Twenty-five years of listening to stories of pain in individuals' lives have taught me many important lessons. Perhaps the most important is the art of listening. If I reduce the pain I hear to a static moment or try to freeze it with my understanding, then I interrupt a process which always has a deeper meaning embedded within it. Pain is a messenger, a strange winged visitor that asks us to pay attention and listen beyond our usual preoccupations and concerns.
I call the high and light aspects of my being SPIRIT and the dark and heavy aspects SOUL. Soul is at home in the deep, shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowers saturated with black grow there.
The rivers flow like warm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul. Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers.
Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances. There is soul music, soul food, and soul love.
People need to climb the mountain not simply because it is there, but because the soulful divinity needs to be mated with the spirit.