Every morning before I make my tea, I brace myself as I turn on the radio to groggily hear what matters most at the top of the hour: “From Galactic Public Radio on Planet Earth, I’m a human being. In today’s news, a mockingbird sang late into the night in Asheville, while a cacophony of fireflies lit up a field with bioluminescent abandon. A waterfall in the Pisgah National Forest formed countless rainbows, through which children dove and butterflies flew. The sunset was reportedly a honker, while a weird little man watched in awe and realized that the soul is not some hackneyed daydream but a real manifestation of our quest to experience fullness of life. And politicians worldwide have determined that they are no longer relevant to an emerging paradigm of personal spiritual evolution, and the weather’s fine.”

If only, right? If only soul stirring moments were the headlines, and soul deadening institutions took a hint and folded. We can only dream, and in the dreaming, possibly catch a shimmering momentary glimpse of that elusive concept we call “soul.” Everyone struggles, at one time or another, to define the thing, which as an enterprise is as daunting as a cat finally catching its own tail. Yet we all in our own way seek out the soul within ourselves and each other in a mythical odyssey to at last Know Thyself. Breathe deeply.

The word ‘animal’ is derived from the Latin anima, which is defined as soul. Anima itself comes from the Latin root “ani,” which translates to ‘breath’ or ‘wind.’ In my line of work, I must occasionally remind children that we are animals, and their reply is typically defensive. “Animals stink.” Actually, we all stink (some more than others) and anyone who denies it needs a nasal recalibration. “Animals can’t talk.” I truly believe otherwise when I hear a wren defend its perch or my cats chew me out for coming home too late, and who can forget Koko, the sign-language gorilla? “Animals can’t build spaceships.” True, but you, my young friend, can’t rollerskate in a buffalo herd. But, as Roger Miller sang, “you can be happy if you put your mind to it.” At which point the kids look at me funny, walk away, and seek more validating conversation with toy robots.

Ancient wisdom tells us that the soul is the animating principle in all living things, while science tends to beg difference. Science has articulated a mechanical approach to understanding life, yet hasn’t devised a theorem to say why we exist at all in the first place. It is in that ‘why’ that I find sweet mystery, a refreshing lack of answers, and creative wiggle room. Perhaps diving head first into that ‘why’ one may catch a clue to that self-referential spectacle of purpose that confounds us when we attempt to define it.

In quantum physics, it’s been demonstrated that when a particle is under observation, its behavior changes. The soul seems to operate in a similar manner. Averse to being boxed in, the soul plays hide-and-seek when you have the dictionary and magnifying glass out, yet it makes itself known when you’re nowhere near the ‘record’ button. Right now at the very least, most of us are awake and conscious, or as much as we can be for a Sunday morning. Consciousness is for psychology what the soul has been for mysticism; consciousness forms the seat of awareness, while the soul connects our awareness to something vaster. Like the soul to the seeker, consciousness remains a mystery to researchers. Thousands of pages in scholarly journals are written about consciousness each year, just as thousands of napkins are scribbled on by yearning poets journeying to understand the breath within them. The readings today tell of feats of magic and faith which transform inert, dead matter into life sustaining flesh. How may these parables inspire consideration for our own bodies, awareness, and stories? What about them ignites an inmost tickling of our reckonings with the soul, body, and the subatomic entanglement of it all? Breathe deeply.

Being a bit of a self-proclaimed metaphysical wing-nut and card-carrying member of the Wacky Ideas Club, I have had my own theories about the soul. They began with a rather inventive cosmology as a young child, in which I believed every person had a little Casper the Friendly Ghost inside them who sent a daily celestial telegram of misdeeds to God, who weighed them against the amount of guilt you should feel for the rest your life. Fortunately, I was exposed to transcendentalism early on and we tweaked that just a tish.

I can’t recall the first time I truly sensed of the soul, but I’d like to think that it was a night that, as an nine year old rug rat, I stayed awake in my bunkbed all the way through to the purple light of morning, mentally overheating while attempting to grasp the idea of the infinite, and the sheer terrifying size of the Universe. While feeling so utterly small, I recalled feeling a ripple of interconnection, a weird sensation of safety and connectedness within it all, a nearness to the eternal.

