The Path of the Pearl

I’m at the point where most of my friends are talking about getting older, and they’re grieving the fact they no longer have the same sense of possibility about their future like they did when they were younger. The essence is, “The world is no longer my oyster.” But have you actually thought about that expression? Oysters are closed, tight, dark. They’re not warm, open, or inviting.

Does that mean when we use that expression, we’re saying the world is a tightly closed, dark place? Or are we saying that we’re the precious jewelry formed in oysters, a pearl? If so, that’s not particularly flattering either. Natural pearls are formed when a parasite works its way into an oyster, and as a defense mechanism, the oyster coats the irritant with layer after layer until voila! A pearl.

That’s kind of gross to think about, but honestly, where I’m at in my life, that tracks. The world can be scary, uncomfortable, uncertain, filled with irritants, but through that experience, we emerge as pearls. We come out different from what we were before, and without knowing the exact shape we’ll be in when we emerge.

It’s not only pearls that come from hardship. There are wildflowers that only grow because they were exposed to high heat from fires, which is called scarification. Spiritual teacher Tosha Silver talks about this, too. She says, “True surrender to Love isn’t just about being ‘guided.’ It’s a freakin holy alchemy that you can neither control nor predict. You are ravished. You are changed.” I wish this weren’t true, and I wish I were changed and shaped in the ways that fit with my vision, but, well, that’s never happened.

My spiritual practice is about finding God in everything – the mundane and the extraordinary, the suffering and the ease. There is nowhere I can go to escape the divine, and that means God is here, too, in the transformation process, in the wars, in the famine. In all of it. How will we be different on the other side? Will we be bright and shiny pearls, stronger as a result of living in the dark, confined, irritating spaces? Maybe. It’s something I, personally, am hoping for.

I dream of a world where we remember that if the world is our oyster, that means we are the pearl. A world where we understand beauty and transformation arise from hardship, and that’s always been so. A world where we recognize life is a path of change. A world where we understand, in essence, we are all on the path of the pearl.

Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.