e i g h t
Life is an endless making, a tireless process of picking up the materials at hand and creating order out of chaos, form out of formlessness, however fleeting that order may be, however persistent the entropic pull towards chaos. Life is poetry in its original sense, that is to say poesis, making.
Soul making and soil making are not so very different. They are two rivers flowing from the same source, they are life expressing itself while simultaneously creating the necessary preconditions for yet more life. Soil and soul are generous and they are generative.
And so perhaps the best way to talk about soil and soul is through poetry. Here is the shortest of poetic fragments, twelve simple words from Mary Oliver, that tell us much of what we need to know about soul making and soil making.
Instructions for Living a Life
Pay Attention
Be Astonished
Tell About it
Let’s explore this many seeded fruit of meaning.
First of all, to pay attention. To pay, to render what is due. Attention is not free – it necessitates focus, the purposeful allocation of a finite and valuable resource.
Attention: the roots of which bring us to “stretching, moving toward”. To be attentive draws us out of abstractions and reductions, brings us from the forest to the trees, into the messy, intricate, fascinating, contradictory specificities of life.
But it is here in the mess, in the granularity of life, where we encounter the unexpected and are open to astonishment, to that which upends what we thought we knew, what, echoing Auden, we pretend to understand. Buried in the word astonishment is the verb “to thunder”. Intensified attention is a laser beam that has the potential to excite what it touches, a lightning strike that initiates the thunder clap. Listen here to the poet and artist William Blake, who knew how to pay attention:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
If we cannot be astonished, if we cannot, on occasion, hear the thundering of the awesome tempest that is life on earth, we become deaf to wonder; we narrow, we shrink, we rigidify. We cannot take in what is novel, cannot absorb new data that challenges us to remain open and adaptive, responsive and resilient.
But it is not enough to simply open our ears and our hearts to the astonishment: Oliver’s poem concludes with the directive: tell about it. Her final instruction prods us towards poesis, to making. To communicate the raw experience of astonishment is not mere translation, it is a creative act in itself. Whether our acts of telling take the form of poems or paintings, symphonies or buildings, policies or activism, anything ready-made or pre-fabricated will not suffice. Poesis is not a mechanical process, it is not making in the sense of assembling with nuts and bolts. Soil making and soul making are organic processes that requires ingesting and digesting before the transmutation of one thing into another can occur. Re-animating the world is alchemy, which is precisely why that opaque and mysterious subject matter consumed Jung for the latter half of his professional life.
