Do what the soul wants

I've spent most of today reading. I'm utterly packed full of words. I feel like I've been on a journey and the flight has involved many stopovers. I'm exhausted. I wonder if the luggage has all arrived and whether my prearranged ride is here to pick me up.

I've got so many words and ideas and stories floating in my head that there in only one thing I know - I need to read books more often. I've missed the close companionship with books. Books offer the meaty challenges of sustained reading. I'm used to now to fast food reading. I've got used to reading Internet entries, magazine articles, newspaper headlines and yes, small word bites and I'm finding it difficult to plow through the endless fields of pages in real books.

I think what I'll do is this - sit and read like a holy person in the shrine of words for a good portion of each day. I can do this. I have the time. I have the want.

It has been just the type of day I wanted except I did not walk and I made yucky chicken nuggets for supper. Ah, but tomorrow. I'll try and make a meal. I wonder wht tomorrow will be like?

I find when I don't force the day into the corset of my preconceived ideas, the day unfolds naturally, organically and at the end of the day, I'm sooo relaxed and calm. I think the soul needs these gap periods where it gets to do almost nothing or what it wants to do and not what it is forced to do.

It takes a long time to just let the soul be, to just let the soul do what it wants to do. I'm always caught up in the "should dos" and the "must dos" and I don't listen to the deep inner longings of this inner being that wants none of these shoulds and musts. It wants simply to read, play and write. Or it simply wants to be left alone and rest. It is as if we are cut off from the real needs of our soul and we are always trying to develop or organize or push the body that contains the soul forward on some preconceived path. The soul doesn't want development. It wants us to doodle. And let it doodle.

Do what the soul wants and you will be well rested and ready for whatever the world throws at you. Serendipity is what makes for an interesting life. Not conformity. If you want to do something that is not part of the daily ritual, do it. It gives the soul room for breathing. It simply stretches you to grow. It gets you extending adventitious roots into the soil you are already rooted in.

The main tap root is important - it anchors you to the soil and makes it possible for you to nourish yourself but the adventitious roots of the soul are necessary as well. We aren't only what we do. We are what we do not do. Not doing is simply reflection, pondering, digesting what we've read, writing out what we've learned, farting around with nonsense, sifting through all the panned dirt and rocks to find tiny specks of gold. This is what the soul is determined to do and if we do not do it, it sits like a heaviness and misery inside of us, and makes everything unbearable until we listen to it. Yes, we are our bodies and our minds but we are also our souls and if we just listen to the first two, we won't get very far in life. What is missing in our lives is the third element - soul.

The main problem with work is that it is utterly without soul. You go to work. You try to do it as best you can but there is no imagination in any aspect of it. Just doing work in an endless circular fashion is enough to make you feel like your brain is atrophying and what the hell are you doing there losing neurons? It is not sufficient to have cash only at work. It is necessary to have sort of intrinsic satisfaction from the doing of the work. If you cannot extract this satisfaction from work then you are basically doing soulless work and how long can you do such work without rebellion from your soul?

Soulless work is endurable if you have ego in charge and ego is able to rationalize that the work is supplying you with sufficient money and advancement to make the time spent in such conditions worthwhile but in the end, I think this rationalization of work fails and the soul becomes twisted and pathological manifestations of the soul's twisting start appearing. The soul is essential for normal, healthy functioning of the mind and body. When you start to work solely for the money, the corner office, the job title and the position, hell you are doomed.

But if you are forced (I say this temporarily forced) to work at soulless work then perhaps you can manage spending upwards of eight hours in such work, if you can fashion a soulful life out of work. I don't imagine that most of us have a choice about the type of work we do since most work in most places is designed for robot workers so the main thing we can do to counter the ill effects of soulless work environments is to keep ourselves intact in such places and do fashion a world of intimacy and desire and imagination out of work.

It is too bad we need to do this and I'm hoping that eventually there will be a transition from such work places to ones that are more humanistic and adaptive to the true natures of human beings but until that happens the best we can do is to tolerate working in such environments for as short a period as we can and then, porting ourselves through active searching into work that is more satisfying to our souls. It may take us a great deal of our life to find such soulfilled work. Or we may never find it and our after job work may be what makes us soul satisfied but it is necessary to do what the soul wants - as much

When I returned to work after a long absence spent as a SAHM, I thought I could do just any work and make it soulful. I was wrong. I could do any type of work but I could not make any type of work soulful. There is no way that some forms of work can be made to nourish the soul and in fact, some forms of work act against the needs of the soul and in fact, make the soul tarnished, weary and harmed.

I don't believe employers will change the job descriptions of soulless jobs and nor will they change the soulless quality of work environments unless workers stop working in these conditions. It is like this. When you have an endless supply of laboratory rats for each of your experiments why would you seek to change your experiments? Once you lose a rat, you simply find another one to take his place. It is the same place with most work places. The experiments they conduct may be inhumane but the test organisms are plentiful and do not appear to not want to participate. They in fact, work until they conk out.

Such is the nature of most work places. It is up to us to make work more soulful. It is up to us to make all of our lives more soulful. In simple ways it is possible to to do this. In my home, I have rooms filled with books, paper and pens and drawing pencils. I have writing and drawing places. I have notebooks to write in. One section of a book case has piles of past and current journals. There is opportunity to listen to music. No television but the hands, eyes and ears can be fully occupied in this house. Or if we want we can sit rocking by the gas fireplace and ponder. We have a corner loveseat downstairs with two large cushions where I love to lie flat out and simply relax.

Or in the summer, I go out to my garden. There is a metal table with two adjacent chairs and three birdhouses sitting on the ground next to them. I have a coffee outside and I'm covered by the tall stalks of the sunflowers in the raised bed next to the table and chairs. I drink coffee or tea out there. Sometimes, I'll have breakfast there too in the early morning sunshine.

Or all through the year, I'll put on my hiking boots, move to the forest and go worship the tree gods. If you feel that the soul is in need of green, there is green there all through the year. I get to notice the berries, the rose hips fat and crunchy with ice, the black fingers of mold and the solid masses of moss chaired to the planks of fallen trees. I get to move among the clotted snow and I get to sift through the day's events - ordinary, particular and mundane. It is this, the endless turning over of the stones of one's ordinary life that makes for a soulful life.

Do what the soul wants and no matter how empty and fruitless and pointless is the other parts of the world that you inhabit, this soulfilled part of your life will nourish you and keep you going.