Soul Mates
With all of their inherent difficulties, relationships of all kinds
enrich our lives and help fulfill the needs of the soul.
When we consider the soul of relationship, unexpected factors come
into view. In its deepest nature, for example, the soul involves itself
in the stuff of this world, both people and objects. It loves attachment
of all kinds--to places, ideas, times, historical figures and periods,
things, words, sounds, and settings--and if we are going to examine
relationship in the soul, we have to take into account the wide range of
its loves and inclinations.
Yet even though the soul sinks luxuriantly into its attachments,
something in it also moves in a different direction. Something valid and
necessary takes flight when it senses deep attachment, and this flight
also seems so deeply rooted as to be an honest expression of soul. Our
ultimate goal is to find ways to embrace both attachment and resistance
to attachment, and the only way to that reconciliation of opposites is to
dig deeply into the nature of each. As with all matters of soul, it is in
honoring its impulses that we find our way best into its
mysteries.
ATTACHMENT
The soul manifests its innate tendency toward attachment in many
ways. One way is a penchant for the past and a resistance to change. A
particularly soulful person might turn down a good job offer, for
example, because he doesn't want to move away from his hometown. The
soulfulness of this decision is fairly clear: ties to friends, family,
buildings, and a familiar landscape come from the heart, and honoring
them may be more important for a soulful life than following exciting
ideas and possibilities that are rooted in some other part of our
nature.
By definition, the soul is attached to life in all its particulars.
It prefers relatedness to distancing. From the point of view of soul,
meaningfulness and value rise directly out of experience, or from the
images and memories that issue modestly and immediately out of ordinary
life. The soul's intelligence may not arrive through rational analysis
but through a long period of rumination, and its goal may not be
brilliant understanding and unassailable truth, but rather profound
insight and abiding wisdom.
This penchant of the soul for the complications of life plays a
role in personal relationships. Relatedness means staying in life, even
when it becomes complicated and when meaning and clarity are elusive. It
means living with the particular individuals who come into our lives, and
not only with our ideals and images of the perfect mate or the perfect
family. On the other hand, honoring the particular in our lives also
means making the separations, divorces, and endings that the soul
requires. The soul is always attached to what is actually happening, not
necessarily to what could be or will be.
Rather than come up with new understandings and new and improved
ways of doing things, the soul prefers to get what it can gradually,
taking its nourishment from what is already present. Soul-work,
therefore, demands patience and loyalty, virtues not in vogue in our
fast-changing times. The soul asks that we live through our attachments
rather than try to make swift, clean breaks. It may seem wise, at the end
of a divorce or when we've been fired from a job, to get the past behind
us and start a "new life." But the soul may need more reflection on that
painful past, and there may be untouched fertile material in past
events.
It is possible to see our complaints about feeling stuck, or of not
being able to get past the latest trauma, as the work of the soul binding
us to our given existence. The soul doesn't propel, like spirit; it feels
the impact of events. It is easily stung and disturbed. The spirited side
enjoys power, strength, well-being, and superiority. The soul, given to
the pleasures of earthly existence, suffers its intimacies to the extent
that attachment often feels like bondage.
Parents may like the emotional closeness they feel with their
children, but they are also, sometimes frustratingly, tied to them. We
may go to great extremes in order to have a solid romantic relationship
with another person, but then we are also caught in an emotional bond and
may begin to feel a contrary desire for freedom to relate to
others.
The feeling of longing, the ache of desire for a familiar place or
thing, the urgency to visit old friends and places, are all expressions
of the soul. The soul wants these things fiercely, as though its
well-being required them, even if the demands of life make fulfilling
these needs seem impractical.
Attachment to people, things, and places can feel like a burden.
It's a nuisance to carry useless things around with us as we move from
state to state and house to house. It takes care, attention, and time to
write the letters and make the phone calls that sustain attachments. Care
of the soul can be demanding, requiring a decision that the needs of the
soul are as important as the more future-oriented things that claim our
attention.
