“A coffin of the heart”

Firstly, I’m really enjoying writing these musings directly on my website. There’s some psychic shift which feels expansive. It feels less ‘confetti’ like, i.e. simply tossing words to the social media winds.

It’s feels more like a permanent record.

Anyway, yesterday’s live session with Thomas Moore was beautiful, The Soul of Things.

Thomas shared a poem from Donald Hall, which really spoke to me. To how we accumulate things, yet it’s the every day, ordinary things that really carry meaning, more than the fine art, expensive jewellery or other such things.

Things like a pebble gathered. A handmade mug. The seed head of beloved flower.

The session got me reflecting on writers closer to home who seemed to embody this way of seeing.

Of truly looking into the soul of a thing.

Thomas said that we don’t give things soul. They already have soul,

Our job is to allow things to exist on their own terms.

John Lane seems to me to be one such person.

He wrote several books and I own the two pictured here.

Books have soul too.

And their soul travels.

I always have to smile with some irony at Timeless Simplicity, because it’s a book I’ve bought twice.

The first one, which I heavily marked up in light pencils all the down the margins, I left behind at a luxury spa!

Books have soul, and they travel, and I wonder where that book, complete with marginalia is now.

When I opened Timeless Simplicity last night, I noticed how hardly any of the book had been marked up.

But there was one passage I’d underlined in heavy pencil, with such vigour I was destined to find it again:

“To work on something in which one has little or no belief, no commitment, no delight—‘it’s just a job. I do it for the money’—is to bring about an incorrigible paralysis of one’s personal well-being, an inner death, a throttling of life’s most vivid aspirations. In the powerful words of Charles Dickens, it is to make “a coffin of the heart.”

Powerful, right!

A coffin of the heart.

And how to escape that coffin?

Maybe, one way, it to begin to listen to the soul. Its desires. Its nature.

Maybe, one way, is to see the soul in things.

Their beauty. Their nature.

And then to begin to see beyond, through.

Thanks for being here, wherever ‘here’ is.