by Tamsin Kerr

Created on: July 18, 2008   Last Updated: November 03, 2010

There is a Sufi story in which a village asks a nearby wise woman for help. She asks them, do you know the solution?' When the villages say no', she says, then you're not ready to hear it.' Still in trouble a month later, they call her back, more wily. When she asks, do you know the solution?', they say yes'. Then you don't need me to tell you!' She leaves again. When the desperate villagers call her back once again, half say yes' and half say no'. Good,' she says, the half that knows can tell the half that doesn't'. The head man realises that they will have to find their own answer from within the village, rather than listening to outside experts, however wise. Perhaps their consequent solution is appropriate and local as well as being accepted by the entire village, despite and because of its painstaking development. The wise woman has shown them their answers lie within.

There is a difference between getting wisdom and having wisdom. Getting wisdom requires a buying in of skills and knowledge. I might wish to research enough to produce a book. I might want to move to the country to find a closer link to land. I might wish for an indigenous soul. I might want to get art skills so as to improve my creativity. I might seek education: from books, from land, from spirit, from art, from community, from facts. I aspire to the getting of wisdom through future changes in my doing and being. I might in addition wish to educate the world so that it too behaves better in future. Getting wisdom will require doing something new, something different. Getting wisdom is based on originality and change. It is in this doing, that I might find wisdom, later.

But there is another perhaps more grounded and stable - methodology. Rather than believe that wisdom is only possible by standing someplace new, by being different and better, I could look within and beneath where I stand now. I could celebrate the imagination within more local time and immediate space. I could find myself native in my existing reality. I might quietly act within present capabilities, rather than rail against barrenness. I might think the thick time of hearsay' (in Paul Carter's words, 2004: 94) to be more important than the dates of history. I stay on my side of the mountain, investigating its bounded view more fully. I value the wilder parts, both within me and around me. While I celebrate my own culture, I remain porous to other's myriad influences.

I rely upon older memories of those around me, the

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