The Landscape of Your Soul

There’s a place in the center of your soul where all the love you’ve experienced makes an imprint. In this place, which is like a living museum of your desires, you will find all sorts of odd shapes and impressions. The deeper the impression, the deeper the love you felt.

So while there are some slight dips and indents scattered about, there are also deep chasms where water pools because the holes are so deep. A flashlight shining into the darkness doesn’t even penetrate their depths. Needless to say, these are the loves that changed your life – the loves that you will never forget, and that most likely continue to speak to you on a daily basis in the whispers of a memory or the breath of a prayer.

Yes, this is the landscape of your soul; it is ever-changing and incomplete. To tell you the truth, it’s a beautiful place. Peaceful, too. Just be prepared to get a little lost, for the terrain is vast, and if you spent a lifetime exploring it, you still wouldn’t reach its ends. And don’t forget to watch your step, lest you fall deep into one of the chasms and can’t – alas! – manage to climb your way back out.

Dancing in the Street

Notebook draft.

Quickly, with the lightest feet,
they woke their spouses,
left their houses,
and went dancing in the street.

How they danced unto the beat!
The angels sang,
the church bells rang,
the moon stayed out ’til dawn.

But, in a wink, it all was gone!
And tucked inside the quiet houses
were sleeping spouses
whose dreams were sweet –
sweet dreams they dreamed,
those sleeping souls,
of dinner rolls
and distant goals
and dancing in the street.

"Listen to a reading of this piece."

A Dreamy Lens

It’s O.K. to lose yourself in wanderings. It’s O.K. to let yourself dream. There’s a purpose to such drifting, such imaginative traversing of the mind.

You are, in your dreaming, able to envision some things about life with a clarity and luminescence that escapes the ordinary eye. You can, in your dreaming, imagine the potential of things and discover “what may be.”

It’s important to remember this beauty because it can guide your decisions in the real world. You are able, if you try, to mesh together these points of view: your dreamy visions with your apprehension of the physical world as it unfolds before you in real time.

It isn’t easy, but it’s within the bounds of possibility – and to achieve such a fusion (of thoughts, of ideals, of visions) is an admirable and awesome thing.

It is, in effect, a way of infusing the reality of this world with a magical sense of aspiration, of striving for more. You can, if you are diligent in the practice of such skills, achieve a way of living that is at once wholly ordinary and wholly extraordinary – and full of the wonder that leads to GOD.

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