Conversations with a Soul (12 page)

More and more I came to believe that there was something greater than mere curiosity at work here. I began to suspect that if I was open to the world around me, and if I resisted the temptation to take it all for granted, and, most important of all, if I stayed away from categorizing everything into neatly labeled boxes, which is a way of dismissing the wonders of life, I would see and hear things that were there, but hidden. Almost like the faces in children’s books disguised in trees and shrubs, clouds and rippling water, which demand a kind of tuning of the eye before you can see them.

Children manage this journey into seeing with ease.

Not yet embarrassed by the haughty verdicts of rationality, they are immediately at home with the magic of images and recognize the psychic power hidden within them. Children bring a superb ability to see and respond to the visible and the invisible.

Long before we learned the mysteries attendant to building a go-cart, we were claimed by the sheer wonder of such a wondrous machine and yearned to have our own. Here was more, far more, than a wooden box with four wheels, a perilous device for steering, and an even more hazardous system of bringing it to a stop. Here was the means for a boy or girl to live a dream, to swoop and careen and yell and laugh until tears made tracks down dusty cheeks.

For Dad the go-cart was a link to his own childhood and called forth a promise and a commitment to spend more time at home. For Mom the device was able to summon all her fears and ignite her anxiety, for it seemed to have the power to hurt what she had spent her entire life protecting, yet it left her understanding that soon, too soon, she would have to release her children to live their own lives.

Go-carts have a secret life of hidden meanings.

Likewise, long before we understood the rudiments of aerodynamics, the tug on a piece of string attached to a kite summoned feelings of grandeur and awe. We could almost look down on the world and defy gravity.

Kites also have a secret life of hidden meanings.

On those rare and wonderful moments when I have gone through to say, “good night” to my grandsons, the content of our conversation is never about the ordinariness of things. No, we can talk about the things we did and saw but soon we have dived headfirst into the magic, the hidden presence of Soul in images, which to the boys is as obvious as the nose on my face.

I shall grieve when the mystery of images is lost to our conversations, replaced by more practical things. And I shall fight to restore the magic.

The words that these secret meanings kindle,
'wonder, yearning, awe and grandeur'
reflect the power present in an image when we rescue it from dullness and allow it to address our experience.

You will recognize this game of peek-a-boo if ever you have laid down somewhere on your back, silenced the worthless chatter, in which we live too much, and allowed the marvel of the night sky to wash over you. The wonder of shooting stars, the immensity and the grandeur of it all, trillions of distant lights and planets and moons all locked together in a blanket of silence. Then, the questions come, summoned by the majesty of the universe:

Are great histories being written out there; giant battles fought; or maybe a way into the future that we have yet to discover? Where does it begin and does it ever end? Is it all just the result of some gigantic accident or is there a purposeful design behind these wheeling bodies?

I’m sure you’ve had these questions pop into your head.

That mysterious world seems designed to foment questions, and so does the world right outside the front gate.

Some sights (and
in
-sights) have a knack of paving the way for a conversation.
Anyone who wears a wedding ring understands the power and wonder of inward meanings; anyone who has someplace they call, 'home' understands this idea; photographers and artists spend their lives trying to capture the mysterious, numinous quality of some images and when we submerge ourselves in their art, and look at the world through their eyes, we understand.

Years ago, as a student, one of the courses I took required me to spend some time viewing abstract art in an art gallery. I was accustomed to the usual stroll through the gallery, mentally ticking off the paintings with “like, don’t like, like, like, don’t like.” Fortunately, our instructor insisted that we silence our ego-centric criticisms, and position ourselves in front of a huge canvass painted by Mark Rothko, and simply be open to whatever happened. With few other instructions he left us do deal with the painting.

Immediately my rational mind took control. I stared at the painting, looking for clues as to what the painter was trying to communicate. Great swaths of color dominated the canvass. There was nothing that I could recognize as a landscape or a face or anything at all.

Then, little by little, as I continued to study the painting I found that I had to deal with bits and pieces of
my
life and experience. The painting drew me into its shades and colors. No longer was I standing in judgment over the artist or painting. The painting, freed from my analysis, now stood in judgment over me! Even before I was aware of it my Soul was at work helping me to interpret my life and experience through an abstract image.

This ability of an image to get inside us and illuminate, has a certain quality of poetry to it because, like all great poetry, it summons us way past the words and into the felt truth.

Annie Dillard has a wonderful ability to share what she sees.

When the doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in it.’ It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly afire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time, knocked breathless by a powerful glance…I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
³¹

Every day of our lives we are presented with a glorious parade of images which to a greater or lesser measure come and interact with us. Most of the time, and for a variety of reasons, they call out to us, they try to get our attention, and then simply pass us by.

