Dancing in the Light by Shirley Maclaine Read Free Book Online Page B

clicking over.”
    Yes, I remembered the books, and the discussions that Mom and Dad shared with us.
    Mother always encouraged self-reflection and reverence for nature. I remembered the many times she would suggest a long walk by the stream near our house so that I could commune with myself in the company of the birds and trees and rushing water. During an unhappy interlude in a young teenage love affair, she would say, “Shirl, stop worrying about your boyfriend and what he’s doing. You should be out in the wind and the rain. Go stand under a tree and then wonder and think about yourself. You’re too young to be so intensely involved with ‘going steady.’ There’s a magical world of nature out there that you’re missing. You’ll know more about yourself if you allow nature to be your teacher.”
    And Dad, as a teacher himself, regarded education as a dedication. He believed knowledge was power. Knowledge was freedom. To help inspire a young mind to search for truth had been the cornerstone of his life. He not only lived up to that dedication in his chosen profession as a teacher and principal and superintendent of schools in Virginia, but he brought that dedication into the home. There was no question I could ask that he would casually brush away.
    Daddy lit his pipe and crossed one leg over the other as though he were about to launch into a lecture.
    “Monkey,” he said, “do you know the definition of the words ‘education’ or ‘educate’?”
    “No,” I said, “I’ve never thought about it.”
    “Well, they come from the Latin words ed , out of, and ducar , to lead. Educar , to lead out of, or to bring out that which is within. What does that mean to you?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe it means to lead out of yourself the knowledge you already know.”
    He smiled gently. “Yes, it could. But what do you mean?”
    “Well, if we really never die, if we just leave the body like you did, and then if we do continually come back or reincarnate into new bodies, then we must have done that many times. If we have done that many times, then we each must have tremendous knowledge and experience from lives we’ve led before. So maybe the ancients realized that education was just helping people get in touch with what they already knew. And maybe our higher selves already know everything. Isn’t that what Plato and Socrates believed?”
    Daddy thought a moment. “Yes,” he said, “I think you could put it that way. Plato professed to know that other civilizations such as Atlantis existed. Maybe he was having an imaginary vision or maybe he was speaking from former knowledge of those times. I’m not sure what the difference is. Possibly imagination is simply a form of memory. Most of our great thinkers have professed to have had an intuition or guidance that they couldn’t describe, something they ultimately called a force or God or a higher recognition of truth that required a quantum leap of inspired faith. As Carlyle put it, ‘The unfathomable SOMEWHAT which is not WE.’ Or as Matthew Arnold said, the ‘not ourselves’ which is in us and all around us.”
    I had never heard my father talk like this. Was this the man whom I had mentally dubbed a prejudiced bigot when he, perversely, insisted on calling black people “niggers”? Was this the man I believed had rotted his brains with booze so much that he reduced me to tears?
    “Art is the same thing,” said Mother. “Who knows where great art comes from? Who knows what inspiration and talent are?”
    “What do you think they are, Mother?” I asked.
    “I think,” she answered, “that everything comes from God.”
    “And what is God, then?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she answered. “But I know it’s there.”
    Daddy cleared his throat with a commanding hurrumphhh. He always did that when he was vitally interested in something.
    “What are you getting at, Monkey?” he asked with genuine curiosity on his face.
    I chose my words