The Salt Doll

Hello,

Today I have been thinking about living life with a purpose and feeling renewed every day. I don't want to live my life without getting up every morning knowing and feeling that there is something beyond and that what I do every day matters. I want to get up grateful of who I am and what I do and be humble of the opportunities and challenges I get. I don't want to live a life without meaning, without discovering the depth of life and without being surprised by what life has to offer. I don't want to get up every morning tired to go to work but I want to be filled with joy to be able to do what I like.

I want to get up every morning giving thanks to God because there is more to do than I possibly can imagine, because there is more to see and understand than what I can possibly expect and because there is something more I can learn if I am willing to get immersed in it. I want to live a life full of possibilities and openness, full of rediscoveries and self-awareness.

In the midst of this reflection I remembered a poem called the Salt Doll, which reminds me of the need to go beyond and find myself in the journey for discovering the unknown.

Read the Salt Doll below.

Peace,

Malu

The salt doll

After a long pilgrimage on dry land a doll of salt came to the sea and discovered something
she had never seen and could not possibly understand.

She stood on the firm ground, a solid little doll of salt, and saw there was another ground that
was mobile, insecure, noisy, strange and unknown.

She asked the sea, “But what are you?”
The sea replied, “I am the sea.”
The doll said, “What is the sea?”
To which the sea replied, “It is me.”
Then the doll said, “I cannot understand, but I want to; how can I?”
The sea answered, “Touch me.”

So the doll shyly put forward a foot and touched the water and she got a strange impression that it was something that began to be knowable. She withdrew her leg, looked and saw that her toes had gone, and she was afraid and said, ‘Oh, but where are my toes? What have you done to me?”

And the sea said, “You have given something in order to understand.”

The doll went farther and farther into the sea and the water took away small bits of the doll’s salt, and at every moment she had a sense of understanding more and more, and yet of not being able to say what the sea was.

As she went deeper, she melted more and more, repeating: “But what is the sea?” At last a wave dissolved the rest of her and the doll said: “It is I!”

She had discovered what the sea was, but not yet what the water was.

(Anthony Bloom: Living Prayer, Libra, London, 1966, pp.105-106)