Are you really successful?

The last chapter in Terry Tempest Williams [TTW] new book, Erosion - Essays of Undoing, begins with a wonderful quotation from David Orr. I'm seriously considering making it the basis for a personal manifesto on living my life as sustainably as possible.

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

is this a successful sunrise? how would we know?

Photo by J. Harrington

For a moment, let's hold off on the "need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind" and give some thought to "successful." Bob Dylan helps identify some aspects worthy of our consideration when he wrote Love Minus Zero/No Limit:

My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all

Years before Dylan wrote those zen-like, taoistic lines, a definition of "success," attributed to Emerson, although that's disputed by some, is this:

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.

Center for Book Arts window: does it tell a story?

Photo by J. Harrington

I have long enjoyed and admired the writings of both Dylan and Emerson. Each of them seems to find success to be more, much more, in line with David Orr's caution than with our contemporary, conventional "wisdom."

Now, it's time we can focus on the need, for "more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers." Peacemaking is far from my forte, although I've been known to fumble and stumble my way through some peacemaking efforts. My relationship with healers ended, much to my mother's dismay, when I transferred from pre-med as a major to English. I seem to be most comfortable in the humanities and at the time I was in college there was little, if any, though of exposing would be doctors to poetry. Restoration is part of what I helped work on before I became a recovering planner. Brownfields, industrial building reuse, historic preservation were all elements of my yearly activities. These days I find restorative agriculture to be a fascinating topic. I have long been a lover of my wife, my family, various dogs, wild lands, rivers, the Atlantic Ocean, and their respective inhabitants. That leaves storytelling. I'm a better reader than writer but I work on the latter and include storytelling as an aspiration. By my reckoning, in terms identified by Emerson, within the perspective of Dylan's love, I believe I've been successful and the Mr. Orr, while clearly correct about the majority's definition, needs to recognize there is, and has been for some time, a well thought out minority report.

Each of us must decide whether we will define success by transactions or relations. We've created some horrendous ruts by walking the middle of the road between those two kinds of relationships we can have with the world. It's time, and then some, to ponder the questions Mary Oliver poses to us, the last one being the most important. But you knew that.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

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