I felt that sensation within the scrubby woods of youthful summers, touching leaves with hopeful fingers, rope-swinging over dark water and hidden bullfrogs, and in willful surrender to the drenching daring-do of passing thunderstorms. As a child yet unjaded by the minutiae of routine and responsibility, the freedom of forest and sand was exhilarating. By virtue of being alive, we are all entitled to experience a harboring within holy moments which illuminate a sacredness unique to us, within and throughout. Call it the soul, the mind, or the silent whirring of mitochondria, do you think these conscious experiences of closeness might just be one way the cat finally catches its own metaphorical tail? The words and music are by Dougie McLean…

VERSE: The old man looks out to the island
He says this place is endless thin
There's no real distance here to mention
we might all fall in, all fall in
No distance to the spirits of the living
No distance to the spirits of the dead
And as he turned his eyes were shining
And he proudly said, proudly said

CHORUS: I feel so near to the howling of the wind
I feel so near to the crashing of the waves
I feel so near to the flowers in the field
Feel so near

And yet, as you can imagine, getting to know the absolute core and essence of the self is not entirely a joyful romp through huggy-kissy happy land. As beings whose range of experience is not bounded (!), we at times must endure great despair in order to comprehend the magnitude of our being here, the repercussions of consciousness. Indeed, as innocence passed beneath my little troll feet, the world of youthful awe became grittier, discovery and surprise became harder won. I forged my way through foggy and dead times, sloughing off wonder for the quick fix. I had never felt the soul as a vividly essential part of self as I did in the aftermath of my greatest failure, lying there one gray morning in pain, loneliness, in my own reckless crucifixion. It was that feeling, there, within and around the hardened earth of my own body, which forced me to sit up, forced me to breathe through the miseries of my own decisions, to come to life again and transform.

VERSE: So we build our tower constructions
There to mark our place in time
We justify our great destructions
As on we climb on we climb
Now the journey doesn't seem to matter
The destinations faded out
And gathering out along the headland
I hear the children shout children shout

CHORUS: I feel so near to the howling of the wind
I feel so near to the crashing of the waves
I feel so near to the flowers in the field
Feel so near

Anima, spiritus… “Young man, I say unto thee, arise…” Anam Cara, soul friend… “…and the soul of the child came into him again.” We have the remarkable good fortune of being cosmically allowed to be shocked out of our stupors and into realization of our presence within the eternal. We rent a framework of muscle and bone that, as aspects of the Universe and ongoing expressions of the Big Bang, can arise, breathe, laugh heartily and love big for the blink of time we’ve won. It would seem that the gift of our being here is easily distracted by the mundane, yet why can’t it all be a vehicle for self-awareness? In “Wings of Desire,” a film by Wim Wenders, Peter Falk tells an angel considering giving up the business of merely observing the world beneath him that “on a cold day, you can rub your hands together, and you can drink coffee, and it’s good.” What he describes is a holy moment, a firing of the senses for the conjuring of spirit. In one of his last and certainly shortest sermons, the Buddha lifted a flower, laughed, and just walked away. Simplicity. Directness. Presence. The soul won’t be summoned by pedigree and pontification, but by doing something purposefully, by breathing with the wholeness of the body, and by savoring the unpredictability of each passing minute.

CHORUS: I feel so near to the howling of the wind
I feel so near to the crashing of the waves
I feel so near to the flowers in the field
Feel so near

So these holy moments of realization can come cheap, if not free. For adults, it may take practice, but for children still living within a world as yet unfettered by deadlines, those wide eyes and intense curiosities are symptoms of the adventure of knowing thyself, of the journey home which decades later is still unraveling as a map marked by a miraculous topography. The journey to the soul, down sunset trails, passing through rivers of deepest magic, is our birthright, and quite possibly, our purpose.

CHORUS: I feel so near to the howling of the wind
I feel so near to the crashing of the waves
I feel so near to the flowers in the field
Feel so near.

Oh yeah.

[delivered today at the Jubilee Community, Asheville, NC]

"Suffer the little children..."

It's been a tough past few days. In the town where I work, a 12 year old child took his life, and to watch how this town is reacting has been heartbreaking. Mostly, they've reacted by sweeping it under the rug, leaving the memory of a bright-eyed child at the school door and waving off the grief. Sure, they are likely unsure as to how to discuss this with their own kids, and also there is the onus of religion. Where his "soul goes" as computed by humans which surely know everything is likely a matter of great consternation, as are several other factors which came into play which I won't go into here. There is a core of people who are indeed very concerned about this, and very committed to bringing a community-wide discussion to the fore. This gives me hope, if a sliver.

I have wrestled with the same spectre that this 12 year old did, several times, and I'm glad to say that my work in understanding the nature of the game has enabled for me to finally stop playing it... it has been years and years of strengthening. Yet someone so young making this decision releases a torrent of feeling, empathy first, and frustration with a society still ill-equipped to cope with the intensely private world of young children who secretly battle a depression so blinding that the outlets become fewer and more precious, until there's nothing. A child affected by this has said that there are no answers, and perhaps we'll never understand. You're on to something, there... life and death are made of the same, inexplicable gossamer.

We may never know, but can always remember, and always seek to do good work, especially in the light of those which have gone before us...

