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New Year’s Reflection: Your Soul and Ritual
Image courtesy of Flickr The year that I spent living on the coast of Oregon has come back to me in the last several days, and seems an appropriate reflection for the start of 2014. It was fall when I moved there, and near Christmastime when I met a wise woman at church whom I befriended simply because she happened to be there each time I went, seeking solace because I was so far away from home. She was twice my age, literally, and in January that year invited me to join her and a group of other women who fellowshipped together once a month. I was clearly a…
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Reflections :: To be alive with what is alive
Here is a thought worth contemplating. It comes from a man named James Hollis in his book The Archetypal Imagination. Hollis reminds us that the Greek word psyche, which is the root of words like psychology, means soul. Today the word psyche is associated with our mental life, as in our thoughts and emotions–what’s going on in our head. Meaning psyche as soul could be showing itself in whats running across our mind. Soul is a funny thing to talk about. It’s not something that can be counted or added up. It has much more to do with quality. So let’s call it quality of life. Starting with the idea of…
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Reflections: Dropping the Stones
On a soul level there is an inner reckoning that takes place during the holidays. Regardless of whether or not we honor the process, the season grants a pause of contemplation in which we take stock. Specific to this is a measure of our year’s gains, and too a more sullen depth awareness of losses or sacrifices that may have been at stake. We quietly account, if we take the pause to consider within. This is part of the human rhythm which inter-webs us all, and natural as the flux of the seasons or regularity of the here-then-gone-again moon. This year’s reflection seemed to have repeated expression, or in other words, a…
