Some years ago I shared in Reckonings a poem by Denise Levertov that she called simply "A Gift." I want to reprint it here because it seems a good introduction to the entry that follows on the subject of sanctuary and soul.
All of us surely know the feeling with which Levertov begins: when "you seem to yourself nothing but a flimsy web of questions." The apparent fragility of our internal web of consciousness and of the questions—the threads—themselves, speak of our confusion, the elusiveness of satisfying meaning or response. In confusion and absent of meaning, our lives lose their luster. As another poet, Gunilla Norris, writes, "We endure our days rather than embrace the living of them. To enter the realm of meaning requires attention and dedication. It requires an interior, reflective life. It requires the calming of our usual chattering minds. It requires trusting the life-giving nourishment of silence, that vast field of permission and sustenance in which our lives are held." It requires truly being with others rather than merely passing on the sidewalk or a hallway with a "How are you?" and an "OK." Now read Levertov's "A Gift" with Norris's thoughts in mind: at least twice, slowly and reflectively, as good poems ask us to do.
A Gift
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.
~ Denise Levertov ~
Note the character of the gifts Levertov offers. First, they are gifts—questions—of others, in which we have no proprietary belonging, no ownership. So they are gifts of relationship, requiring a caring response from us. They are gifts entrusted to us that we must gently cup in our hands. Their life, in this moment, is ours to protect and nourish: the songbird eggs that can still hatch if we keep them warm, delicate butterflies trusting us "not to injure their scintillant fur, their dust." We are their sanctuaries, and they are ours. The answer may be implicit in the question. The delicacy—the may be, the as if, the perhaps—remains.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.
Some readers will recall a book published some 26 years ago, Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul. Moore believed that the greatest malady of our time is neither heart disease nor cancer, but loss of soul. "When soul is neglected it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence and loss of meaning."
While Moore warns against efforts at precise definition, he associates the word soul with recognition of depth and genuineness or authenticity in our lives. As such it is no less present or absent in our ordinary daily rounds—work and love, play, active and contemplative times—than it is in rare moments of dramatic crisis, insight or vision. He argues, I think persuasively but less capaciously than is justified, that the instrument of soul is imagination. That is so if we understand imagination to include experience of all of our sensory, emotional and intuitive faculties, including the enormous range of bodily sensations in movement and at rest.
But, with that caveat, imagination is a useful word, because it conveys the important sense that soul is not merely more or less present or absent in our lives, but that there are crafts available for its cultivation, renewal and redemption. One further limitation of the term, however, is that it encourages us to conceive of soul as an exclusively human phenomenon. More classical notions of soul acknowledge that it is present in all animate creatures; indeed, it may be most usefully understood as the very principle of animation or vitality, and care of the soul as the craft of reanimation. Anima mundi, Moore reminds us, refers not to some abstract concept of world soul or organizing divinity, but to "the soul in each thing," and our capacity truly to tend with lingering and loving attention.
Paradoxically, as spiritual traditions have commonly recognized, soul is more accessible, more nourished, when we are simply attentive and mindful, rather than when we deliberately seek. One of the most beautiful expressions is found in the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching (here in my own adaptation from several versions; I don't speak or read or write Chinese, but this book has been a treasured companion.)
Of old, he who was well versed in the way
was subtle, mysteriously comprehending,
and too profound to be known.
Just because he is unknowable,
The best one can do is describe him.
His alertness was as that of one crossing
a river in winter.
His caution was as that of one who must meet danger on every side.
His gravity was as that of a guest.
He was fluid as melting ice,
simple as uncarved wood,
open as a valley.
inscrutable as murky water.
Who can be muddy and yet, settling,
slowly become limpid?
Who can be at rest
till the right action arises by itself?
He who preserves this way
does not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
he is present, and can welcome all things.
When we think of ways of caring for soul, tradition often suggests, rightly, that we think of the liturgies, the music and other practices of our religious traditions, including prayer and meditation. For all of us, though—and especially for those who have lost effective connection with those traditions, it is worth recalling that soul makes no hard and fast division between sacred and secular. Reckonings time and again recognizes poetry as a deep well of imagining, reimagining, evoking soul.
One of the oldest and most treasured ways of gaining access to soul is through the ancient craft of storytelling. Many traditional tales, if written—or preferably spoken, sung or enacted—by a genuine artist, bring soul to life in ways that are moving and profound. A contemporary example is the work of an old friend, Gioia Timpanelli, who, in her writing and (best) in the full presence of her telling before an evening fire, breathes new life into old tales in ways that reveal both the depth of their familiarity and their ineluctable mystery.
In her novella, Rusina, Not Quite in Love, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fable in Sicilian guise, Goia weaves a tapestry of mutual awakening, that of the young woman Rusina and that of the reclusive Master Gardener, Sebastian, whom Rusina initially knows as both gentle and "the ugliest man I had ever seen." The story, of course, is that of their coming to know each other more deeply, and particularly that of Rusina's awakening, through kindness, care and love, to Sebastian's true nature. At story's end, when they are talking, Sebastian says, "My favorite part of the story, Rusina, is when you take my hand and look into my eyes and see me." Rusina replies, "As always, mine, Sebastian, is now when you will say for the first time and again, 'This has happened not because we have loved beauty but because it has loved us.'" (Gioia Timpanelli, Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily. NY: W.W. Norton, 1998)
Care of the soul, writes Moore, "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. It sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel."
I spent my professional life (as well as most of my childhood and adolescence) in schools, colleges and universities, which—particularly as one moves from high school to college and on to graduate study—pay too little attention to recognizing and developing the crafts of soul. The very pace and fragmentation of the school day, as well as preoccupation with information, cognition and skill, have more to do with socialization and functionality in the marketplace than with human development. Intellect and soul are not antithetical; at best, they complement and nourish each other. When they are out of balance, when intellectual accomplishment and physical prowess are rewarded in service to a narrow or superficial sense of vocation, soulfulness—a more capacious identity—withers.
Nature and God—I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew me
They startled, like Executors
of My identity.
- Emily Dickinson