Lodged in the material world

All of a sudden I'm singing Madonna in my head...

Sorry I haven't posted much this past week. I'm technically on vacation, though the next few days can hardly be considered vacation. My parents are coming into town from 900+ miles away, and I'm also frantically looking for an apartment...one that doesn't smell like cat piss, or is located above a gaggle of children. I'm set in my ways...

So I'm reading "Wicked" by Gregory Maguire for a new book club I've joined, and am finding it's take on evil to be pretty amusing. My favorite line so far: "Woe is the natural end of life, yet we go on having babies." I laughed, because I remember telling a co-worker some odd months ago that I couldn't see bringing children into this world, when there's so much that's bad. The following line in the book made me laugh even harder..."We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out." Cynical, yes, but ain't that the truth?

I don't know. Lately I've found myself not paying enough attention to the spiritual, and when that happens, I tend to get a little crabby. (I think I also get some bags under my eyes, too. Twenty-six year olds shouldn't have bags, should they?) Maybe I'm also paying a little too much attention to politics. That tends to drive up the cynic levels in everyone.

So from "Wicked" I got to reading this article from Psychology Today that talks about caring for your soul. In fact, it's called Care of the Soul. Its point is that the soul is the seat of our deepest emotions, the fiber of who we are, the spot that generates our worldview...and when we neglect its growth, we suffer individually and as a community. I found this paragraph particularly relevant to me...

We have a spiritual longing for community and relatedness and for a cosmic vision, but we go after them with literal hardware instead of with sensitivity of the heart. We want to know all about people from far away places, but we don't want to feel emotionally connected to them.

Something is in that paragraph that gets to the heart of some of my sadness lately. Is it that instead of feeling emotionally connected to people, I find myself dwelling on the latest article from The New York Times, or some task at work? Here's the next paragraph...

"Therefore, our many studies of world cultures are soulless, replacing the common bonding of humanity and its shared wisdom with bytes of information that have no way of getting into us deeply, of nourishing and transforming our sense of ourselves. Soul has been extracted from the beginning, because we conceive education to be about skills and information, not about depth of feeling and imagination."

Maybe that gets at it better...I don't feel like much is getting into me deeply, except for rage at our incompetent President and his circus. But that doesn't make me a better person; it just makes me angry. And probably results in the bags under my eyes.

Anyway, this isn't the most articulate entry I've ever posted. But it's sort of a cathartic reminder to myself of my need to feel connected, to be rooted a little more spiritually. Hope everyone has a good night.