A landslide of rejection letters arrived in my inbox. It had taken me only seven years to write my memoir that will not sell, they said. Only celebrity memoirs sell, they said.
What could I do? Bow my head while the rats of disappointment nibbled at my toes and keep writing something with a smile on my lips and a sting of tears behind my eyes. It’s okay, I tell myself. It’s okay. More than five hundred and fifty years ago, Martin Luther, a great German thinker and theologian said, even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. Inspired by him, I keep my head down, scribbling something on a page.
Since moving to India, we have been saying ‘Namaste’ with prayer hands to greet people. The literal meaning of that word is, I bow to the divine in you. A deeper interpretation of the greeting is, the divine in me bows to the divine in you.
When confronted with an irreversible loss, an unwelcome change, an unwanted happening, a storm of huge protestations arises, eventually transforming into a profound calm of humbling, a kneeling to kiss the ground, a bowing down to all that is beyond us, to everything that was and is and ever will be.
Inside the fold of that humility hides the softness that the world needs and we need from ourselves. After we have fully faced the fallibility of being human, we can stretch our arms up and touch the sky of self-forgiveness with our fingertips. After we have felt the crushing weight of circumstance, we can expand into a shimmering ocean of compassion. After we have been swallowed by the dark void of yesterday, we fully emerge into the warm new light of today. After we have lost ourselves in the fathomless depths of sorrow, we can be found by the lightness of a candyfloss-pink joy.
Humilitas is Latin for lowness, smallness, insignificance, and littleness. The word humility originates from humus which means, Earth.
All we are springs from the Earth, the repository of life. Being of the Earth, we hold great potential for new growth and possibility. Being stripped of our dreams, naked in the face of our loss, we are invited to plant new seeds, nurture them in the fresh soil of our humility under the warm light of today, so they may possibly grow into apple trees.