The Soul Never Gives Up...
/photo by Julie Daley
The soul never gives up…
on its insistence for reunion, on its insatiable appetite for wholeness.
“We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.” ― Roxane Gay
I’ve been in an alchemical process. Powerful. Painful. Beautiful. And deeply transformational.
And in this process I am remembering how I was as a young girl, the stirrings of new awareness to the physical world and the deep feeling nature of my body, the wide-open heart and wide-eyed hunger for soul connection, and the delight I found in nature and the world of trees and flowers that spoke to me so clearly and lovingly.
And how who I was and what I needed was met by adults who had forgotten what it was like to be a child, to be a soul in a new body who still remembered where I’d come from and the light I knew in my own eyes and saw glimmers of in theirs.
And how this meeting of soul numbness in the world caused great soul pain in me, in this young girl who still could feel the light in all things and knew something the rest of the world seemed to have forgotten…except for the trees and flowers, birds and four-legged beings, and other small children whose eyes still sparkled with magic and remembrance.
And how the day came when the pain of not remembering this magic became greater than the need to shield myself from remembering the pain of disconnection and loss and how the risk to remember became the way of magical reclamation.
I once wrote of magic and how the magical girl in me returned and how she longed to guide me, and how at the time I wondered if she could lead me to a sense of magical womanhood. And I see this time has come — that this alchemical process has prepared me to reclaim my deeper nature as Soul in this woman’s body, to reclaim the power of the darkness of the mystery and the power of the universal womb.
And Audre Lorde once wrote, “As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. …But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough. …The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
As I go deeper into this nonrational place within me that is the same well of power I knew as a child but now exists within an adult woman’s body, a powerful energetic force is rising up to meet me. It’s this ‘chaos of our strongest feelings’ and in recognizing its power I am awed. It’s unlike anything I’ve experienced before in its depth and intensity. So strong that my mind fears how small its thoughts are in comparison. And this is true.
There is a hunger in this depth of feeling. I once read that women’s hunger is insatiable and that perhaps this is what frightens ‘polite society’, for an insatiable hunger is anything but polite. While the young girl I once was knew nothing about how to feed herself the love and connection she longed for, or how to hang onto the innocence of her own soul’s radiance (which was perhaps never meant to happen in the context of ‘polite society’ which is anything but polite), now that this same power is returning with the force of the mystery Herself, the hunger is fierce. But it’s a hunger that cannot be filled with the wants of the personality nor the ‘treats’ dangled by those who attempt to tell us what we should be hungry for.
Instead, it is the instinct of the dark-side-of-the-moon and the fire-at-the-center of the-broken-open-heart that call…
And the undulating pulse of waves and the scent of the blood swell in my hips that sing…
And that which lies just beyond where the known meets the mysterious that beckons me to it.
The soul never gives up on its insistence for reunion, on its insatiable appetite for wholeness.
Never.