This is the piece that screams never to that which would beat you down. … It is the cry that says, “I will not sell my soul.” … This piece is held within your heart, and it is this piece with which we now will work. C:7.5-6

One of my greatest joys in life is following the threads that seem to begin to weave themselves together on their own. They arise everywhere, like ghostly specters, the unseen come to taunt and tease forth. I love being in their grip, the beginning being particularly delightful. It’s an exploration. I’m on the scent. Whee! Joy!

This week it has been “soul” that has called. It started with a few lines in A Course of Love appealing to the part of ourselves we knew to cherish and set aside from the harsh realities of the world. The urge was vague though; not defining itself as “soul” until after I found myself looking for a favorite James Hillman book: The Soul’s Code. The first day that I went looking for it, I didn’t find it, and it wasn’t the kind of urge that made it necessary to do so.

The best thing about threads is that they meander.

The Soul’s Code was not in the house but in the cabin and I retrieved it a few days later. By then I recognized the urge to find it as the beginning of a thread, an initial clue that I would follow. I became quite happy, even excited about seeing where it would lead, and sure enough, as always happens, following a thread reveals the old adage that it is not the end but the journey that reveals.

There are so many textures to an exploration of soul that they can’t be counted. Yet, as I began The Soul’s Code, I found myself thrilled by realizing why it was this book, from among many that I have on the subject of soul, that was the only one I sought to find. . . .

Last week I wrote on my upcoming journey to New York. I’ve had various responses to it. My daughter Mia came over and asked if we could sit out in the cabin and talk. She mentioned having read it. She said, “I thought, ‘Oh shit, she’s saying, “Goodbye. I’m out of here!”’ A friend made a comment that he thought my expectations were too great. I could see why each of them felt as they did. But my reverie on the trip wasn’t about farewell or high expectations. New York represents a big ol’ thread, maybe the start of a whole new ball of yarn, maybe the wrapping up of many diverse threads. And that is why, or the major reason that I believe I was drawn to The Soul’s Code.

What Hillman is doing in this book (he’s a renowned psychologist) is hoping to return soul to the field of psychology. He says that he wants to set psychology back two hundred years to the time when Romantic enthusiasm was breaking up the Age of Reason. On the same page he says, “We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives.” And a page later, “To change how we see things takes falling in love.”

A Course of Love has a similar method. It begins to break us from our own age of reason, to encourage us to value our lives here, and to make us fall in love so that we see all things newly.

Rejoice that there is something in this world that you will not bargain with, something you hold sacrosanct. This is your Self. Yet this Self that you hold so dear that you will never let it go is precisely what you must be willing to freely give away.  C:7.7