[Image: “View to the East, 10:12:45 PM,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.
To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.
Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.
But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.
More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.
(Tom Robbins [source])
…and (ibid.):
How many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to change it, and one not to change it.
(Anonymous […but here’s one source])
Not from whiskey river:
Dream Job
Editorial Assistant. Executive Assistant. Administrative Assistant. Writing
Center Director. Writing Teacher. Receptionist. Poetry Fellow. Technical
Writer. Barista. Waitress. Applying for three jobs a day doesn’t get me a
job. I get an offer from the diner and then the diner burns down. I flop an
interview at the local Subway. I make a couple hundred a month writing
blogs for hotels I cannot afford. I write a blog about Benjamin Franklin’s
Ghost House. It’s a chalk outline in the ground where his house was torn
down. I have a Ghost Life. My friends all get jobs. I know because they
each come to the bar with a polished eye around their neck. The eyes can
foresee only positive futures. In the future, my friends eat takeout and
rescue a dog. They have children they’ve made on purpose and call by
fashionable names. I try to look into their job-eyes, and the eyes close
their bulbous lids. The lids make a horrible smacking sound like someone
closing their mouth to go hmmmm—then not saying what everyone knows
they want to say. Was my phone voice too weak? Did my neck look too
brittle to hold a full-size job-eye? The lease is running out much faster
than my life is. Every day, my apartment gets one-cubic-inch smaller. The
walls get so short I only have room for the bed. I lie there and dream of
having any real job.
(Nicole Connolly [source])
…and:
The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the way places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities—a lot of religions have local deities, presiding spirits, geniuses of the place. You could imagine that in those [old country] songs Kentucky or the Red River is a spirit to which the singer prays, that they mourn the dreamtime before banishment, when the singer lived among the gods who were not phantasms but geography, matter, earth itself.
There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from, because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
…and:
How many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb?
The peach blossoms fall softly on the warty old frog.
(Bhikkhu Sujato [source])
