Qualities

Can you find yourself in one (or many) of these qualities?

Longing
Longing speaks the language of dreams. She is a dancer and an actress. She knows tides and currents and pirates. She has swum in all the oceans, and traveled to places that the rest of us have only visited in our sleep. Although I have met Longing many times, it is not easy to describe her appearance. Even the gossip comumnist who notices everything could not quite remember Longing's height or the color of her sea-filled eyes.

Liberation
Liberation tried to commit suicide when he was seventeen. Things got worse before they got better. He was married to Terror for nearly ten years. One day, as he was wandering, famished and half-crazy, in the mountains, he bumped into Ecstasy. Ecstasy wept to be reunited with his old friend and taught Liberation a simple prayer. After that Liberation was free to leave Terror.

Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a strong woman, tender and earthly and direct. Since her children have left home, she has embarked on an extended walking tour, visiting ruins and old monuments, bathing in rivers and hot springs, traveling through the small towns and large pulsing cities, tracing the current of sorrow under the stories she hears. Sometimes the city authorities and officials don't want her within their gates. If the people want her there enough, though, she always manages to find a way inside.

Commitment
Commitment has kind eyes. He wears sturdy shoes. Everything is very vivid when he is around. It is wonderful to sit and have lunch in his gardens around harvest time. You can taste in the vegetables that the soil has been cared for. Because he is so serious, he loves clowns and balloons and fools and limericks. He has four daughters, grown now, but when they were little they always took him to the circus. He is more generous than most people. His heart is open. He is not afraid of life. He is married to Joy.

Suffering
Suffering teaches philosophy on a part-time basis. She likes the icy days in February when she can stay home from school, make thick soups, and catch up on her reading. With her white skin and dark hair, she even looks like winter. She has a slender face and dramatic cheekbones.

Guilt
Guilt is the prosecutor who knows how to make every victim feel like the criminal. She follows the scent of doubt and self-hatred to its sources. She will not tell you what you have done wrong. Her silence is brutal. Her disapproval surrounds you in an envelope of cold nameless terror. She says horrible things about me to the neighbors. In self-defense, sometimes I tell people what she says about me before she has the chance. I don't care as much as I did, but I can't pretend I don't care at all.

Clarity
My visits to Clarity are soothing now. He never tells me what to think or feel or do but shows me how to find out what I need to know. It was not always like this. I used to visit other people who visited him. Finally, I summoned up the courage to call on him myself. I still remember the first time I saw him. When I left, he presented me with a sketchbook and told me to draw the same thing every day until the drawing started to speak to me.

Creativity
Creativity is not efficient. She has a different relationship to time than most of us. A minute can last a day and a day can last an hour. She loves all the seasons. She is on intimate terms with the sun and the moon. Some people consider her selfish because she does what she wants. I have always found her to be gracious and most generous. She is certainly complex. If you have only met her in a serene mood, her flair for drama may offend you. She is not your aunt with the porcelain teapot who plays chamber music. If you are one of those people who only go to see her when she is starring in a major melodrama, you will not hear her rain songs. If you insist she is mad, you will never see how still her face is when she returns from a dream. She has a strong need to be occasionally anonymous. More than anyone else, Creativity understands the secret meanings of the months when nothing seems to get done.

All these qualities are from a wonderful book called "The Book of Qualities", sent to me by Dani, my fantabulous sister. Thank you, Babe-a-loo...I could spend days just sitting in the bathroom and reading it...luckily (for my colleagues) I have no heat in my bathroom and would freeze my bum off in no time at all...that makes such an activity highly impractical (;-P)