liver spread. Liver spread. Just some chopped liver with a lot of help added.
And I wondered why we don’t just call things what they are.
Pâté.
That’s what far too often the world has been for me.
We come into this world as chopped liver, so to speak, and then find ourselves one day or another being cajoled or pushed down the road to paté-land. We start out what we are, as we are—simple, good, beautiful—then strive to become someone else instead because somebody told us to, somehow, somewhere along the way. Somebody in their own way said we weren’t good enough the way we were. And though rarely can we recall who said it, or when or how we came to feel this way, we spend half our lives trying to become someone we are not and the other half searching for what we were, before we got lost.
And I forget how impressionable I am. I stand back in awe before the pâté bunch and their pâté lifestyle and all the fancy words and glitter and bubbly chatter-jabber they use to describe people and life and all their various moments—as though all those many and fancy descriptions could really separate their experiences from mine. And I lose heart. I put those folks and their ways and their words on a pedestal, not to be touched, while, throughout, something much greater than all of this manages not to make its way onto the stage:
The realization that, despite how things might be presented, we are all hopelessly the same, believe it or not. We are all changelessly equal and one, like it or not. The one who does manual labor, the artist, the office worker, the politician, the garbage hauler, the professional, the beggar, the religious leader, the repair person alike, whatever the category, whoever the individual. Rich, powerful, famous, this truth does not move; poor, powerless, forgotten, it does not change.
Pâté.
How in the world did something as simple and natural as just being who we are, remaining as we were made, take the long dark detour into the labyrinth of unfamiliar ways?
What has led so many of us to abandon ourselves to that which is less meaningful, to that which contributes less dignity to the human person, to that which in the end almost always fails to satisfy?
What has led so many to stop exploring the meaning of their journey? To stop exploring the wisdom and truth that mystery can often supply where reality cannot? To stop exploring how words can fall short and silence itself can be the wildest place on earth, screaming out understandings of which words have not even dreamt?
How did we find ourselves on the bridge to obscurity and indistinct shadows though we started out such clear and unmistakable wonders to everyone?
And how have so many been led to forget that those things which matter most in life we were designed in the guts of our genes to pursue relentlessly and passionately all the days of our lives?
Pâté.
It’s only chopped liver with a lot of help added.
After all.
October 1975
Photo Credits Text: Talarico / Calligraphy: DuBosch / Photography: Bachhuber Note: This calligraphy was designed as a book, and only a random sampling of pages from it appears herein.
