In Response to The Woodcarver

Taken from Parker Palmer's "The Active Life"

We need ego-strength to live and live fruitfully. But it is a paradoxical truth that in order to gain the strength that comes from knowing our gifts we may have to fight the ego's drive to dominate our lives. The woodcarver fought through fasting, forgetting, and dying to the false demands of his ego. In that process he penetrated the ego's self -delusions and arrived at a truth about himself, his gifts, and his relation to the reality around him, a truth that allowed him to transcend the traps inherent in the skillfulness necessary for action.

It is important to realize that the woodcarver's native gift may not have been the obvious one -- his capacity to employ woodworking tools with consummate skill. Even if he had been born with the manual dexterity that woodworking requires, his skill with those particular tools surely took him years of practice to perfect. A careful reading of the story shows that the woodcarver possesses several other gifts, all of which are essential to the mastery he demonstrates: the capacity to wait patiently for insight to emerge, the capacity to trust in the outcomes of an uncertain process, the capacity to take risks even under pressure, the capacity to speak his truth even when it is not what people want to hear. Any of these may be his birthright gift, without which his technical ability to carve would make him no more than an average artisan.


His excellence isn't in his skill but his gifts. I wonder what would happen if we all embraced our gifts more. I know some of my gifts are relationship to people, empathy, humility, compassion and energy. I know I do not have the gift of organization, patients, or details. If I am to succeed I need to embrace the gifts I have and transfer that into a relevant skill. Hence I may never be a paper pusher or professional fisherman.