Sometimes we are just too busy to stop and engage the images, or there’s nothing of immediate significance to arrest our awareness. The hurried pace with which we live our lives, generally demands that we don’t linger too long over matters that don’t call for an instantaneous response, or over images that don’t have an obvious application to our business of living. Instead we select what we see and we do so based upon what we
want
to see. William Blake suggested;

As a man is, so he sees
.

Were it not for our terrible addiction to the language and demands of 'practicality' and the subsequent death of imagination we would find it far easier to honor the awesome power of images to address and educate us: sometimes to demand that we reflect, sometimes to open whole new worlds which we barely understand, and sometimes to reach deep inside us with life changing authority, en route to a conversation with the Soul.

Images speak to the heart in a language frequently more powerful than any other, including that of meditation and contemplation, and certainly more powerfully than liturgical or ritual expressions. We have all brushed up against the explosive energy of an image and the transformation of the senses called alive without warning, for the image is the portal through which we journey to many worlds.

I know that the smell of rain on parched earth has the power to return me to my youth and breathes life into the memory of walking on the thirsty veld of central Africa as the rainy season was about to break a long drought and bring dead things alive again. Far greater than the power of any photograph, that scent of those first great rain drops given to a desperate earth draws me back and I remember and I relive.

Then, the people who were a part of my life at that time and in that place come to stand beside me again and there is healing as I share the words I should have spoken years ago.

I know too that the merest whiff of wisteria can carry me back to Rhodes University and a Sunday evening’s stroll down High Street to Commemoration Methodist Church and I am young again and ready to war against injustice and I am filled with optimism and hope is my companion, and I am in love again.

The power of sight and scent and sound is deeply written into my experience and resurfaces in a place called
Psyche
. The ancients knew this well.

Demeter’s hair was yellow corn of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain. The threshing floor was her sacred space. Women, the world’s first farmers (while men still ran off to the bloody howling of hunt and battle) were her natural worshippers, praying: ‘May it be our part to separate wheat from chaff in the rush of wind’, digging the great winnowing fan through Demeter’s heaped-up mounds of corn while she stands among us, smiling, her brown arms heavy with sheaves. Her ample breasts adorned in flowers of the field.
³²

One could be forgiven for wondering whether amongst the waving golden grain
in every farm and field
it is still possible to catch sight of an ancient goddess. She who brings dignity to women, who, for thousands of years, have labored and sacrificed to provide for their families, and not infrequently, the families of others!

Thus it is that day after day we journey out into the world about us and at every moment we are surrounded by a world premiere of images. Some of the images are concrete and visible, some are invisible but no less real, some images leave us intrigued and questioning while the vast majority, after assembling before us, disappear into the passage of time.

We may not have the time or the inclination to explore the images that come our way, yet this is the portal through which we engage and are engaged by the world in which we live, as well as the world that lives within us. Everything that enters our awareness does so through this portal. All knowledge and every idea that comes to us is clothed as an image. Even our most abstract thoughts are couched in images.

Some images are rooted in the practical, every day, concrete realities of earning a living, raising children and managing relationships. Some images suddenly accost us and send us off trying to understand the message. Sometimes it’s because a particular image has the power to make us stop and think, such as the sight of an automobile accident which reminds us of our vulnerability and that of our loved ones. Sometimes the image has the ability to encourage us to recall something in our past which still waits impatiently for resolution. Some images speak to us of loss, or of hope or of fear. Some images reignite our curiosity and reestablish a sense of wonder. Some draw us back into our childhood and a time of magic or of tragedy.

Sometimes we take the image home with us and as soon as we can, we explore it in greater depth. At other times we invoke the gods of illusion and avoid exploring the image because we fear its power, yet it returns to us in moments of reflection. Sometimes in our dreams, it finds a voice. Many images leave us questioning, often about ourselves and who we have become.

We may be too busy to stop and see and engage the world through which we are passing, never the less all images exert a powerful attraction to our being. But, as in the brainstorming exercise, images demand a willingness from us to set aside our usual, careless dismissal. These imaginal visitors are frequently forerunners to a conversation with the Soul, but everything depends on the eyes and the understanding with which we view life!

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews gets to my point when he warns:
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.

Despite the extravagant works of romantic painters which depict angels as sensual females dressed in wings, feathers and the latest accessories from Victoria’s Secret, the ancient world thought of angels as quintessentially the bearers of messages. Angels might or might not originate from beyond the grave but their role was clearly that of an emissary. They brought news and therefore they changed the lives of those to whom they were sent.

The images with which we are surrounded have the same mystical power to change our lives, for they too come bearing messages. Of course seeing images as
strange visitors,
emissaries that prepare us to engage in a conversation with the Soul, demands a leap of faith only made possible by surrendering to the mysterious, illuminating influence of the Soul!