Month: February 2021

How light is your soul?

During a recent early morning drive across the Arizona desert, I noticed a few unusual dots on the horizon. The air was cold, even for February. The sky was pasty. The dots seemed balanced atop the scene, immobile, as if they were small blobs of paint placed on the canvas of winter by an unseen hand. No, my mind corrected itself, those dots resemble points on graph paper more than artistic whimsy, data on the grid of daybreak plotted by avian artists. As I drove further, through the mesas of higher altitude and into the distance expanding across the car windshield, more dots appeared. How many were there? Six became eight, wait, there were at least two or even three more, was that another just to the east? yes, how many now? – soon I lost both the count and the desire to make it. They were hot air balloons, of course. A bevy of them. Lifting, ever so gradually, from the surface of time, manifesting, with calm majesty, into the morning, ideas, released by unseen thinkers, tear drops, of joy rather than sadness, embodying the release of life and the floating sensation of being present for such moments of expression.

In 1978, as part of my sophomore year in college, I spent a semester studying in France. The goal was language acquisition through immersion. But the daily classes were held inside a school, all the Americans learning together, a process of study separate from the community in the French town where we were staying. I was somewhat shy, and was staying with a family whose house was farthest from the school. I was also trying to actually learn French and, using the excuse of living at such a distance, avoided routine gatherings of the mobile American student ghetto as it frequented local cafes when there were no classes. This left me somewhat adrift, from the standpoint of communications. There was English woven through the daily French classes. There was French outside those classes. And there was my limited ability to communicate in my new setting coupled with my desire to still make friends and connect with fellow students from the States who seemed much more comfortable in their skins than I was.

What emerged was “Kwin Mo”, a daily rendering of form and color on the classroom chalk board, a geometric design, always punctuated by a small circle, sketched against the blue-gray slate. Picture a pie with only the upper right quadrant remaining. Draw the straight edge borders of that quadrant with white chalk, two lines representing the truncated x and y axes. Now, using other chalk colors, place a series of arcs, smudges, and lines within the open field above the x axis and to the right of y axis. Find by instinct the right place for the small circle. Maybe you feel the circle is an eye. Maybe you feel it is a portal through the drawing into a world of being on its other side. It doesn’t matter. What matters is spontaneity, completion of the design, signaled by placement of the small circle. Name the design. For example, “Kwin Mo: The Journey Continues”. Replace the chalk where you found it. Wipe your fingers across your clothes (sometimes damp from racing on your bike to arrive in time for afternoon class). Sit. Say nothing. Ignore the raised eyebrows and tilted heads of classmates. Wonder from where your own expression arose and why you were compelled to free it. Smile when the professor erases the entire blackboard before beginning the lesson.

Our souls are such delicate things. We like to speak of them using somber tones, feeling the need to differentiate them from other parts of ourselves that we call spirits, or hearts, or personas. Since there is proof for what I feel – because I feel it – and there is similar proof for what you feel – because you tell me you feel it, there is safety in referring to feelings and emotions, relative comfort in leveraging the language of body parts that can be visualized, damaged, and occasionally held. Heart. Intestinal fortitude. Gut instinct. However, the soul, ah, well that is different. The soul supposedly cannot be weighed. It has never been repaired by a surgeon. It refers to something that might exist beyond our physical form. Let us be cautious then of soul speak. For a soul has not been photographed. It has never been definitively demonstrated. It is the realm of belief rather than commonly accepted reality.

Driving this week into the lift of spherical balloons from flat desert fields, I could not help but reflect on the nature of who we are and where we find our reason for being. Unpacked against the hard ground, the nylon and polyester shell of a hot air balloon is filled with more than helium and hot air. There is intention. Purpose. Dream. As my car passed one balloon gently finding its shape, I felt myself filling with the miracle of possibility. Of buoyancy. Of simple, subtle, sensational flight.

Might life be that easy? If we fill ourselves daily with the freeing goodness of honest breath, might we all become so light that we have no choice but to fly? That inspiration, that motivation, that acceptance which gives us weightlessness, that, my friends, is soul. There is no need to go searching for soul. For soul has already found you. Fill with it and you will find your lift.

