“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”
“Do not despise your inner world,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum admonished in her reflection on what it takes to live a full life. “Real self-esteem is an integration of an inner value with things in the world around you,” Anna Deavere Smith wrote in her spectacular letters of advice to young artists. And yet in a culture where we’re devouring one another’s outward selves with accelerating“aesthetic consumerism” as we scroll through social media feeds, we’re increasingly bedeviled by the rift between private person and public persona, inner world and outward projection. The soul-salving art of bridging that gap is whatParker Palmer explores in A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life (public library) — an ennobling field guide to living with the grace and integrity of being your whole self, titled after the famous Thomas Merton line, “there is in all things … a hidden wholeness.”
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