I
had been on the same road a few times already earlier that day forty
years ago, to teach a tennis lesson and clean a house. The road was
curvy, above the beach, lined with eucalyptus and nasturtiums, a
constant interplay of light and shade, and teasing glimpses of the
ocean. There was a monarch butterfly grove there, veils of black,
orange, and white clutching the trunks of trees, at rest or clustered
together for warmth, fluttering, undulating. In the past few years,
drought and climate shifts have caused them to stop landing there during
their migration.
Ali lived near a
famous monarch grove, too, in Huntington Beach, with her mom. Everyone
liked her a lot, but she was always finding fault with her own creative
efforts, her studies, her body, and she had become directionless since
dropping out of college. She hung out with her friends, smoked dope,
worked odd jobs, went to outdoor concerts.
She
was caught, convicted, and sentenced to two years in a prison two
hours' drive from her mother's cottage in Riverside. It wasn't Robben
Island, but it was hideous enough, all concrete blocks and isolation. A
short, slight woman in her thirties, with dimples, Ali was nearly
catatonic when she entered prison, except when she was in sheer terror.
I told my kids at Sunday school about her because the prison restored her soul.
"You've
all had incredibly sad things happen," I said. "You've all had
disappointments. Maybe you've shut down a little, or had to pretend you
were just fine all the time. This can make our souls feel cloudy, like a
streaky crystal ball."
A hand shot up. I
smiled. When you've been teaching Sunday school for as long as I have,
you know when you've hit upon a great topic.
"What is our snack today?"
Oh, well. Cherries and chips. Three thumbs up.
The
kids in my class have had significant challenges: a crazy mother,
absent fathers, a disabled brother, depression. Some of the older
teenage girls who have passed through our Sunday school have already
been through rehab, and some have been cutters. And when there aren't
actual hardships in a child's life, it's still just damaging here on
earth. Someday they will also feel smudged by the detritus of
addictions, regrets, obsession with finances, chronic guilt about having
failed their grown kids, sorrow over the state of their current
marriage or guilt about earlier ones. Even now, they know that the world
leaves grubby fingerprints all over everything: our hearts, minds,
hope.
What would soul Windex look like?
This is what I wanted to talk to the kids about. Who are we, and why
aren't we being that person? How would we know? When I was a kid, the
grown-ups in charge conveyed that we were our manners, what we succeeded
at, failed at, looked like, how we obeyed, how we measured up.
What
was so threatening for our parents that they avoided mentioning soul?
The concept may have been too woo-woo and esoteric, and inefficient. And
they couldn't control it or grade it. It was spacy and daydreamy. I
was, too, and I was chastised for that. We got hijacked into
socialization. Maturing meant conforming to a million rules set by our
parents, away from a more seamless participation in life. We had to be
herded back to the road from the hedgerows, where, if we were not
careful, we would still be living out our days, mostly trying to avoid
driving into ditches or being late for important appointments. Ali and I
shared a struggle with perfectionism, the most toxic condition for the
soul. The next most toxic is the ensuing and chronic contempt for
oneself, the belief that one is secretly defective and less-than. The
next is the obsession that one is right and better-than.
I
told the kids about Ali, what an ordinary person she had been, and then
what she had done. The girls put their hands over their mouths.
"Do you think she can ever forgive herself?" I asked.
They agreed, oh, no, absolutely not, not only for killing the man, but also for running.
"Well, would you forgive her?"
They looked at one another.
"It's okay if you wouldn't, especially if you knew the guy she killed. So how could she possibly begin to forgive herself?"
Pause.
"I'll tell you. She made a friend."
These
kids' friends are their entire lives. All they want is to be with them,
or on the phone, talking or texting. They don't particularly want to be
with their parents anymore; horribly, they don't even want to be with
their grandmothers as much. Yet hanging out with their buddies downtown
instills them with friendly watchfulness and curiosity, the very
qualities of soul.
All those years ago I'd
made a mess of my life, although unlike Ali's, the outside package was
successful, and even inspiring, with beautiful views. I betrayed my core
values, and women friends who stayed at home with their kids while I
partied with their husbands. I thought that I was beyond redemption, but
I became friends with a few wild sober women, who insisted that my mind
was not always to be trusted: half the time it was for entertainment
purposes only. My mind was not who I was. I thought I was nuts and
pathetic. The sober women said we all were. They said my soul was fine
inside the rubble. They would help me clear it away, and when my cup had
begun to fill again, I would pay it forward.
The
soul is the lighthouse from which we see the vast celestial ocean, a
kiosk from which we observe whatever passes by, the purest expression of
our being alive, the one part they couldn't wreck, in the paranoid
sense of the word "they." Charles Bukowski said, "If you don't have much
soul left and you know it, you've still got soul." Plato said a soul is
immortal and imperishable. My new husband-who still reads Plato, if you
can believe it-is prone to the random Obi-Wan pronouncement, and he
says that the soul is made of friendly awareness and the awareness of
that awareness.
One of my Sunday school
kids, a twelve-year-old, recently said she sees the soul as being like
Pikachu, "a cat-bunny creature, kind and curious." The other
twelve-year-old saw it as Casper the friendly ghost. A fifteen-year-old
boy with acne said it's a tiny golden snow globe. I wrote all these
down, for myself as well as for my own belief that the soul is a
location, T. S. Eliot's still point, with a lorgnette.
