life: acoustic & amplified

poetry, quotes & thoughts about life

THE SUBVERSIVE SOUL

We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul-life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence, but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a fuller union with the world. The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counselor’s central puzzle, the biographer’s conundrum, the saboteur of the puritanical and the unimaginative; an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a flow: an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart; a pilgrim often suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who would much rather fail spectacularly at their own life than succeed drably at someone else’s.

❤️

Winter Thoughts © David Whyte 2018

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