but Thanks to Rob Breszney...it 'tis no more.
DO YOU HAVE A SOUL?
Some people imagine the word "soul" to be a New Age term, a lazy woo-
woo concept favored by fuzzy thinkers. As evidence that this isn't the case,
I offer references to "soul" by writers who don't fit those descriptions,
starting with Walt Whitman.
I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of
hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself — the latter I
translate into a new tongue.
—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
+
How prompt we are to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our bodies; how
slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls!
—Henry David Thoreau
+
The soul should always stand ajar,
That if the heaven inquire,
He will not be obliged to wait,
Or shy of troubling her.
—Emily Dickinson
+
This earth is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this earth.
The intelligent, immortal being, the soul of the earth, and the intelligent,
immortal being, the soul in the individual being—each is honey to the
other.
—Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
+
Ondinnonk is an Iroquois word with two related meanings: 1. a secret wish
of the soul, especially as revealed in dreams; 2. the spiritual part of our
nature that longs to do good deeds.
+
In the best-known version of the Greek myth, Persephone is dragged down
into the underworld by Hades, whose title is "Pluto." But in earlier, pre-
patriarchal tales, she descends there under her own power, actively
seeking to graduate from her virginal naiveté by exploring the intriguing
land of shadows.
"Pluto" is derived from the Greek word *plutus*, meaning "wealth."
Psychologist James Hillman says this refers to the psyche-building
riches available in Pluto's domain. Hades, he says, is "the giver of
nourishment to the soul."
+
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the
senses but the soul.
—Oscar Wilde
+
"There is a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears,"
writes Clarissa Pinkola Estes. But the magic of that formula may not
unfold with smooth simplicity, she says: "The teacher comes when the
soul, not the ego, is ready. The teacher comes when the soul calls, and
thank goodness—for the ego is never fully ready."
+
What is the "soul," anyway? Is it a ghostly blob of magic stuff within us
that keeps us connected to the world of dreams and the divine realms? Is it
an amorphous metaphor for the secret source of our spiritual power? Is
it a myth that people entertain because they desperately want to believe
there's more to them than just their physical bodies?
Here's what I think: The soul is a perspective that pushes us to go deeper
and see further and live wilder. It's what drives our imagination to flesh
out our raw experience, transforming that chaotic stuff into rich
storylines that animate our love of life.
With the gently propulsive force of the soul, we probe beyond the surface
level of things, working to find the hidden meaning and truer feeling.
+
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
—Pablo Picasso.
+
At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the
approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered
with wrinkles — wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put
there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.
– André Gide
+
The soul moves in circles.
—ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus
+
Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the
mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul,
these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.
—philosopher Voltaire in a letter to his partner Marie Louise Denis
+
You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical
justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
—Albert Camus
+
I note the echo that each thing produces as it strikes my soul.
—Stendhal
+
I am not quick moving. I have to wait for myself—it is always late before
the water comes to light out of the well of my self, and I often have to
endure thirst for longer than I have patience. That is why I go into solitude
— so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern.
When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I
really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish
me from myself and rob me of my soul—and I grow angry with everybody
and fear everybody. I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
"The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with
clinical coolness," said the painter Joan Miró in describing his artistic
process.
+
"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul," wrote environmentalist
Edward Abbey.
+
"I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity," wrote author Sue Monk
Kidd in her memoir. "When I looked it up in my dictionary, however, I
found that the words 'passive' and 'passion' come from the same Latin root,
*pati*, which means 'to endure.' Waiting is thus both passive and
passionate. It's a vibrant, contemplative work . . . It involves listening to
disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied
and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely."
+
If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf
howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as
near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of
hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery.
Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.
By waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of
ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated
universe."
—Tom Robbins
