Letting Our Souls Catch Up

Giving time, time to let our souls catch up with our bodies

Anyone who has traveled across time zones to far off places must know what I am feeling as I am attempting to re-enter my quiet life in the mountains of North Carolina.  I came home to a Spring that is now past and weeds that took over my garden. I feel the pressure of catch up. I feel the threat of hurry-scurry syndrome. I feel the hustle culture again. I can feel in the air the anticipation of yet another warmer season quickly approaching.  I came home and did not unpack because I went to a funeral. 

How is that while we are on vacation or travel that the world, suffering and death cannot be put on hold?  Why is there war on Gaza and protests on college campuses when we go to the beach; hike in the mountains or try to be happy for a brief moment in such a  fragile world?

From the Amalfi coast and Greek Isles to singing “I’ll fly away” at the funeral of a loved one is no way to reenter one’s life.  Upon my return, I also chose to visit my dear friend, who in twelve months, lost his wife, his health, his home and his life as he knew it. He is now diagnosed with congestive heart failure. But, I think his heart is really just broken—perhaps into a million pieces maybe beyond any kind of possible repair. Only a few hours before this visit, I was sitting in an open air Greek Tavern under fishing nets by the blue Aegean sea. 

How am I suppose to fit all these pieces together?

Jet travel is way, way, way too fast for the soul. The soul needs slow time. The world in the West abhors and detests slow anything. During World War 2, soldiers came home on ships taking weeks to traverse what an airplane does in only a few hours. On the decks of those ships, those warriors told their stories; absorbed the calm of waves they were crossing to enter a life—their life that awaited them. Where are those ships today? What has happened to slow time—that space to savor, integrate and marinate in all the good there actually is in this big, fragile world?

The lost art of reflection is an essential lost commodity we are suffering from as moderns.

To survive well as humans, we must choose to reflect—or else we will lose our humanity and surrender everything to speed and to AI.

Today, there is no time to adjust to time zones; no time to savor where I had been and all that my soul took in in foreign places yet with people I love so deeply.

Chop. Chop. Hurry. Scurry and in this frenetic pace, the soul gets divided and dizzy; not knowing what end is up and which way North is. I’m dizzy.

It’s more that jet-lag. Ambien helps with that. But, there is no pill for missing such an epic time and a sensory overload of Mediterranean spices, red tomatoes and white anchovies.

Our family was not all together. And I was told by one son, not with us on this trip, that the “optics were hard.” He meant by this statement that our pictures of such a good time. stirred up conflicting feelings. We must have posted too many pictures of long tables of food, swimming in the Aegean and Greek monasteries. I know, all too well, what he was trying to tell me. When one re-enters one’s own life, all the realities seem to collide in on us.

It’s interesting to let yourself examine the feelings that are elicited when someone is showing your their supposedly wonderful time on social media or through images sent through texts. Is it jealousy? Is it feeling being left out? Is it envy? Is it hatred? Is it genuine happiness for those who are looking, for a moment, so happy in that one frame of a photograph?

What about the images stirred up in my own heart of swimming with my grandkids; eating too much Gelato and talking about the meaning of life with my own sons where ancient philosophers did the exact same thing then, as I was doing with them—trying to make sense of such a messed up world with an evolving faith now. 

Did it really have to end? After all, people are moving to Italy and other sunny countries to escape the tyranny of the urgent we have created here.

Oh, relax. Maybe—I am just needing to tell myself to relax. I’m not going to move. I like my home; my mountain setting. I like being surrounded and cocooned by the National Forest.  But, to be honest, I could see myself growing a long, white beard and growing old on an island too. I do like olives a lot.

I will now need to heed my own advice I so often give to others: Give time, time.

Give time the chance to invite my soul to catch up with my body through time zones and culture and memories and reality.

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Writing poetry helps me put my soul back in order. It helps me to go inward and observe what it really is that is moving around way down in my heart—way down in that fourth quadrant that is so often neglected and unexplored in the human heart. Having written the words down, I feel a certain release inside. I’m getting something out—something that I need to say—and perhaps someone needs to hear. You be the judge. Unsubscribe if you need to or want to. Stay with me as you can.

I spent some time excavating my own feelings this morning. And this poem is what came out. Some of you can relate. Some of you may not.

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Here’s my poem and if you’d like to read it but can’t become a subsriber, just email me at info@pottersinn.com and I’ll get you on the list. No worries.