Volunteering at a mass COVID vaccination site is quite the experience. Six thousand people per day, all in vehicles, every person and car filled with a unique blend of enthusiasm, fear, hesitancy, impatience, and ebullience.

“Hello!” “Is this your first or second dose?” “Any history of serious reactions to vaccines, foods, medications, pets, or anything at all?” “Have you had any other vaccines in the past 14 days?”

As a vaccinator in one of ten car lanes, a clinician charged with performing last minute screenings prior to gently slipping a needle into deltoid muscles large and small, I have learned to ask screening questions while scanning faces, listening for responses that might disqualify someone from receiving the vaccine, staying attentive for tense voices and body language that could foreshadow an anxiety reaction, being alert for signs of defensiveness and watchful for unexpected reactions that my questions, posed through the muffling shield of a KN95 mask, may bring.

It is rewarding work. It is fatiguing. It can be exhilarating. All in the short span of seconds, really. Take a breath. Smile with the eyes. Bring new energy for each vehicle. Observe. Assure that the vaccine is delivered where it is supposed to be. Try not to fumble with a bandaid that often sticks to other things than the skin it is intended for. Remember to acknowledge the sincere expressions of gratitude offered by the majority of car occupants as one vehicle rolls out of the station and the next one rolls in.

So much of our lives are choices. We can, at any moment, decide whether or not to give a vaccine, to receive one, to tell someone about ourselves, to take real interest in another person, to contribute, to trust, to offer our love, to believe that love, and its expression, is meaningful.

Valentine was a fairly common name in past millennia. It meant strength, capacity. In the centuries of the Roman empire, someone called Valentine was a person named in honor of valor. It took courage to live up to the appellation. People died because of that bravery. One of those people, Valentine of Terni, was martyred for it on February 14, in the year 269. A feast day in his honor – St. Valentine’s Day – was formally acknowledged in the year 496. Today, over 1500 years later, we retain our own version of this remembrance, a day filled with an assortment of symbols and expressions of romance, amorous intentions, and fondness. The path from 269 to 2021 has had some interesting turns; along the way, dying for love transformed from a religious to a more secular interpretation. The change, however, is not a loss. What has been retained, despite contemporary manifestations of materialism in the name of intimacy, is the vital expression of interpersonal caring. Of love. It is not easy to decide to love someone, whether that someone be a romantic partner, a family member or friend, or a stranger in need of assistance. Doing so is a choice. Acting on that choice is a display of vulnerability, commitment, and common identity.

Such actions take strength.

I am thinking today about strength, and its sources, because I am reminded this morning, the day prior to another shift of vaccination volunteering, of how weak I so often feel. There are big problems in the world. There are huge challenges in daily life. Sometimes I’d rather plunge my head into the proverbial sand of distraction, of avoidance, rather than turn towards the seemingly tyrannical pleas for assistance, for betterment, that surround us so openly, so persistently, so painfully obviously. Pandemic or not, we do not, as a species, reliably advance common causes of decency, inter-reliance, and global protection. It is, sadly, all too easy for narratives of individualism and personal achievement to occupy our focus and seduce our energies. And it is, unfortunately, part of my own plight that a day giving to others necessitates at least two or three sun cycles of emotional preparation. I worry about my ability to serve, to truly support the needs of each person in each vehicle, to be a part of the whole that understands, fulfills, and enjoys its role.

But that is a choice, is it not? That is my choice. My decision. When I am able to do that, when I can find strength through my convictions, then I can share that capacity with others. And that stoutness can be shared with me. Atoms, bonded together, form molecules, and molecules that combine become compounds. That is “valence”, the essence of everything we physically experience, at a basic biological level. It is the ability of things to bond. And bonding is what we all seek on emotional and spiritual levels as ell. So why do we make both our fundamental desire to connect and our experience of connecting so difficult? Why do we question, fret, and despair when our individual capacity to bond feels insufficient? That is how this design of life is structured. That is the basic drive behind our desire to love, to be loved. We are not separate; we only like to think we are. We are not isolated; we only experience isolation through disruptions of our commitment to connect. We are not energizers; we are simply expressions of universal and cosmic energy.

I can chose to believe that together, you and I, are powerful. We can chose to recognize that separately, you and I, are weak. If we do so, are we not then stronger? When we embrace that strength, are we not then all Valentines?