Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange...
-William Shakespeare, The Tempest
That's part of Ariel's song, the one that he sings to Ferdinand as he guides the young prince to Prospero. It's a beautiful song, but I think that these few lines are my favorite. They're brilliant, because at this point of the story Ferdinand believes his father to be drowned.
One would think such a situation would be devastating, not brilliant. And, it is. But Ariel, that ingenious airy spirit, offers such beautiful words. Such marvelous comfort.
To transform an idea so awful as a rotting underwater corpse into something so magical. To suggest that even the ugly can yield beauty, that death can yield something more than dust and bones, that the tragic--that all the tragic, and not just King Alonso's supposed death, or any death actually--can perhaps means something more than tragedy, that it could actually be a means of molding us into something stronger, better, fairer, or something closer to the sorts of things that make up an elusive perfect world.
There are so many tragedies, rotting dreams, decomposing circumstances, pasts that could eat away at your skin. In short, there is so much pain in the world. The phrase sounds trite and overused, and I am cringing as I say it. It is the kind of overused where well-meaning people shake their heads and feel sympathy for all the orphans in the world before they say something like "Let them eat cake" because they don't realize that there is no cake to be had in such places of pain. Sometimes, there aren't even breadcrumbs.
I went to two orphanages this week with a group of people from NuSkin Japan. At one of the orphanages, a little girl named Nancy latched onto my side for the afternoon. She was bright, and smart, and so happy, and as we were laughing together at a joke, she grabbed my hand and looked up into my face and seriously asked, "Will you be my mom?" And I laughed.
I laughed because I didn't know what else to do. I thought about all the other people who had told her yes, or no, or perhaps just laughed as I did, and then left her. I thought about how long it would take her to stop smiling and laughing and playing with all the orphanage visitors, how long it would take her to realize that too many of them came to see her because she was an orphan, not because they necessarily wanted to take her out of it. And I felt slightly guilty, because I saw the older orphans, the teenagers who were standing back, watch us with their unreadable dark eyes, and I knew that they knew as well as I did that after we had toured their orphanage, seen their bedrooms and paltry belongings, played with the little ones, and patted ourselves on the back for spending time with them and giving them vitameal, that we would leave and not look back. And I wondered how long it took those ones to figure out the game, how many rejections it took before they stopped amusing visitors in the vain hope of gaining a family.
And so when I told Nancy, "I can't," it broke my heart, because whether or not the phrase was rehearsed or how many people she'd told it to, whether or not she said it with a little shard of hope, whether or not she knew what was happening, she didn't deserve it. She didn't deserve anything of what had happened to her--she was just a kid, and she just wanted to belong somewhere. And I wanted so badly to give her something more, to let her know that she was important, that she belonged, that all the rejection in the world couldn't take away who she was. I wanted to assure her that I wasn't exploiting her, using her, playing with her emotions. That the orphanage and all of their sad stories weren't just an ethnographic experience. But I couldn't, because in that short moment, I wasn't sure myself, and I couldn't have told you why I was there if you'd asked me. It was a horrible feeling, because I felt like I was learning something at her expense, because I did grow up in that 20-second span of life, and I still had nothing to offer her. And as I said, "I can't," because I didn't want to lie to her, all I could do was hope and pray that even with all the ugliness and tragedy in her life, that nothing of her doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
The NuSkin Japan people brought polaroid cameras and took tons of pictures and gave the pictures to the kids. The kids loved it, and collected them like they were Pokemon cards. Nancy gave me one of her treasured polaroids to remember her by, and I told her that I would, so...here she is!
 |
| meet nancy! |
If even death couldn't stop the wondrous process of a sea-change, there's got to be hope for the diseased, the orphaned, the brokenhearted. Can tragedy wreak its havoc upon us and can grief bring us to our knees and can the crushing weight of all the uncontrollable forces in the universe rest upon our shoulders, and can we still lose nothing of ourselves but that it be transformed into something beautiful? I hope so.
And perhaps most importantly, can we play a role in that, in enacting sea-change? In ourselves? Most definitely. In others? I believe so. We are asked to bear one another's burdens, to mourn with those that mourn, and to comfort those that stand in need of comfort. To help transform pain into relief, into something beautiful, more whole. I need to figure out my role in all of this--how can I best accomplish this? I'm not sure yet.
Sea-change. See change. Here's to limiting decomposition and stagnation, to encouraging transformation. Here's to doing it with the help of God, the stubbornness (and brokenness) of our own selfwill, and the love of others. May we always give love, and may we learn to accept it.
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