Sometimes you have to put down a thought and pick up a new one. I thought I was going to work on a post about listening and trusting that little voice inside, and instead I am going to just listen to it, and get to writing about it later.
The question is: Once we’ve discovered our souls, how do we keep the door open?
I am feeling less angst about the answer to that question than I did before, mostly because I am appreciating the question more, because an answer lies in the questioning itself. The answer is to love ourselves enough to live a life asking that question, right Rilke? How do we keep the door open to our souls? Keep looking for openings and use them; let love in, and let love out.
We can love ourselves by doing the most trivial things, it really doesn’t matter the things we do, just that we do them with intent. Tiny little precious gifts, like some time to play, doing something special just for ourselves, something on purpose to nurture our soul.
Our soul needs attention, not greedy me, me, me attention, it needs someone to care about how its doing, to ask questions of it it, to just be with. It needs to be able to express its own caring and to be heard and listened to. It needs to be treated with kindness and respect, to be treasured and revered and valued. It needs to be shared.
There is something about sharing that I didn’t know was so important. Questions of the soul really are about as personal as it gets, right? Its an internal road to travel with our souls. So what is it about sharing? Maybe its the giving and the willingness to be vulnerable? Maybe its sharing that demonstrates value?
I don’t know! But I think there may be something synergistic about sharing this journey.
I found an opening in my soul after I gave up on a lot of bullshit I was living and made a choice to wake up and do the right thing for myself. It was the making of the right choices and the effort of doing the best I could for myself even though it meant giving up on my ego. Being willing to look at the mess I had made and own it it and take responsibility. To be forgiving and compassionate instead of choosing resentment and bitterness towards myself or who I was feeling hurt by. It was giving up all the answers that I thought I had and accept that I really didn’t know myself as well as I thought, and that I really hadn’t been very nice or caring or respectful or loving of myself on purpose for a while.
I don’t know, I think that I really did give up on something. Its almost like I was keeping the door closed, and I just decided to finally stop struggling to keep it closed. Maybe the answer to how to keep the door open is to quit trying to close it.
June 26, 2008 at 11:17 pm
I also was going to mention that one defining quality of the soul is that it is the part of us that knows. That knows the truth when it hears it. And the lies. That knows what we really stand for. And what we just can’t stand.
And learning to listen to it is perhaps the primary way we nurture the soul – our self – by giving it our attention.
It seems so simple that I am amazed at how easy it is to forget.
June 26, 2008 at 11:35 pm
…how easy it is to forget.
I think thats often the biggest problem: forgetting, taking ourself for granted, becoming complacent. It really is about having a relationship with ourselves, and we’re subject to the same needs and difficulties as with our relationships with others.
You are so right about it being the part of us that knows. When I am feeling connected, I feel like I can stand on something real, not rationalizations or bullshit. Its a part of us that can also see what matters and what doesn’t.