Conversations with a Soul (14 page)

How often in a physician’s office, a counselor’s study, or in our own living room have the rational answers simply got in the way. We live life on a level quite different from prescriptions and descriptions and clinical forms of advice. What we most need is to be understood and loved so that we might release our own strength, no matter what. In the face of acrid technology, we’ve all yearned for the powerful words of the Soul, frequently mediated through patient, bumbling, inadequate human beings who are not afraid to love.

A tremendous benefit of legitimizing imagination is about learning how to deal with the ghosts of loneliness and fear that sometimes haunt our nighttime hours. If, through imagination, we can allow them to be present and even speak to us, they somehow seem to lose their destructive power, and we open a door to manage our fears. But beyond dealing with the ghoulies that rattle their chains at midnight, imagination breathes life into our relationships, especially the relationship we have with our Souls.

What evidence we can glean from archeological digs suggests that prehistoric human evolution is about technology. It’s a story of weapons, tools, learning how to hunt, kindle fire, deal with wounds and harvest food that was safe to eat.

At the same time it is also the story of imagination. Paintings on cave walls, the creation of amulets and jewelry, simple musical instruments, the creative ordering of religious totems and elaborate funeral rites all spell the beginnings of artistic interpretation and bares eloquent testimony to the antiquity of imagination in the evolution of human beings.

Nor, in the ancient world, was imagination merely tolerated as a harmless and playful way of seeing faces in cloud formations. Plato and Socrates both argued that poets should be exiled or their writings censored. In fact Plato went so far as to declare poets to be mad and a danger to the State because their work contradicted good, logical philosophy. Rationalism over imagination might well have been Plato’s motto.

On the other hand, the richness of myth, story, legend and poetry which lies at the heart of the Old Testament is unintelligible until interpreted through imagination to be the saga of a people and their God.

It is common knowledge that Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony after his ears could no longer hear and therefore the symphony would have had to have been composed in his imagination, the then presented to the world.

Michelangelo spoke about freeing the figures he envisioned lying locked inside their marble prisons. Working on a block of marble he pursued what he called, 'the heart’s image' and sculpted the
Pieta
. Then, from a chunk of white Carrara marble, some 18 feet high and weighing several tons he 'released'
David
. All seen and brought to fruition in his imagination.

No great books could ever have been written nor masterpieces created without the exercise of imagination. Very few of the world’s great scientific discoveries were stumbled upon. Most required an act of imagination, dignified as a 'theory,' which became the basis for exploration. The disciplines of Architecture and Aeronautical engineering would not exist apart from the exercise of imagination.

A moment’s thought and a few random examples quickly lead us to value imagination as one of the most critical gifts. After all, there is nothing else that admits us into a world that is yet to be born.

I sometimes think of imagination as the game my Soul plays by arranging and rearranging the ideas to which images give birth.

In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed an apple tree;

In cocoons a hidden promise: butterflies will soon be free!

In the snow and cold of winter there’s a spring that waits to be,

Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.
³⁵

Perhaps one way of describing the wonder of imagination is that it admits us to see what God alone can see, and what the Soul alone enlivens!

I have often been intrigued by the fact that people generally know a lot more than they are aware of. The exercise of imagination allows us to rummage about in our knowing. Freed from the need to discount anything simply because it lacks the credentials for presentation to a technological world, we begin to see and hear possibilities that were there all along but hidden from awareness.

As I walked into my 5-year-old son’s bedroom to put some clean clothes away, I found him lying on his bed doing absolutely nothing. Ankles crossed and hands clasped behind his head, he was staring blankly at the ceiling. A little put off by what, at first glance, appeared to be a waste of time, I asked with a slight note of disapproval, ‘What are you doing?’ He matter-of-factly replied, ‘I’m just looking around in my mind.’ It was a perfect description of what most of us would call daydreaming. In fact, his imagination was at work - or, better yet, at play.”
³⁶

Soul language is the language of myth, lore and legend, of fantasy and metaphor but most of all, a language born of a mysterious inner recognition wherein the whole world has the right to speak and I have the responsibility to listen. The key is not to force anything, nor to sit in judgment, but simply to be present.

Dealing with an image in a poetic manner, is about seeing what lies beyond sight; and hearing what lies beyond sound; and embracing what cannot be reduced to a simple, or a complex formula. Treating an image in a poetic or metaphorical way leads us step by step to make friends with myth and symbol and imagination. It also teaches us a language which enables us to make friends with a hidden mysterious part of ourselves, a part called,
Soul
.

