“The soul is like a wild animal”
How is your soul?
Someone said recently that they had been asked this question and didn’t know how to answer it. I mean, how would you answer it? What does it even mean?
It seems to me that when people ask this question they are trying to create a dualism. Either your soul is saved or unsaved, found or lost, whole or broken, good or bad. They are trying to create a problem to be solved.
The way I answer this question is to say that the soul is the part of us that holds all those things at once: wholeness and brokenness, good and bad, finding and losing, knowing and unknowing.
The mind and the ego look at the soul and divide it up into good/bad categories but the soul knows no such divisions.
The soul just is.
The soul holds it all, infinitely, eternally and without judgement.
How is your soul?
It is everything.
“The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.” Parker Palmer