From Language to Life edit BY PARKER J. PALMER

From Language to Life edit
BY PARKER J. PALMER


https://onbeing.org/blog/from-language-to-life/

metaphor/names our experience of life. 

metaphors are more than mirrors to reality — they often become reality, transmuting themselves from language into the living of our lives.

metaphor can create a fatalism/
an obsession 
Paranoia/dissociation

Seasons:
metaphor for the movement of life

lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons

does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all — and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.

seasons as metaphor:
continually frame our lives. 

master metaphor of our era/
comes from manufacturing/
We do not believe that we “grow” our lives — we believe that we “make” them

in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.

reducing the world to mere “raw material” that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.

metaphor/our lives are dependent on an inexorable cycle of seasons, on a play of powers that we can conspire with but never controlthat we can make whatever kind of life we want, 

 a culture/insists... we can make whatever kind of life we want, whenever we want it. 
we are always in charge.

[what does one do when all places seem to be occupied and controlled by an enemy/
places where people come to challenge and reform the distortions of both culture and ego 
the nature of the occupation/ it's become enemy occupied territory ... occupied by the Enemy Within one/ the Enemy Within/ one has become one's enemy] 

reform/ways of thinking and doing


 “raw material” on which we make all the demands/this ecology makes demands on us even as it sustains our lives. We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.

it is good to know that there is comfort as well as challenge in the metaphor of life as a cycle of seasons/

Illumined by that image, we see that we are not alone in the universe. We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth. We can, and we must — if we want our sciences to be humane, our institutions to be sustaining, our healings to be deep, our lives to be true.