Journal of a Soul 2

Intense was the word that a good friend used to describe me when I was in my early twenties.  He added that he meant absolutely no criticism by that description.  Nor indeed did I take it as such.  And other synonyms for intense are passionate, powerful, profound, forceful, heartfelt and concentrated.  I'd still accept any of those adjectives as descriptive of my way of being in the world.

Having recently read much philosophy from the early Greeks right through to the contemporary Charles Taylor I am still enthused with a passion for wonder, with a desire to embrace life in its fullest measure.  From my readings in philosophy and literature I find a singular lack of intensity and passion in the world in general. That's why we need our religions (in the spiritual manifestation, not in the power manifestation, of those entities, I hasten to add is what I have in mind here), our theatres, our cinemas, our traditions and our literatures, and especially our music.

In the psalms we read that  "Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls; All Your breakers and Your waves have rolled over me." (Psalm 42:7; New American Standard Bible, 1995)  I remember these words clearly since the time I was a young novice in the Augustinian Order many years ago.  Deep calling onto deep always moved me to the very foundations of my being.  A I sat there in the early mornings in the cool and incense-laden oratory, season in and season out, I remember touching depths within me that I certainly had never plumbed before.  Some past pupils who, with their dad, are expert potholers come to mind.  What is it in the human heart that wishes to push its being deeper and ever deeper.  These past pupils are now doing just that, and doing it physically, literally crawling on their bellies down and further down and further down still into the bowels of the very earth.  As I sat there all those years ago I felt that I was spiritually doing what these lads do physically, except that I was crawling down, down, down into the caverns of the heart, or of the soul, or of the spirit, or indeed of the Self.  And yes, I am using all these words here synonymously even though I am aware that there are differences between their connotations in various areas of study.  But for my personal purposes here they refer to my deep sense of my own being. 

And so, in short I am moved to new depths always.  I rejoice that as I age I am able to go deeper and am able to bear more pressure.  It's rather like diving deeper, as the deeper you get the more the water presses down on you.  And so, again, as I sit here listening to the haunting voice of the great Canadian singer Neil Young singing Old Man and my eyes are filled with tears as he brings me deeper with his words:

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,

Twenty four

and there's so much more

Live alone in a paradise

That makes me think of two.

Or again listening to the late great and wonderful Irish Folk singer Liam Clancy weaves the same wondrous effect on my soul. Try listening to his rendition of Those Were The Days on YouTube here:

Or again listen to the late great Jacques Brel singing his powerful rendition of Amsterdam which you can view hereunder:

Or again, I dove much deeper still when viewing Des Bishop's tribute to his late father Mike, RIP, in tonight's documentary on RTE 2.  You can view this in three parts on YouTube here:

And so all of these things serve to carry me deeper and deeper into self.  Whatever Self may be it is to be found only by pushing oneself to the limit.  Des Bishop, Jacques Brel and Liam Clancy all push themselves to the limit because the self is a reality of the limits and of the horizons.  Again many other metaphors can come to mind here.  The Self is a reality of the extremes, that's why the human soul is wont to go on pilgrimage.  Look at all those great mountaineers who seek to climb the highest mountains.  Bring to mind all those explorers of yesteryear who sought out the very limits of the world.  Think of those astronauts who seek to explore the wonder of space.  Call to mind the English Captain Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, explorers of polar regions both.  Nothing but the pursuit of self, the pursuit of identity could carry them up to and beyond the threshold or portal of death. 

Journal of a Soul 1

                                                                                         I

Italy, Christmas, 2011

Children talk their coded language of play.  Their voices rise to greet my attic presence.  What they are saying, I know not, but their enthusiasm and excitement are infectious. They celebrate life in its presence and in its carefree nowness. Today has been a day spent alone in the attic of my own mind; in the quiet of my own heart and in the sanctuary of my own body.  I am attempting to meet whatever or whoever is the I that I am.

In the distance a dog barks, small birds chirp in the garden hedges below and cars fly along the adjacent motorway.  The world is all too present even in this intimate silence.  The self I would be I simply cannot pin down.  It is forever a work in progress and yet "forever" seems to be an adverb denoting impossibility, if not illusion, for our little fragile lives are marked out with the patient, slow, inevitable ticking of the stark hands of the clock of dying and death.

A wood pigeon has come to coo his/her cares away in the cherry blossom tree in my neighbour's garden.  As I open my attic window, I open my soul to the gift of life, to its there-ness, to its "dasein" or "being-there-ness" as the philosophers would have it.  While I may be responding to external reality, singing its praises and criticisms with well-formed words, I am aware that I am not creating external reality anymore than I am creating my internal reality.  In a sense I experience both of them as given or as gift.  And yet, there is also a sense in which I create both my inner and outer realities through my own individual perceptions, by the unique way my mind filters this or that out, notices this or that, and yet somewhere objectivity exists in the shared nature of the encounter we all make with shared reality.

And so I write these words here in search of a prose poem to capture how this mind-heart or mind-soul works.  I write these words to put shape on my experience, to give it an order and a form and a familiarity so that it will no longer mirror back to me a hostile, inimical or frightening world.  We name every item in our world in order to ward off the fierce oppositional nature of that world.  We seek to domesticate our fears in this way.  In so doing we also decrease our anxieties. 

In  the stillness my breath is the very body clock of which I grow ever more in awareness.  And now as an infant calls its baby language to the kind evening air of summer and as its screams abate with its mother's soothing, my Body-Soul and Heart-Mind were never more at one.  In this stillness no cheap answers will abide.  In this stillness simplicity is luring complexity to express itself in less technical language. 

It is time we awoke from our dogmatic and religious slumber.