Your Soul is Calling, are You Listening?
The soul has a language all it’s own and you probably hear it more than you think. It speaks in the emotional language of longing. This longing is not the same as desire; it is not a wish for some external object or person. It’s more like a soft whisper that spirals down and backwards into the deep recesses of your being.
The Portuguese word saudade speaks to the language of soul. Saudade is the feeling of missing something that you can just barely sense around the edges of your mind, some lingering fragrance of sadness or loss that perhaps in reality you never knew but can somehow feel in your bones.
Then there’s the Welsh word, hiraeth, which expresses a similar amorphous feeling. It holds the sense of homesickness for a place that may or may never have existed, a yearning for a mythical past or an ache to connect to long dead ancestors.
But why should you care about such a fanciful feeling, a useless longing for something unattainable? Because actually this is your soul calling you back home to yourself, saying, “hey, remember me? I miss you!” The archetypal psychologist James Hillman wrote, “Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are.” What we yearn for may be the depths of our own soul to counterbalance the lofty heights our spirits wish to reach. In fact, long buried in the soul like an acorn in the earth, might be our true purpose or desire for unique expression in the world.
In the soul’s longing there is meaning. Following the thread of longing back to the soul means connecting or reconnecting to your life’s path. There is a poem, “The Way It Is” by William Stafford that reads:
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
Perhaps in the next few weeks, in a momentary pause during the mad rush of the holiday season, you might feel a little tug of that thread. I encourage you to follow it. Forget the dishes or the recycling of wrapping paper, follow that thread all the way back to the core of your longing. What you find waiting for you there might be a treasure beyond price.
