Pet wolves

Where are we going with this discussion of darkness and soul? Don't ask me, I'm just holding onto my end of the thread. Soul searches out intensity, variety, and depth, which doesn't always match up with concerns for security, safety, and dinner on time. I think of it as an inherent perversity that often leads me to moments of great beauty, difficulty, aliveness, or all three at once.

I hate to use the term "ego" to describe what is pedestrian and orderly about my psyche. Ego positions, mine anyway, can be impulsive, volcanic even, under duress, and talk of "the ego" leads to talk of "the soul" and that is not where we want to go. It's like trying to own a pet wolf, a lovely fantasy perhaps, of wildness and the wild thing, but if taken literally everything essential is lost. (Ask Barry Lopez. In his wonderful book, Of Wolves and Men, he discusses his experience with two "pet" wolves. "Having done it once, naively," he writes, "I would never do it again....I am grateful for the knowledge I have gained but if I'd known what it would cost I don't think I would have asked").

To admit, invite, appreciate, or just survive the soul that moves us like a ventriloquist's dummy (well, I'll speak for myself), we have to learn to consciously embrace the meanings embedded in our fantasies without acting them all out in real time and space, and recognize that human life and reality are fundamentally acts of imagination. I don't mean that there is no concrete, material world governed by gravity, but that we move through it like a psychological Helen Keller, arms outstretched, nose twitching, finding our way via our interpretations (which are as accurate as our attention is close).

Toni Morrison says "Fact can exist without human intelligence but truth cannot." No. Truth is made, discovered, lost, and remade. This, soul can teach us. Soul and our dreams in the dark.