Cherishing what lies beneath.
A blessing for all who remember.
Dear fellow traveler, and welcome to all who are new here!
I came across this photo of an old door today that I took on a pilgrimage to Italy several years ago. Something appealed to me. Was it the old layers peeling off? The beauty of the patina?
And is the paint peeling from the door or is the door freeing itself from all the accumulated layers of age, seeking its origin and source?
We are always quick to paint over. A fresh coat of paint, they say, and everything looks like new.
But what if the layers of the door could speak? Would they tell us tales from former times, of people who walked through the door, of conversation overheard, of kisses on the threshold?
What doors of life come to your mind? Doors guarding old memories, or doors to inner rooms long closed?
So here is my humble blessing for you today:
May you come to cherish
the many layers covering
the door of your heart.
May you find courage
to listen to their memories
the good and the bad
and the long forgotten.
Keep the good
bid farewell to the burdensome
dust off the flaking paint
from your heart’s door.
Let go of the old which longs to become dust
and cherish the patina of what is beneath.
…
Be the patina
Be the door
and the threshold.
***
May it be so. And may peace abound within you, Almut
PS: If you can, leave a heart, a word or a line which resonated with you in the comments, so we know you have been here :-)
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About Almut
Almut Furchert, Dr. phil., Dipl. Psych. is a German American scholar and practitioner, a psychologist turned philosopher turned writer, traveler, photographer, retreat leader and mother of a pre-schooler. She has taught and published on authors like Kierkegaard, Buber, Frankl, Yalom, Edith Stein, and Hildegard of Bingen. Almut is also a Benedictine Oblate and lives with her family in a little college town in MN.
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All these beautiful musings on Almut's post remind me that remembering is a verb. It is something we do. Sometimes we feel as though our memories are imposed on us (the same way we often feel our emotions are simple reactions and not constructions). But we construct our memories. We rehearse those constructions and elaborate them, or fail to maintain them and let them slip away. We cherish some and disregard others. We edit and coax, and shape them like stage directors of an internal play. We are constantly choosing, constructing stories, and fitting the pieces of our memories into them. We ignore this ongoing work at our own peril.
Almut's lovely poetic blessing is a call to be mindful in doing this, to practice discernment, to reflect on how we relate to our memories. It is heartening to know, and to be reminded, that we can do this.
Beautiful thoughts that lead to quiet reflection. Doors and their weathering are like that. My favorite lines are, "Let go of the old which longs to become dust / and cherish the patina of what is beneath." Good memories are such good medicine and I think they are from God's hand.