I awoke in the morning with the giddy hope of a kid
For piles of snow and peals of laughter
But there was only rain, yet it was alright.
I held you and savored each kiss as if it were a falling star-
You left and the day was restful
And I thought of you
As night slipped in silently
And the snow finally did blow through the moon-dizzied trees.
I took a walk
To feel the chill the window implies
And to think about the nights we've shared
And about a hundred fluttering thoughts which swirl like the flakes
Which you left for me to find scattered about the house
With the socks and shoes kicked off so quickly in anticipation.
I taste the snow... vanilla,
And I spin in desire, fall to the earth,
Making snow angels in a childlike rite of melding man and bird.
I never really expected the snow,
I wrote it off in puffs of worldplay with the gray sky,
Cancelling the chance like some needless appointment
Scratched in haste on the calendar.
Yet here it is, falling now,
Bringing that wonderful hush with it
Soft secret sounds are vaguely heard
And all is rapt in attention to theis strangely dazzled world.

As I am in you.

[for J.S.H.]

You’re weary from the road;
It’s been a very long drive, and the last of daylight is pushed back
By a sunset so broad and magical that it makes you exclaim and exalt
With such vigor that the windshield vibrates.
As the colors wane, you pull into a truck stop,
A concrete island in an asphalt sea,
Lit by a harsh orange light that competes with the stars.

With a flick of an old and arthritic wrist
A motion as tired and worn as the sum of your waitress’s years,
You have a menu, and you have, for now, a refuge,
Midway to home.
It’s two days past Christmas,
And you are seeking out a fried egg sandwich in the middle of nowhere, Virginia,
Sitting at a counter which has witnessed a million stories
You recount your drive, your days alive, a whole year now nearly gone.

The shelter to which you have temporarily moored
Is merely a speck upon the face of the Earth,
Merely a second thrown in the great flood of time.
As the seasons pass through your mind
As the griddle hums and country music absconds with silence,
A whole Creation engines onward in impossibly spontaneous beauty, and awe.
Galaxies dance like ecstatic dervishes deeper into the expanse,
Dreams erupt from worlds unseen,
And you’re remembering a time this year
When you forgot to call on old friend on her birthday.
You’ll remember next year.

We come out of the world, emerging from it like spring’s first delicate butterfly,
Or winter’s first perfect snowflake.
We are not from here or there,
We are here and there, emanations,
Undulations of this swaying body called the Universe.
With the iridescence of a sunset gone mad,
We are born into that which we are made from.
Our weathered bodies collect time, collect whole years
As if we were picking berries in the last days of harvest.
Suddenly, time itself reminds you, as another year prepares to travel,
That it is thin, and fleet, and so easily out of sight.
Time to pay the check, and leave a tip, and a thank you.
It’s full on night now,
And you’re ready for the next three hundred miles.
You know the road ahead, and know it somehow leads
To the door you’ve been missing,
And the cats and the messages and the life you stowed behind it last week.
The stars are bright, raging, and they feel not-so-far away.
After your rest, the whole world feels closer,
Nearer to the flocking geese, nearer to the stone,
Nearer to the winter wind, nearer to the bleached bone.
After reconciling the days of the year past either wasted or uplifted,
You sense that time somehow is not a berry bush to be picked
But is something more like those stars-
Impossible to fathom, dizzying in their size, brilliant in their light.

You came from that deeply impossible to express light.
You rush headlong into it again.
You find yourself,
In a brief moment of holy recognition.

You carefully mind the turn in the highway,
Thinking that was one heck of a fried egg sandwich.

Happy New Year.

...Mostly because the Universe seems to be a giant listening device. Really. I've been asking for a breakthrough which will lead me out of my current job, which is in an abusive and hostile environment. It seems, without jinxing anything, as if there is great progress on two front, and both are radical departures from my current grind. I won't stop looking, however.

Also, after experiencing a number of painful financial setbacks, by car got a ding in a parking lot, for which I'll receive a $400 mea culpa check. I'm happy to live with the ding in order to make a car payment or two from it. That is seriously good news, which seems to relate to a universal law of karma; all good things come in balance. For each blessing from the cosmic, there is a little sacrifice one must make in tribute, a kind of quantum TINSTAAFL.

And suddenly, after a long drought, there seems to be opportunities for a minimum of companionship and a maximum of romance on two to three front. In fact, it seems that I'm being presented with choices. I need mellow in this department, and it seems as if these opportunities meet that base criteria. No use getting hopes uppity at this point, but there is an apparent warming trend poised to meet the cold front. And one knows meteorlogically what happens when the twain meet, so umbrella is in position.

So, I'm feeling optimistic for the first time in a while, and that's a good thing. I won't let myself be lulled into mediocrity by this uptick, however... I've got to keep working at it and be diligent, and prepared to face obstacle and challenge. At the very least, all this goodness it quite flattering. So, thanks, Universe, and thanks to all those who have been pulling for me. Keep pulling.