Bow Tie o’ the Day and I have been ruminating on the ideas of purpose and passion today. Naturally, for me, that meant I dug up one of my haggard copies of Annie Dillard’s book of essays called TEACHING A STONE TO TALK. The first essay in the collection is called “Living Like Weasels,” and it references the story of a man who once shot an eagle out of the sky. (Bad man!) Upon examining the freshly dead eagle, the man discovered the dry skull of a weasel with its jaws attached to the eagle’s throat. It seemed a reasonable assumption that the eagle had at one time pounced on the weasel, and the weasel had swiftly and instinctively swiveled and bit the eagle’s throat. The weasel lost its life to the eagle, but its dead jaws remained clenched on the eagle’s throat for who-knows-how-long until the eagle itself fell prey to its executioner, and all that remained of the weasel was its skull’s clenched jaw. The weasel latched on, with all of its instinctive weasel purpose and passion, most of its body falling away piece by piece over time. The weasel flew high, even to its own end. But imagine what unbelievable things that dying weasel got to see—if only for a few moments—of the world from up in the sky, where it had never before been in its tiny weasel life!
The essay ends with this call to find our own purpose and passion:
“We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting….
“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”
Chew on that. Ponder those images. Then ask yourself if you hold that tightly to anything? Got purposes? Got passions? If you’re lucky, you know exactly who you are and what you’re about. You’re already flying.
