This is a story about a farmer from Florida who inherited a piece of land that was extremely infertile. I read it some time ago in a book by Dale Carnegie and remembered it because it touches on one of my favorite themes—the transformation of lead into gold, which he calls “how to turn lemons into lemonade.”
So,
“Nothing could be grown on the land—neither fruit nor pigs could be raised. The only things that thrived there were centuries-old oak trees and rattlesnakes.
But eventually inspiration struck him. ‘What if we turn the negatives into positives?’ Why not profit from the rattlesnakes?
To everyone’s amazement, he began canning rattlesnake meat. Each year the farm was visited by 20,000 people. His enterprise flourished. The venom extracted from the snakes’ fangs was sent to laboratories and used to produce antitoxin serum. The snakes’ skins were sold for fabulous sums and made into women’s shoes and handbags…
I saw the canned rattlesnake meat being shipped to customers all over the world. I bought a postcard with a view of the farm and mailed it from the local post office in the village, which had been renamed Rattlesnake in honor of the man who had turned a poisonous lemon into sweet lemonade.”
— Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
In my professional practice, I constantly encounter people who inherit from their parents a psychic legacy that strongly resembles the farm of our Florida farmer. It is full of rattlesnakes and appears, at first glance, to be completely useless. The thought that this is the main capital they possess throws them into genuine despair. Although they try in every possible way not to resemble the parent they dislike and reject, they fail—because that parent exists inside them, not outside.
At that point I tell them this story. For me, it is a genuine psychic recipe for alchemizing our family inheritance. It tells us that there is a way to transform the hostile and infertile land we have inherited into a profitable enterprise. To do so, we must see the unfinished business our ancestors have left us and then turn it into a valuable life lesson to be learned.
This process of transforming infertile land into a profitable business unfolds in three steps.
The first is to stop running away from our fate, no matter how much we dislike it. There is no way to transform the negative into the positive while pretending that the land we have inherited has nothing to do with who we are. Some people do exactly this. They close their eyes and fail to see that they are increasingly beginning to resemble the parent they reject.
The second step is the most creative one. It consists in understanding what the mature psychic forms of expression are for the very quality we reject. And since maturity is the same as consciousness, this requires passing through painful inner conflicts. Our inner conflicts create the conditions for becoming conscious, and thus for finding the third solution that unites the opposites.
The third step is the most difficult. After we have understood what the gold we seek looks like, we must have the moral strength to endure the tension of this inner conflict. The gold we are looking for lies deep in the underground chambers of the soul, and it requires great patience and devotion to reach it. Sometimes I think that the greatest amount of gold is contained in family situations where the parents are complete opposites of one another. Their outer incompatibility becomes our inner conflict, which pushes us toward development at a new level of consciousness.
It is precisely this new level of consciousness that is the gold we seek.
Thus, the creative approach to working through a difficult family inheritance is to become alchemists—to discover the hidden potential in what drives us to despair, and then to realize it in our lives.
“That is life. That is more than life. That is the VICTORIOUS life! I would like to cast the following words of William Bolitho in bronze, if I could, and hang them in every school in the land: ‘The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. What is important is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence; that is the difference between a wise person and a fool.’”
— Dale Carnegie
I would add that this is the difference between mere reproduction and creativity, between inertia and growth, between the visible and the invisible. If we make the right choice, a day will come when we too will own a profitable business in a village that bears our name.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
