Soul Work

I was reading through some thoughts I’d written in personal journals over the last year and stumbled upon the following sentences,

This is deep spirit work, deep soul work. This is no ‘if I can just read the right book, watch the right movie, or meet the right person then everything will be alright’ work. No, this is a dark journey, through the dark places of a life that isn’t afraid to venture into the night.

The last few weeks have found me feeling thin. Thin in spirit, thin in patience, thin in love. Sometimes I feel so thin it seems as if I might disappear, evaporate into the night and become the wind that scatters leaves down the alleyway.

And then there are these moments when I settle into the thinness and begin to appreciate it, begin to listen to my soul and what it might be attempting to tell me.

To talk about spirit and soul is risky business for me, its even riskier to publish it online for all to read. There are many that will read these words and have no way to view them besides through the religious lens they see the world through. Perhaps for them spirit can only mean “Holy Spirit”, the third entity of a triune god (the other two being Father and Son). Maybe soul can only be a part of us that is either going to heaven or hell.

While I have not, and am not sure if in the near or distant future will have, formulated my own definitions for what spirit and soul mean to me, I do know that they are very real and very “there” somewhere inside of me.

I could carry on about this topic at length but I will stop myself there.

Below you will find a completely unrelated self-portrait I took today while in the Bauhaus coffee shop toilet on Capital Hill.