| "Have you ever read CENTERING?" a friend asked me. "That book changed my life," she explained, with a knowing smile, "and I'll even loan you my copy." M. C. Richards was a potter, teacher, and poet, and her 1962 book is "a story of transformation" (p. 4). In his Foreward to the 25th Anniversay Edition of M.C.'s "truly subversive book" (p. ix), Matthew Fox writes, "I consider this book one of the great works of American philosophy: it is so cosmological, so feminist (without once using that term), so original, so full of wisdom, so post Cartesian, so nondualistic, so moral, and so fully a part of the mystical tradition of the West that one wonders from what source it arrived in our world . . . This is a prophetic and mystical book. Such books are dangerous. They are the kind dictators burn, churches tend to ignore, and consumer cultures leave on the shelf. For they have the power to awaken, to stir, to disturb, and to transform" (pp. vii-viii). After forty years, CENTERING remains as relevant as ever. The good news is that it's still in print. M. C. observes that, in our society, "ordinary education and social training seem to impoverish the capacity for free initiative and artistic imagination. We talk indepedence, but we enact conformity . . . Brains are washed (when they are not clogged), wills are standardized, that is to say immobilized. Someone within cries for help. There must be more to life than all these learned acts, all this highly conditioned consumption. A person wants to do something of his own, to feel his own being alive and unique. He wants out of bondage. He wants in to the promised land" (p. 43). Wisdom arrives through a childlike sense of wonder, or through "centering," as M. C. calls it. "Within us lives a merciful being," she observes, "who helps us to our feet however many times we fall" (p. 8). "Wisdom is not the product of mental effort," she tells us. Rather, it is a state of "total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience of meaning that can voice itself as wise action" (p. 15). She encourages us to "ride our lives like natural beasts, like tempests, like the bounce of a ball or the slightest ambiguous hovering of ash, the drift of scent: let us stick to those currents that can carry us, membering them with our souls. Our world personifies us, we know ourselves by it" (p. 7). "I sense this," she writes; "we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright, to be intact, to be persons" (p. 12). CENTERING is a "sensual, sexual, trusting" book "full of surprises" (p. xv) you'll want to share with your friends. G. Merritt |
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