Have you ever just woken up and felt your physical humanity in a profound and unsettling way? Happens to me all the time. Maybe I'm just weird, or maybe it's God's gift that I would percieve just how temperal an existance this is. Maybe I'm full of crap. All I know is that some days I wake up and as the first fuzzy, bleach-blonde images of my bedroom stream to my retinas, I get the feeling. It happens when I strech in a certain way as to feel a rib brush againt my arm, or the bone of my cheek, and the thought that comes to mind is ...
"This is not me."
Such a thought is about 20 times deeper than I'm willing to go at 6AM -- an hour best spent pondering hot tea and English muffins.* Still, it's there and I am made to deal with it. Two eyes, two ears, a slightly crooked nose and a mouth from which so much awkwardness emits: these are the elements of the senses. From those elements, every detail of my life and existence is loaded into a wheelbarrow and dumped into my brain. Life, it seems, is percieved in the physical and yet it exists in some space between synapses. It's that space that both haunts and enchants me. While we all feel it, no one knows quite what to say of it unless they're attempting to refute its existence. Reality is in a way subjective and in a way not; It is largely built on-site through our own perceptions, but I ask: "In the bustling construction site of reality, where is my soul?"
For the answer I turn to a four year old Chihuahua and a battered old copy of a Star Wars novel. As good a place to start as any, I suppose. Mostly I think about writing or creating. Something in the activity usually reassures me that we're more than a cerebrum housed by our skulls and in its own way it's like having a conversation with my two known selves:
"Hello, Soul! You still in there?"
"Yep! Remember that kitten you kicked on the sidewalk last night? Without me you wouldn't have felt bad afterward."
"I still don't feel bad, though"
"Oh, bad example I guess."
Moving seems like a good plan too. I'm not talking about moving to another city or anything, I'm talking about keeping your life in motion. A good habit is to ask yourself if you're secure and comfortable. If the answer is yes, it is generally time to move. This constant revision slaps you in the face like a cool slice of lunch meat. NO. Do not sit on Park Place. Pass Go. Collect $200.00, and give some to a friend on your way back around the board. Wake up and remember that this game will end and when it does we somehow need the answer that we played it well.
And who is playing it, anyway? Is it this man? This foot I slide into a pair of Timberlands, or the skin that keeps my insides in or the heart that pushes oxygen through it all -- or is it the real me? My soul. That soul that speaks in the early hours of the day when all I know are the sheets on the bed and the gravity which inexplicably holds me there. It holds us all here, and one fine day if we're lucky and if our hope is justly invested - it's going to let us go.
*Incedentally it is not uncommon for me to ponder hot tea or English muffins at all hours of the day and night.
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