There is a teaching story from the tradition that I return to often.
A blind man and a lame man were in a forest when a fire broke out.
The blind man could run but could not see where to go. The lame man could see but could not run.
Separately, both would perish.
Together — the lame man sat on the blind man’s shoulders, directed with his eyes, the blind man ran with his legs — they escaped the fire.
This is not a story about disability. It is a story about interdependence. About the fact that what is absent in one person is often present in another, and that survival — and more than survival, flourishing — depends on the willingness to acknowledge this and to act on it.
The tradition consistently uses this as a metaphor for the relationship between different members of the community. The scholarly person and the practical person. The wealthy person and the resourceful poor person. The elder with experience and the young person with energy.
Every one of us is both the blind man and the lame man in different areas of life.
You are seeing in places where someone near you cannot see. You are mobile in directions where someone near you is stuck. And they see what you cannot see. They can move where you are frozen.
Real community is the conscious organization of this interdependence.
At Divine Care Foundation, we don’t serve. We participate. We bring what we have and we receive what the communities we work with have, which is often something we could not have found anywhere else: resilience, creativity, knowledge of survival, the particular wisdom that comes from living close to necessity.
We are carrying each other out of the forest.
