There are many things in this book and many passages that are simply magnificent. I feel a twinge of kindred with the writer because she truly ponders the big question in life. This is something that we all do, but for her it drives painfully deep.

I ran across one passage in the book that struck me in two stages. She was anguishing over pain and suffering, and the trials that we face as humans and she was speaking to a figure she calls the grandmother.

The grandmother points to an ox in the field. It was just eating grass and swatting flies with its tail. The grandmother asks her: What is the major trait of the Ox? Oriah responds with "Strength". The grandmother replies: "But can the Ox know its own strength, realize it fully without the cart?"

It's a beautiful passage and the message is that the burdens we bear are necessary to bring us to a fullness. We can never achieve or fully realize our "Strength" without the burden of the cart.

This is quite beautiful and I had to consider this for a time.

But a doubt crept into me over the wisdom of this. I have this feeling that we are all just elastic globs of clay. readily molded to the task at hand. The ox is molded to his shape and disposition because the task at hand was to pull a cart. The cheetah is molded to his shape for the tasks he is presented with. I think that we are also so molded -to the task at hand. The problem with being human is that we truly have no idea what the task at hand is.

The bull in the field has no clue what a cart is, let alone that he is supposed to pull it. There isn't a cart to be seen. In fact he has never seen a cart. Someone has to come along and show him how to apply his strength. Then show him where to stand, then show him which way to pull. This is what he was made for.

So the same holds true for us as humans. We were made for a reason -a cart if you will, But we don't see any cart, don't have a clue as to what a cart looks like, and worse yet, don't even realize that we are supposed to be pulling a cart at all. We need someone to show us. Where the hell is this someone?