‘
Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘
Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.
³⁷

Treat the earth well, it was not given to you by your parents;

it was loaned to you by your children.
³⁸

Dr. Suess
‘Sometimes the questions are complicated,

And the answers are simple’'
³⁹

The most terrifying place to encounter a storm is out on the ocean.

The second is in a forest.

In both the sheer ferocity of wind and wave, uncontrolled, uncontrollable, unpredictable, beyond accountability for what they destroy or spare; gives substance to the threat that,
Mother nature is going to unleash her fury
.

This is no gentle mother who kisses the morning awake and orchestrates the song birds in a chorus to welcome the sun. No, this mother is in cahoots with Zeus and Poseidon and she is ticked off! Like most mothers in full war cry, she taps into an ancient fear that the gods are furious, and ready to punish our frail humanity for some misdeed, acknowledged or not.

Apart from a fair sprinkling of tough, gnarled oaks, that have managed to outlast many winter storms, most of the trees in the Del Monte forest are tall, proud, soaring cypresses and Monterey pines. Averaging a hundred feet in height, upwards of fifteen feet in girth with a root system that anchors them deep into the earth they seem immortal.

Yet seasons of drought, disease, insect pests and simple old age have weakened some of these towering giants. When rain soaks the earth and powerful, gusting winds whip the tops of the trees into a wild, frenzied dance, some of them cannot hold on any longer and they come down.

Generally, the trees exhibit the most extraordinary concern so as not to flatten houses but they regard electric power lines with contempt, leaving us to cope for hours, if not days, without light or heat.

The most destructive storms are the first ones of the season. Weakened or dead trees go first, scattering bark and brittle branches in every direction. Pine cones, needles and lichen litter roads and lawns, thereby serving notice to all that the winter storm season has begun!

However, living on California’s west coast, such a dramatic warning needs some qualification. Winter storms may be accompanied by heavy rains, high winds and dangerous seas, but little else that you might expect to find in a severe winter storm warning. Snow is a rarity as is prolonged biting cold. Roads and power lines almost never ice over.

It’s true that in parts of California, Rivers will sometimes overflow their banks and flood homes, although it ought to be noted that many of the homes that flood year after year, are the
same
ones. Human beings are awfully slow to learn the most basic lessons painstakingly, and sometimes, dramatically, laid out for us. If a working definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different outcome, then we have an overabundant supply of crazy home owners who rebuild their houses not far from where they were flooded the previous year, and two years before that!

On the Monterey Peninsula our summer highs seldom rise above 75ºF and winter temperatures hardly ever fall below 40; annual rainfall is about 19 inches and humidity hovers around 70% for most of the year.

Our seasons are gentle, making the transitions from one season to another equally so. Compared to the Midwest and East Coast, what we think of as seasonal changes, must seem very mild, to say the least.

Perhaps that’s why some visitors and new residents are sometimes heard to lament the 'absence of the seasons'. By this, I think they mean wide temperature fluctuations between fall, winter, spring and summer and the dramatic impact of those changes on trees, plants and most forms of life, including human. Although, if I spent most of winter shovelling snow and sliding about on icy sidewalks, then I too would yearn for a significant change of seasons, even if that change would, in short order, deposit me in temperatures that hovered in the high 80’s with humidity even higher, replete with hoards of hungry, blood sucking insects who manage to survive even the coldest of winters!

While our West Coast’s seasonal changes lack the drama of violent and dramatic weather, we, nevertheless,
do
have our seasons, and those seasonal changes are everywhere to be seen and enjoyed, but it takes a calibration of the eye and a broadening of the mind to engage them.

There are many ways to discern seasonal changes.

Apart from focusing on the raw fact of weather, seasonal changes can be seen reflected in the
ebb and flow of life
in plants and creatures. Despite the secretive nature of the plants that grow here, they are no less awe inspiring than the dramatic fall forest colours, or tulips and daffodils that poke their heads out of the still cold earth to greet and celebrate spring.

On the Monterey Peninsula changes in daytime temperatures between February and March are, generally, hardly discernible; but those tiny changes are critically important to the Monarchs.
⁴⁰

Every year hundreds of thousands of Monarch Butterflies, flying up to 100 miles a day, undertake a long journey that stretches from Canada to California, and, some even as far south as Mexico. Obedient to a mysterious instinctual call, the Monarchs travel to ancestral groves where, for hundreds of years, previous generations have come to mate, give life and die.

Beginning in October, about 65,000 butterflies settle in parks and groves in the little town of Pacific Grove, right next to Pebble Beach. Great clusters cling to trees and shrubs as the tiny, beautifully patterned creatures, overwinter in our mild climate, and wait for the moment when they will become the next link in a thousand year old saga.