Of Moles and Mystics

This past week has been one of the worst in recent memory.  It brings to mind a story in Aesop's fables about a young mole who went to his mother and told her he could see.  Now, as most people know, sight is something traditionally lacking in moles.  This mole's mother decided to test him.  She placed in front of him a piece of frankincense, and asked him what it was.

"A stone," replied the little mole.

"Not only are you blind," his mother answered, "but you have lost your sense of smell as well."

As a symbol of my own psychic momentum, the little mole, both blind and without a sense of smell, would seem to aptly describe my inability of late to effectively navigate my world.  The following is a brief but not exhaustive list of the struggles that have managed to undo me this week:  yet another tiresome, inconvenient snowstorm; mounting frustrations at work; the seeming ephemerality of what I thought was a solid, life-long friendship; a stubbornly oppositional 17-year old daughter; a (hopefully) minor health issue; and most prominently, standing (figuratively and, as often as possible, literally) next to one of my oldest, dearest friends and watching in horror as her partner, an intelligent, kind, and gentle man of only 50, teeters over the abyss of advanced stage 4 pancreatic cancer.  If the little mole is a symbol of my own inner potentiality, this week mine is decidedly retrograde. 

What did manage to ground me somewhat this week, if not lift my spirits very much, was a return to the rich, potent work of the Nobel Prize (Literature) winning writer Doris Lessing.  A chance remark about Lessing by a woman I met in Jamaica led me to order a rare book of interviews, Putting The Questions Differently:  Interviews with Doris Lessing (1964-1994), which in turn led me to an unread novel of hers already on my bookshelves, The Marriages of  Zones Three, Four, and Five.  I finished both in a few days time.  I am also currently listening to an Audible version of The Good Terrorist, so my Lessing immersion this week has been intense.  While I have read most of Lessing's prolific output--starting in my early 20's and ongoing--there are a few treasures that still await me, as these latest reads proved.   Lessing doesn't mince words and she doesn't suffer fools, so while reading her did not have a palliative effect, her brilliance and intellectuality at least distracted me from my own petty woes for a bit. 

What was intensely interesting to learn, especially from the Interviews and the Marriages novel, was the enormous influence Lessing's study of and immersion in Sufism had on her writing.  I know nothing about Sufis but the Interviews led me to another book, The Sufis, which I just started, by the Sufi Master Idries Shah, who Lessing studied with in the 1960's.  Which brings me full circle, because that book opens with a brief meditation on why Sufis consider the fabulist, Aesop, a Sufi Master in his own right.  I love Aesop, and recently heard the mole fable, narrated above, on a BBC podcast I follow (In Our Time).  So, while many of the dots of my life are not connecting this week, it is, somehow, compensatory and gratifying that my reading dots, at least, are.