Author: Sydney Hanson Mandt

I wrote this in 2019 and edited it for clarity in 2022.

I’ve been stuck lately. There are different ways to describe it – hopeless, depressed, attenuated to failure.

Another way could be numb – to creativity, to possibility of change and fulfilling my potential. I go to my daily job from 8:30am to 3pm, maybe run an errand after work, go home, make dinner, and do very little the rest of the evening until I can finally put myself to bed with the justification that I have to get up for work the next day.

Somehow I manage to get the BARE minimum of my other duties accomplished. I do enough laundry to have something clean to wear, shop in little bits here and there to keep a modicum of food on hand, shower at least every other day. As far as my Baha’i responsibilities are concerned, there are assembly duties I have literally been avoiding for years, including archiving old papers, calling National to ask about assembly business, updating membership and records. Guilt weighs heavy on me, but is only partially why I have so little energy to move forward.

Doug sees my struggles. He’s amazingly patient with me – more than I am with myself. He found a person online who offers life coaching and encouraged me to give her a call. I have been considering it, but she charges $350 for a 1 hour phone call. And though the hour may give me some of the direction and momentum I need, there are several reasons I drag my feet.

1. $350 is about what I get paid for 3 6-hour days at work. That’s 18 hours at my day gig for 1 hour of her time. I get spending anxiety as it is, and given our money situation, I don’t feel good about this ratio of input to output. Yes, due to not having health insurance this year, we have some savings. But that will be spent on my dental implant, plus I would really like to replace the tub in the girls’ house, since it is gross, at best, and full of health-damaging black mold at worst.
2. The Baha’i writings talk about asking God for help – a version of “ask and ye shall receive”. It feels like I am betraying God, like I don’t have full faith in him if I ask someone else for help. 

Then again, I am reminded of the joke about the guy whose home is in the path of flood waters. People come to his door to warn him and offer to drive him to a safe zone. But his answer is, “God will save me.” Then, when the water enters his home, a rescuer in a boat comes by to pick him up. But the man refuses to go, saying “God will save me.” The flood is so bad that eventually the homeowner has to climb onto the roof to escape the waters. A helicopter comes to take him off the roof, but again he stays put, saying, “God will save me.” The waters finally drown him, and when the man dies and goes to heaven, he confronts God. “Why didn’t you save me?” God says, “What do you mean? I sent you a car, a boat, and a helicopter!”

I believe that a Divine Force created human beings. And I believe that Life, as an emanation of this force, offers innumerable lessons for humanity’s education.

Sometimes life feels so complicated, with too many unrelated parts to make them work together coherently. Then again, the human body is made of many seemingly unrelated parts that all work together quite wonderfully.

The human body is one of my favorite metaphors.

So, with that, I take my brain, with its current pre-migraine sensations, and my strangely tweaky left shoulder, and my skin, basking in warmth and reveling in the cooling breeze, and I ask God, the Creator, to take these disparate elements that make up this person I have been made to be, and to move them into a fully functioning, Self-actualized form.

And to please help me recognize the modes of transportation that have been divinely sent to help me get to where I need to be.

I remember hearing this story as a child.

It’s harvest time, and the ants are working hard to gather food. But the grasshopper doesn’t help and instead plays his violin, sings songs, and generally enjoys himself. Then, of course, when winter comes, the grasshopper doesn’t have stores of food and must turn to the ants to be fed and to survive. My young self came to two conclusions:

1. The ants were good – industrious, forward-thinking, practical.

2. The grasshopper was bad – lazy, disobedient, disrespectful of the serious and wise.

As an adult, I think of this story differently. It occurs to me that the grasshopper is not being lazy, but is in fact showing integrity and courage by being himself. He is a creative who brings forth melodies from the invisible realm. He crafts the magic of music, which speaks to hearts and lifts spirits.

The ants are more inclined toward physical preparation and logical action, and this has the positive result of allowing them to physically survive lean times. But I am sad now, thinking of how they shamed the grasshopper for expressing his inner truth, and then piled on more shame when they reluctantly fed him in the winter. Yes, the version I remember features a begrudgingly righteous ant population, obligated to help a fellow creature, but not happy about it. Considering the gruesomeness of many of old morality-based stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if older versions have the grasshopper starving to death and the ants carrying away the grasshopper’s dead body once spring arrives.

It’s an unfortunate situation when two different views resent each other to the point where they start to deny some of their own strengths. One of the ants’ strengths, for example, is that they are communal. They share with and protect each other, allowing all members to contribute their share and distributing everything equally.*

It seems that a group based on collective well-being could very easily accept the role of feeding an individual who contributes to society in a way that does not involve the gathering of that food. For example, there are ants whose jobs aren’t food-based: they breed and raise baby ants, maintain tunnels, etc. I assume these individuals are fed just as well as the food-gatherers.*

If the ants were open to it, the grasshopper could contribute to their group by being allowed to share his unique talents with them. A monotonous, back-breaking job can be made infinitely more pleasant and even easy when music is allowed to be part of the atmosphere.

But when the ants patently reject musical expression as a valid way to spend one’s time, the grasshopper is less likely to share his work with the ants. And that, in turn, makes it so the ants don’t realize the beauty and uplifting magic of music.

So, feeling mutual resentment, the two species, with their two different (albeit highly complementary) ways of being, isolate from each other, imagining themselves to be in greater opposition than they really are. Instead of being allowed to appreciate and benefit from each other, their unhappiness increases (in part, ironically, from not being with each other!), and the spiral of dysfunction continues to grind everybody into misery.

The ants seem to have the upper hand morally, since their actions ensure the physical survival of all those they allow to partake of their spoils. (The unspoiled spoils, of course) That is because physical things can be easier for us corporeal creatures to acknowledge. But the creative realm (which I here equate with the spiritual) is just as essential for us to be our healthiest and best selves.

It occurs to me that I may need to write a children’s story that addresses some of these issues, because children embody the lessons in these stories more than we might understand.

Case in point: I am a 53-year-old woman who has, at every turn, denied my creative tendencies for the sake of more “practical” endeavors. In college, I chose to pursue science, even though sometimes I found the study thereof to be spirit-deadening. I enjoyed being in college plays so much that I considered being an actor. But I rejected the “starving artist” idea for an alternative that promised consistent wages.

The only thing that kept me happy or even sane as I studied science was seeing it as a metaphor for spiritual things and writing, either in journals or on now-lost pieces of paper that were what I could find at the time.

Even now, after I’ve filled scores of journals with writing, written hundreds of stories and poems, and worked at jobs that were not my calling, I still have had an inscrutable barrier keeping me away from the thought that I could actually become a full-time writer.

It’s time for me to get my inner ants and grasshoppers to become friends.

*I am not an ant expert; these statements may not be entirely accurate. But I think they contain some truth, and they help with the analogy.

That’s the person I call me. I have been keeping journals full of thoughts, stories, poems and dreams since 1985, when I was 16 years old. My Father, Robert L. Hanson, instilled in me a love and respect for words – their power, their beauty, their reflection of truth. He enjoyed all kinds of word play, and encouraged that playfulness in me.

Hello to all who visit here! Word Fertilizer is a place where I can share thoughts and creative writing. I have embarked on this particular web adventure a few times now, and then let my contributions slip due to life distractions.

So I start again. This time, with a writing studio to work in and with no full-time job to get in my way, I am ready to work more consistently on my writing skills and to learn new ways to share the products of my creativity. Shout out to my dear husband for his encouragement and support (financial, emotional, and technical).

I don’t know who is reading this. But I am glad you are here.