Why You Cannot Learn to Be a Wise Woman

✦ Hearth Fire Talks ✦

Why You Cannot Learn to Be a Wise Woman

This year, in Inanna Salon, I'm guiding a group of women through a shared journey into the Yi Jing. There are no prerequisites. Everyone comes and goes, reads, practices, or does nothing at all, according to her own needs. We don't advance. We don't get grades. We evolve into whatever we need to become.

The other night, one woman stormed out — virtually, but still — because she "wasn't going to waste any more time with beginners."

Evolving and broadening the way we make sense of the world is a basic human need. When this happens over the course of a lifetime, we sometimes call it the cultivation of wisdom. There are no shortcuts. There are no honours students who spend their nights reading twice as much as their minds and bodies can actually absorb.

Wisdom grows the way a forest grows, not the way a head of lettuce grows. Artificial light and enough fertilizer will get you a watery salad in six weeks. A forest takes centuries, and no amount of fertilizer will speed it up.

There Are No Hierarchies

Knowledge can be accumulated through force, determination, and sheer stubbornness. Wisdom cannot. Wisdom grows the way mycelium grows: every part either evolves or is recycled into fertilizer for what comes next. In a system governed by wisdom, there is no waste and no rejects. There are no bad pupils expelled from class, and no pampered A-students recruited to add prestige to the enterprise.

For wisdom to grow, all parts of a person must be involved. Some parts grow through rest and digestion. Others need to be shocked awake — by illness, by confrontation with whatever they'd rather avoid. Others need to be coaxed gently back to life. Some are woken by one lucky accident. Others need years of silent, unglamorous observation.

Schools Were Never Built for This

Our schools were never built for the growth of a person, let alone her wisdom. A rare, enlightened teacher might encourage social skills and the ability to function inside a group. But mostly, this is treated as a necessary step in producing humans who can take themselves to market.

The better the school, the higher the future market value of its students. So from the very start, some children are faster, better, and better graded than others — and participation trophies, and declarations that "we are all winners," only add insult to injury. We know, from a very young age, exactly who the real winners are, and who is being fobbed off with the junk food of insincere praise.

Most of us grew whatever personality we could on that thin soil. We added an unending string of extracurricular activities, courses, and therapies to make up for what we were told we lacked. But however hard we try — even once the door is wide open — we rarely make it all the way out of the original cage. Its bars are made of feeling inadequate, feeling like we are not enough.

The system branded our being "less than." And that was that.

Leaving the Grading System

We can, however, leave the grading system altogether, and simply be. This is where autonomy begins — and maybe, wisdom too.

When a group of Zen practitioners sits together in silence, who can say which one is meditating faster?

When a group of women immerses herself, together, in a system of ancient, deliberately illogical associations so intricate that three thousand years of searching has never gotten to the bottom of it — who, exactly, is going to point out the winners?

This is the same tension I've spent years circling in my Abalone novels — a mute magical healer in ancient China who cannot be fast-tracked into her gift, who isn't permitted to skip a single year of confusion, humiliation and loneliness on the way to it.

No luminous pearl gifted by the Dragon princess, no forbidden potion will shortcut the cultivation of wisdom.

Wisdom, in Abalone’s world as in ours, comes only to those willing to be slowly, patiently recycled by it.