Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.
—John O’Donohue, from Anam Cara
If we’re going to talk about the ecology of the soul, we’ll need to define terms. By ecology, I mean the broader context in which the soul exists, and more particularly, the context in which the soul is nurtured and nourished.
By soul, I mean the singular, spiritual essence that animates each individual life in oneness with its source. I understand that source to be God; you might have a different idea.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how all the traditions with which I am familiar include fasting as part of religious practice. Jews fast on Yom Kippur; Muslims fast during the month of Ramadan; Catholics and Episcopalians fast during Lent. Fasting is a private spiritual and corporeal discipline. It paves the way to gratitude and to a small understanding of the reality of those who don’t have reliable access to food. The Catholic practice of fasting for 40 days during Lent echoes Jesus’s 40 days of fasting in the desert before he began his public ministry.
That story of Jesus in the desert includes an important encounter that I think reveals why fasting in modern times is so important. At the end of the 40 days, Jesus is understandably hungry. The devil shows up and says, “You’re the Son of God, right? If you’re all that, why don’t you change these rocks into bread? I know you’re hungry.” And Jesus says, famously, “One does not live by bread alone.”
Indeed. If I’m fasting, and I want a piece of bread or chocolate or whatever, but I don’t eat it, I exercise my resistance muscle. It means that I’m not puppeteered by whims or desires or wants. It means that advertisers don’t own me; they can make me feel like I want something, maybe even like I need something, but because I’ve worked that muscle, I don’t have to consume/buy/fixate on whatever they’re selling. I’m free.
Soulcraft, the nourishment of the soul, is like exercise, it’s like good nutrition. There are macronutrients and micronutrients that nurture the soul. But there are also things that dull or obscure it, among them: consumerism, staring at a screen constantly, being indoors all the time, spending your precious life filling out forms and waiting on hold and standing in line.
I suspect, to some extent, that soulcraft is personal. But I also believe that there are broad strokes, universals that are true for all of us. Here is my list of macro- and micronutrients for the ecology of the soul:
Macros:
*Developing a love for the natural world and spending time in it. This does a couple of things for the soul: it situates it in its most beneficial setting, the setting that we’re evolutionarily designed for and in which we have spent most of our human history; and it contextualizes and right-sizes concerns and worries. Walking in natural settings quiets rumination, the mental habit of playing and replaying the same anxieties over and over in your head. If your own experiences haven’t illustrated this for you, researchers have proven it.
Contact with the natural world is spiritually formative for the young, spiritually regenerative for everybody else. There’s really nothing like it. We don’t have language for all the ways the natural world nourishes and enlivens us. What does it mean for every cell in our body to feel a summer breeze? It doesn’t matter that we can’t talk about it in a precise, granular, data-collection kind of way. We feel and know its importance, we recognize it as home.
Spending time in nature often goes hand in hand with movement—we’ll swim at the beach or walk through the woods or a meadow. This is soul-nourishing too: The soul animates the body, they work together to experience the world. Feeling the body move outdoors, feeling the sun and the wind and the temperature changes as clouds pass, this is primordial nourishment at its best.
*Beauty and awe. When I encounter beautiful and awesome things, I feel it in my heart, I feel it in my body, I feel it in my soul. This could be inspired by a mountain or a poem or a piece of music. If you’ve ever had the experience of something in your world striking you in that way, you’ll know exactly what I mean. It’s staying alert to the presence, even in everyday life, of the luminous numinous, tuning in to both the material and the transcendent. It’s there; but it is easily paved over with busyness, overscheduling, and quotidian demands on time and attention.
*Hope. Having worked with people with profound clinical depression, I acknowledge that sometimes hope simply isn’t accessible. Here, I’m writing about those that have options and choose against hope. Constant despair throttles the soul. I think it’s spiritually hygienic to hope. At the same time, as with any virtue, hope needs to be counterbalanced with other virtues. If you just hope for the best all the time and take no action to move in that direction, and reality suggests that your current situation, left unchanged, is actually pretty hopeless, well, that’s a mess. Hope needs to co-exist with an ability to perceive reality. Together, those two skills can be nutritious.
Micros:
*Solitude. My family used to spend summers in New York. Sometimes I’d need to gather the children for whatever reason, and everyone would come from what they were doing. Except one of my daughters. We’d look around the half-acre, wooded yard to find her. Invariably, she’d be in the hammock at the back property line, trees overhead, swinging gently by herself. She knew then that her soul needed solitude, as she knows it today. People are different about how much and how frequently they need to drink at that well in order to nourish the soul. But it’s important to be tuned into this one, even if you find yourself in a season of life when it happens hardly ever.
*Company. There are people who are good for your soul and there are people who aren’t. The company of those who are is ambrosial and sweet. Hopefully, you live near or with some of them. The company of nourishing people provides the healthy counterbalance to the delights of solitude.
*Encounters with ideas. The soul breathes life into the body-mind-heart triad. It’s all of a piece. Because ideas—especially mind-blowing, original, or intriguing ones—strengthen and invigorate the mind, I believe that they also do good to the soul.
*Praying. I understand this broadly. Fasting is praying; swimming in the ocean, done reverently and with gratitude, can be too. It’s a request, it’s an acknowledgement, it’s a narrative. It carves out time to recognize the source and to recharge.
*Making things. Doing fruitful things with your hands—knitting, carving, drawing, tinkering, playing the autoharp, propagating lavender from cuttings, making lemon curd, dipping candles—offers a singular kind of soul satisfaction. You’ve been productive, but on your own terms, in your own way. You weren’t paid to make but you did it anyway. Like fasting, making things exercises your independence muscle.
These kinds of soul nourishment are unlikely to take place in school or in modern workplaces. Most schools, even religious schools, are designed to teach people their place in life, and to prepare them to occupy that place for the rest of their days. Work, for most folks, picks up where school leaves off. People need to be miserable and dissatisfied enough that they consume, but not so miserable that they grind to a halt and refuse to toil in the salt mines.
So that leaves the home and the family and the community. We’ve got to keep this all alive so that we’re human beings and not sad automatons plugged into Pharma and Streaming Services and Video Gaming and Porn.
So much of what you wrote resonates with me, Mary.
Beautifully expressed. And so many good reminders of how to feed the soul. Thank you.