Keeping the acorn to believe you can fly

March 12, 2009

Dear Leslie,

Watching the acrobatic artists in Cirque Eloize perform this week at the River Campus, I wondered if when asked as children what they wanted to do when they grow up, they said, "I want to fly."

Most of the performers fly, either suspended inside a hoop or from long straps attached to the ceiling or bounding 20 or 30 feet above a hidden trampoline.

In "The Soul's Code," James Hillman says the nature-versus-nurture argument over how we become whatever we become ignores a much more powerful influence. He refers to the acorn theory, the idea that each of us is born with an image that defines us.

Call it a sense of fate, of calling, of inherently knowing what we want from life. Knowing we were born to fly, or sing, or any of the countless ways of fulfilling our destiny. The theory also accounts for "mediocrity," a word that can be attached to no one's soul. "Character is not what you do, it's the way you do it," Hillman writes.

Hillman is a psychologist, a calling that has a lot of skin in the notion that upbringing and environment determine who we are. But our Declaration of Independence contains the truth, Hillman believes, that being created equal beings being created free. And free is expressing the beauty in each of our souls.

Of course, some lose track of their acorn or don't believe in its power.

"How do you like teaching?" ask people I haven't seen in a while. People I have seen more recently ask, "Do you still like teaching?"

They must suspect the truth, that liking teaching can depend on the time of day and the day of the week the question is asked. My answer is still yes.

My students are trying to divine what to do with their lives. For some, writing is a calling. They were meant to tell stories.

Some are stories they have written. Some are stories they tell me to explain why they haven't written the story they were assigned. Hillman cites example upon example of people who had trouble at school because their calling was so much stronger. Picasso never mastered the alphabet.

Performers come to the Cirque Eloize in Montreal from all over the world. They come to play marimbas and violin and flute and guitar and drums and clown and dance and juggle. And fly.

Most of us as children jumped out of trees or off hillsides imagining we could fly. These children believed they could.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.