Conversations with a Soul (19 page)

We trash our lives too easily and banish from our awareness the sense that we were meant to be, and mysterious spirit guides still call and beckon us on a journey.

The ancients, who were not obsessed by the need to find scientifically verifiable causal explanations for every experience, believed that each child was born with a unique daemon. The particularity of each human life was the result of that daemon spirit shaping the person’s being, choices, and fate. The daemon guided the child and later the adult in their journey through changes towards stability, a stability that made room for the guidance of the unseen.

Such was the belief of the Babylonians and the Assyrians attested to by unearthed figurines depicting
helper spirits
. The Greeks taught that everyone was born with
a soul-companion, a Daemon
; the Romans called the
personal guardian spirit
, the
Genius
, who watched over men and the
Juno
who did the same for women. Indians, Persians and Ancient Egyptians believed in
personal guardian spirits,
and American Indians taught about
Spirit Helpers
who sometimes took the form of a particular animal. From the earliest of times the Christian Church has taught about
Guardian Angels
, who were responsible for carrying out God’s will in the life of each child, claiming authority for this belief from several Biblical texts, not least Jesus’ warning:

See that you never despise any of these little ones, for I tell you that their angels in heaven are continually in the presence of my Father in heaven.
⁵³

Of course, like every mystery that surrounds the Soul, there is no scientific data to validate or invalidate these beliefs. These are matters of belief and easily discounted by an appeal to primitive superstition, without ever exploring the question:

“But what if it were true?”

It is a question worthy of reflection why so many civilizations separated by thousands of miles and as many years should all have arrived at such similar ideas?

We may dismiss these ideas and assign to them whatever language we habitually use to discredit what we do not understand, but they have as much validity as the experiences of inspiration, intuition, mental telepathy, the sudden breaking of an idea, the urge to write a book, the desire to pray or the conviction to embrace a cause.

Our willingness, to accept that some patterns seem to be rooted in structures that go way beyond simple or causal explanations, may open the door to new forms of wisdom and nurture new ways of seeing life.

In our own day, most of us have accumulated a store of anecdotal stories, shared by others or experienced ourselves that suggest we too have been guided, nudged, pulled in a direction we would not otherwise have chosen. To dig into the particularity I feel to be me, is to arrive at a place where I understand myself to be more than an accident of genes, a product of chance, or the result of a history. I was meant to be here and there is a purpose to my being which I must discover. In this journey of discovery I am helped and encouraged by that which lies beyond my ability to explain but is nevertheless a powerful part of my experience. All along there was and is a sense of being prodded and called, sometimes in a dramatic way and sometimes very quietly and unobtrusively.

Sometimes the sense of a Spirit that guides my destiny disappears. Then, something happens, a word, an invitation, a moment of quiet reflection, another human being who steps out of the shadows and just for a moment speaks a word, and I sense that something more than wisdom or luck is calling me to journey.

Sometimes, when I have tried to share one of these experiences with some of my more skeptical friends, my account of being guided by an unseen hand has been dismissed as a coincidence. Far from being dissuaded, the language of coincidence has left me all the more convinced that my particularity included experiences that were not explicable other than to include the element of mystery.

The simple reality of coincidences serves to remind us that far from being in total control of our lives and decisions, unplanned and inexplicable events lie just around the corner. For some it is all a matter of chance, for others, a matter of mystery and faith. The story of our lives told in patterns of change and renewal is also the story of Spirit helpers who come to tug and whisper, sometimes playfully nudge, sometimes dramatically confront, for our individual journeys towards stability are also the stories of our becoming.

The first winter storm rolled in a few days ago. It left us with several downed trees, blown over fences and five cold days and nights without electricity.

A small price to pay for the promise of spring.

There was a child went forth every day;

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;

And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,

And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,

And the Third-month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf,

And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful curious liquid,

And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads—all became part of him.
⁵⁴

On some mornings the beach is strewn with great mounds of kelp:

Twisted,

Bundled,

Tangled.

Ferried by wind and wave, rolling, tumbling, born on the incoming tide, most casually scattered about, or draped over rocks, or carried to the high tide level on the beach and there abandoned by the retreating waters.

