~photo via Pinterest

Somewhere in his book, The Great Divorce, Lewis notes his view, I paraphrase...  the damned as "turned in on themselves".   I've been thinking a bit about that and it seems genius from so many different views.

I have begun learning how to throw pots ... on a wheel ... and one of the things I do sometimes is accidentally  collapse a pot.  I'll have something pretty good spinning around and I'll let my hand linger too long here, or maybe  my hand dries and the clay doesn't slip as it best should through my hands ... maybe a blemish in the clay snags ... any number of whatevers waiting to present themselves to novice me ... sometimes the pot turns in on itself.  No big deal, we begin again.  I make mistakes with my clay that a master potter would never make. ... and ... my teacher has set down with one of my mistakes in the making and deftly reshaped the weak spot out.  So cool to see how it's done when it's done well

I'm thinking about places in my own life where just life spinning me round and round has, or had, turned me in on myself.  Places where this or that aspect of the essential me had begun to collapse inward or ...  maybe had ... and that part of me just set there in a heap ... like a mess ... like, not how it was supposed to be ... like not really good enough for what it potentially might be.

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, 

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” 

~Whitman

Last night, Two and I visited about how usual is the track for a young woman around here to marry young, very likely to a very young man who has enlisted and is sending his pay check home ... home to a trailer parked somewhere in the middle of nowhere ... supporting a bride who spends her days in bed eating pop tarts and shopping on line.  My girl will have a birthday soon and I think she is starting to hear the local buzz "poor child looks like she's well on the way to being an old maid ... " yesterday she told someone that she'd like to take her chance at doing something with her life, she is figuring it out ... I see her doing it, growing in to the life she will be happy to live.  It's not easy ... not a pop tart life.  She says she would like to contribute rather then simply consume.

So, that with the exhibition yesterday ... looking at those "bodies"  I see how similar we all are ... the earth suit is pretty standard issue,  one of those, two of these, miles and miles of that, a bazillion tiny pieces that "I" can't see without the aid of something "We" created. And what I wonder makes us different ... it's really sort of amazing that different is such a universal component of us.  You couldn't lay your hand on "different" yesterday like you might a liver, an artery, a heart.  And I wondered as I marveled at the beauty of these pieces of shell ... this one birthed a child, her hip bone worn milky-transparent thin by osteoporosis, who was she, what became of her life ... how did she come to choose to send this gift from herself.  I really don't know yet how to phrase that question.  Every thing I saw there yesterday was once "alive" ... a soul lived wrapped in "that".  It seems indescribably generous to me that they chose to let whoever see and make what we will of what we saw ... how we are the same ... hints of how we are unique.

saw this early this morning:
"Seduce my mind and you can have my body, find my soul and I am yours forever."
It's supposed to be romantic ... per the comments attached to the "pin".  At first I didn't feel very good about it ... it seemed a bit flippant ... pop tart like ... like disregarding  the hugeness of sharing oneself with another person ... and ... I personally don't believe my soul is mine to give away like that.  But then I started thinking about those relationships where my soul was found.  I know some of my people have come in to my life via my mind and I share with them things my body can do, you know, not sex like this quote seems to imply, but ... tending ... caring about or for which is somewhat superficial.  And then there are those with whom I share or have shared the concerns ... joyous or otherwise ... of my soul, and that is something that seems to have "forever" type resonance ... soul expanding in a way opposite of turning in on oneself.  I have experienced my "shared soul" opening up away from where it was closed and felt "damned".
The soul goes where the body takes it ... the body goes where the soul allows it to go (when choices can be made).  I think it must be the work ... the doings of the soul ... which make one feel as though their life has "made a difference".  I'm coming to that conclusion.  My body pulls weed which will grow back.  My soul pulls weeds which allow me to see more clearly in to the garden.

~ photo ia Pinterest