I see Wisdom as a beautiful, elegant lady who lives in a stone seaside terrace in the Mediterranean. She wears a long silk dress, a single pendant necklace, and a dainty slight heal.
The front of her house grows in bougainvillea and she stands at the steps, inviting people to dinner. She has them over, prepares and lays a feast, and people laugh and laugh at the dinner. The wine is good, the lamb is good and the people feel worthy, valued and loved.
Wisdom ponders deep things, she loves beauty, she is strong and she loves to laugh. She prefers a sound statement to silver, she prefers good words to gold. I imagine her as someone who is happy to use her hands herself. She can pot and repot plants, she can mend a sweater, she loves using a workboard.
She knows when she needs to empty out. She knows how to breathe, how to fill her lungs, and how to exhale. She knows how good it is to get sun on the skin, to wash the day in the sea, to sit with a tea and look at the ocean.
She doesn’t need anyone else to grow into who she is. She doesn’t need to pass a ritual to enter her womanhood. She is already there. She takes on responsibility. She understands cause and consequence. Her life feels spacious. People enter her home for breath.
Wisdom emphasises the intrinsic goodness that comes from the simply life. “Better to be ordinary and work for a living, then act important and starve in the process,” she says.
She talks about the value of language. Better speak less, than speak words that do not give life, she says. “Rash language cuts and maims, but there is healing in the words of the wise,” she says.
“Many words rush along like rivers in the flood, but deep wisdom flows up from artesian springs.” The artesian springs neither run dry. They are deeply connected – to the source – and they never run out of water. We can always draw from the wall.
Wisdom says that those who follow their hearts, thrive. It can be easy to get wisdom mixed up with ‘right-doing’, that is a legalistic righteousness that falls upon a cultural framework, rather than pursuing righteousness for wisdom’s sake. Wisdom is far more stunning, far more nuanced and compelling than living out of legalism. The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life.
Wisdom calls for living out of desire. As children, we find it far easier to live out of desire. Somewhere along the road, it gets knocked out of us. We think we have to wear the right things, get the right degrees and read the right books. Not desire. Desire comes from a deep, internal place that is unique to each one of us.
she, the sojourner 