Some clumps of leafy Giant kelp and elegant fronds of Feather Boa have dressed for the occasion and arrive wrapped in bright green blades of eel grass, while other clusters shun such finery, content to play out the final chapter without ornamentation.

Completing the trio of common kelp to come ashore, there’s the Bullwhip kelp, some of it up to 120 feet long, shiny, leathery, tapered. It looks like a deadly, terrifying sea-snake, but it’s quite harmless.

Some of the Giants still cling to their, now useless, pneumatocysts, little gas filled sacs that helped keep the kelp’s fronds upright in the water. No longer needed by the kelp, they provide entertainment for a few beachcombers who enjoy stomping on the little bladders to hear them pop.

For the uninformed, kelp is merely sea-
weed
. Thus defined and thus dismissed, all that their senses engage is a smelly inconvenience, part of the detritus churned up by the ocean that seems to have little purpose and serves only to ruin the pristine state of the beach.

Yet, as I was to find out, the kelp could open doors; one into a mysterious, long lost world, and another to my own, mystical internal kingdom.

Not long ago these fronds and stipes grew as part of a huge, vibrant, life-supporting, underwater forest, no less spectacular or mysterious than our treasured tropical rainforests. Like forests that grow on the surface of the earth, those that grow beneath the ocean are quite fussy about where they live and are uncompromising about their needs.

Cool water and a fair amount of light, head the list of requirements. Then, since kelp must live by dancing amidst swirling ocean currents, it needs a rocky sea bed onto which it can fasten its roots, appropriately called
holdfasts
.

Finally, kelp likes food, lots of food! Able to grow at an amazing 2 feet
a day,
it needs nutrient rich waters in which to reside.

Once these conditions are met, kelp thrives with a lavish generosity, unsurpassed even by the great land forests in providing a home and nourishment for its residents.

In this mysterious, clandestine village, a host of citizens go about their business: Tiny fish, trying their best not to become supper, eels, halibut, bright orange garibaldi, the elder sheephead, exquisite jelly fish, snails, crabs, shrimp, starfish, and sea anemones, to name but a few.

So too a great many birds; gulls, herons, pelicans, and a variety of waterfowl all go shopping for food in the upper levels of this forest, ever ready to snack on an unwary fish or scoop-up a morsel that has fallen from another shopper’s beak.

Some of the larger residents and visitors: sea lions, sea otters and sometimes even whales, take time off to eat, play and rest in the dappled light amongst the gently swaying stipes.

Sea otters are on particularly good terms with kelp, with which they share a mutually satisfying relationship. So as to stay put while they eat or nap, otters drape long strands of kelp around their shoulders which anchors them to their chosen spot, even though ocean currents may be surging and swirling all about them.

The otters reciprocate the kelp’s hospitality by feasting on sea urchins, which like to feast on the kelp’s holdfasts! Several years ago when the sea otters were almost hunted to extinction, there was nothing to limit the sea urchin population and the kelp forests began to disappear. Once the sea otter population was stabilized, the kelp forests returned

During the summer months and into fall, driven by strong ocean currents and on- shore winds, great quantities of dislodged kelp are washed ashore. Warmed by the late summer sun, the kelp soon decays. Admittedly, not the kind of odour you would want to bottle as air freshener; nevertheless it’s good enough for the myriads of kelp flies, beach hoppers and beetles, which breed, live and die in the mounds of rotting kelp. A walk on the beach displaces swarms of these critters that scamper and flit about looking for a new home.

Many of them do find a new home - inside hungry turnstones that dart from bundle to bundle joyously snacking on the tiny refugees. The birds are quite proficient in bringing down food, on the fly, so to speak.

So, having played host to the creatures of the sea, once it comes ashore, the kelp continues to play host to the hungry.

That task taken care of, the kelp has one more duty to perform. The waves that carry the kelp ashore also churn up sand. Soon covered, the kelp rapidly decomposes and releases back into the ocean the essential elements of nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon. Dark brown smudges in the sand mark the journey of the nutrients back to the forests, as they return to nurture the next generation of giant kelp.