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The Movement of the Soul
By: Dr. Bradley Olson
Time seems to go faster and faster, and the little eruptions of chaos that result serve to remind us how important it is to center ourselves in the moment and love each other. We at Mountain Waves are blessed with another year of health, challenges, and opportunities for growth and feel so fortunate for that.
Indulge me in an innocuous family anecdote that betrays its mundane appearance and really does convey the essential, elemental experiences of life, the growth of consciousness, and the soul’s movement:
There are the new additions to our family in terms of pets. It all began at last year’s county fair when my daughter Lili won a small feeder fish at a sideshow game. On the way home we stopped at Pet Land to get a fish bowl, a relatively easy (we thought) solution to the not-entirely-welcomed-by-mom-and-dad fish. The pet store manager thought we needed another fish in the bowl and gave us a gold fish to keep the carnie fish company. Eventually, the two fish started to grow on us and we thought Shang and Mulan needed better accommodations and got a nice 8-gallon biocube for them.
A month or so later at a local art festival, Lili wins an African Dwarf Frog in an eerily similar fashion. Of course we couldn’t let that lone frog be a singleton either, so we purchased another before the afternoon was out, and joyfully placed the frogs, who are completely aquatic creatures that surface occasionally for a breath of fresh air, in the tank with the fish. My wife, Roxanne, and I hadn’t anticipated the steep learning curve regarding caring for these creatures, nor the apparent suicidal and ranacidal (literally means murderous frogs) tendencies of these creatures. One day, upon peering into the tank, Shang is nowhere to be seen. Soon, we find one of the frogs has gone missing as well. After several days we find, each in its turn, the frog and fish in the filtering mechanism. The fish had apparently jumped into it and was surviving only by the merest flow of water washing over it, while the frog must have been sucked through the intake.
Believing that Shang had been rehabilitated by the nasty reality of his near death experience and loving him even more for his will to survive, he was returned to the tank and to Mulan while we put the frogs in the original bowl we bought for Shang. Not long after this, we found one of the frogs had gone to the great lily pad in the sky, and upon closer inspection it seemed that the other frog had hemoglobin on its hands–a dwarf-frog sized Macbeth, no doubt compulsively scrubbing its webbed hands and muttering to itself, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly…” We thus discovered how territorial these tiny creatures were and realized we needed a bigger tank for the frogs. One of Lili’s grandma’s came to our rescue and gave a 10-gallon tank into which we installed the remaining frog, plus one new frog, and four new fish. Eventually, due in part to our ichthyologic inexperience, Shang and Mulan floated off this mortal coil and we bid a surprisingly sorrowful farewell to them.
We now have another five fish in their tank, and four more in the frog’s tank; we are swimming in fish, all healthy, and to our surprise we love it. These creatures are wildly entertaining and surprisingly personable…who knew? But these incidents have indeed captured the nature of this past year: simple decisions and insignificant events seem to unravel into terribly complex and sometimes painful situations; joy becomes sorrow and sorrow leavens and becomes acceptance. Finally, acceptance drifts into contentment, and all the while, a deeper, more soulful, precious relationship to life and to each other is evolving for all of us.
Life’s little, constant challenges are gifts that so often turn out to bestow upon us riches beyond our imaginings particularly because of the leave-takings they initiate. This leave-taking is the soul’s movement. The soul is always, and in all ways, drawing oneself away from comfort, clement familiarity, safety, and plunging one into situations filled with risk, psychic danger, and utter confusion. The leave taking movement of the soul defines life and living, in fact, leaving the safety and comfort of the womb is the first activity of a life in the world, the first experience any of us has of our elemental nature, the first experience of our humanness. One’s birth is simply the first egress of a lifetime littered with leavings.
I will end this longish post with the last lines of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Eighth Duino Elegy:
Who has turned us around like this, so that
whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude
of someone going away? Just as that person
on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, turns, stops, lingers–
so we live, forever taking our leave.
Dr. Bradley Olson is a Jungian psychologist in private practice and co-owner of Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. He is also a frequent lecturer and writer whose topics intersect with mythology, psychology, spirituality, and culture. To contact him about this article, e-mail Dr. Olson at mythopoesisme@aol.com or visit mwhealingarts.com.
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