Is
the soul damaged by acne, political madness, rigid or unloving parents?
I think so, damaged but not mortally so. It becomes callused,
barricaded, yet it's always there for the asking, always ready for hope.
Some poet once wrote that we think we are drops in the ocean, but that
we are really the ocean in drops, both minute and everything there is.
Certain
qualities are of soul, and not mind or culture. Curiosity is one way we
know that our souls are functioning. So is a deep goodness. So is
presence. When the soul is functioning properly, it tugs on your pant
leg to slow down, but otherwise it observes, mostly quietly, but
sometimes with its mouth hanging open and a wiggly fascination and
sometimes with outright bliss.
I met my
beloved two months before the election of 2016, so these years since
have been a mixed grill: peaceful and joyous, romantic, crazy and hard.
Marriage has helped me feel safe, in having been found by a kind man
whom I love to talk with, my soul free to relax into the ploppy comfort
of being known-of someone being so on to me, except when I am fixated on
the fate of the earth or Neal's suspicious mole and imminent death.
I
have several soul-mate friends, but living with my best friend gave my
soul permission to surface in a new if sometimes tentative way. It has
made me softer, less armored, way less of a perfectionist, since Neal
sees me in my natural state almost all the time, slothful, gluttonous
bear that I am. I can't even pretend to be my impressive public self. No
wonder some of our parents forgot to mention soul, as it is apt to
distract one from Serious Goals and Aspirations. It is as playful and
inefficient as a kitten, as watchful as God or a baby. It rubs its back
lazily against trees. It stops and gasps at beauty and is bathed in it.
And sometimes it begins to weep.
The
soul is the thing underneath that is so hard to express, because it is
so far from regular expressable human endeavors. Rumi comes consistently
closest. The teacher Adyashanti said that the part of you that sees
that you are afraid isn't afraid. It's that watchful part in our
consciousness that knows, that remembers to look up from the bar and the
computer desk, the schedules and the phone.
I
had one of the Sunday school girls read Mark 8:36, "What does it profit
a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?" Jesus says the soul
is more important than the entire world. It is essence, pure love, our
candle, our participation in the illimitable, our goodness.
One
of the kids said the soul is no color and every color; another kid said
it was clear. I have felt my soul go gray. The drinking and eating
disorders, the deadening relationships I couldn't escape, the regrets
about my parenting. My closest friends all have guilt and pain about
their grown children, and financial anxiety, and existential sorrow at
how quickly it all goes, how in a blink the children have grown and can
still be mean to them-to adorable martyred them-after all they've done
for them!
My Sunday school kids love
how quickly life goes. They can't wait to be older and older. They love
things to go faster-my story, for example. They're getting bored now.
They want a chase scene, but as they also want their snack, they will
hang in with me a while longer.
Marcus
Aurelius said that we are little souls carrying around corpses. This is
my understanding, but it's too scary for these kids, and besides, no one
looks less corpsey than the girls in the class. I might ask them about
places they've been where beauty has made them catch their breath. A
mountaintop? The ocean? The redwoods? Where inside them does awe arise?
Soul is a place, the innermost Russian nesting doll.
I promised that after our snack we'd go outside and have soul time. Deal? I asked. They sighed: Deal.
So,
I continued, Ali made a friend, a lifer in the same cell block, who
happened to have gotten sober in prison. The friend was tall and strong
and kept an eye out for her, shared books with her, and took her to
meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Ali explained to the other women in
the first few meetings that she was not actually an alcoholic, just a
social drinker with bad luck. I love this in a person. I was just the
same. The other prisoners nodded politely.
On
one visit from her mother, when she shared with her this belief and her
attendance at meetings, the mom said the most amazing thing a mother
can say. She held back her scared, controlling opinions with her. She
nodded politely and said, "Huh."
Ali
kept going to meetings with her friend, because it got her out of the
cell for an hour a few times a week, and the women at the meetings
laughed and hugged. She was still depressed, flattened by what she had
done, how it had damaged her victim's family and her own; by the year
left to serve and the dismal future.
How
could life possibly degrease Ali's soul? The same way it has always
degreased mine, although our circumstances are so different. Yeats wrote
that soul might louder sing "for every tatter in its mortal dress." You
want mortal dress? Try prison garb.
But
on the day Ali said she might just possibly be an alcoholic, when she
said who she was, or might actually be, something flared: the pilot
light, a watch fire. Ali still smelled the terrible smells, heard the
clang and cacophony of captivity, but a switch had gone on. She looked
up, away from the grime of her floor and plastic prison slippers, to the
window.
Her blood alcohol level had
not been that high at the time of the accident, .12, definitely above
the legal limit but probably not drunk-drunk. I drove hundreds of times
with higher levels than that; all of us bon vivants did at the time. I
never got a DUI. I did get two fix-it tickets while in blackouts, as I
discovered the next day. In our childhoods, the local police drove our
drunk fathers home, handed them over to us at the front door if our
mothers were asleep. But Ali was born in a time when we throw the book
at drunk drivers, especially those who kill or maim, and that's a good
thing. Ali's sentence almost seems extreme, given who she is, but she
killed a man and left the scene of the crime.