Last night a friend told me six words. The only way up is down.
This particular man has earned the prerogative to fling pithy comments at me. I dubbed him "Wise One" last year when he made me laugh and weep and laugh again in a fifteen minute trailer about his life.
I immediately
thought of a superball, which literally raised the bar for bouncing. The way to get a little neon orb to soar above my head is to slam it to the floor. The friend who coined those six words has himself hit the ground. There are still cement crumbs on his forehead, although his laugh lines provide camouflage.
The four of us were the last lingering guests at the local castle, shooed home by the weary hostess with a key in her hand. We reluctantly ambled to
our cars, still clutching the skirts of the evening's Memory even as she strolled up the circular stairs and waved us away. John and I lay our heads in a different state than this couple and last year we lived across an international border, so the time we spend an arm's length from them is in a higher tax bracket than the hours logged filling the dishwasher.
The cohesive factor in the
invitation list to the night's gala was ordination. These are people for whom wisdom is the quintessential skill on their resume. Yet I have on occasion noticed verbal sparring, not unlike a high school football game, as players scrabbled for the chance to grab the conversation like a football and tear across the field to score a goal of rightness. Wisdom, stripped of humility, loses its patina.
The only way up is down.
As chance would have
it the book I am reading reminded me that humility is related to humus, the kind of earth that grows good crops. As a cousin of humility, humus reverberates with the invitation to go down, down on your knees, where the soil is chocolate brown before you stand up and up to reach for a silk tasseled ear of corn high above your heav'n tipped head.
