Don't We All Have A Soul Place?

“Oh, my bags are packed; I’m ready to go . . .” Thank you, John Denver, who loved those Aspen Rockies so much that he gave us wonderful music about them. “Rocky Mountain High, Colorado,” and then he died, crashing his experimental Rutan Long EZ plane into Monterey Bay in California. So much too young: so much more music to write.

I’m not headed for Aspen though. Just to upstate New York to visit my son, Lock, and his spouse, Ken, for the weekend. Good enough for me. To see the rolling Berkshire Hills, the horses and sheep in pastures, their coats thickening with winter and the sharp blue/gray Catskill Mountains in the distance.

I yearn for space around me: something Connecticut doesn’t offer. Once an English friend in New York on business, visited me in Connecticut and, upon arrival at my house, looked upwards and asked, “Where is the big sky?”

“Not here” I replied. “You’ll have to go to Colorado or Montana. Somewhere west. Not here.”  Understanding perfectly, I commiserated with his disappointment.

The only place here where we can find a “big sky” is possibly on a boat out on Long Island Sound. Then, perhaps, we can feel a smattering of the great and awesome expanse of the universe, something I find healing, inspiring and comforting. But here in Southport, pretty as it is, we are pressed against I 95 and each other. The “Big Sky “ eludes us.

This affects me: body mind and spirit. As I said, I yearn for space the way one might yearn for chocolate, or the sight of one’s children or breathing clean air. This hankering for space never quite leaves me, but, instead, bubbles quietly deep within my psyche, occasionally boiling over, erupting, until it feels like some kind of madness, a persistent hunger that cannot be sated.

But my bags are packed and soon I will walk among the hills, breathe the country, highway-free air, and admire the red barns with their sloping roof- lines. I will stop and look for trout in the clean, gurgling stream that runs beneath the bridge just up the road from Lock and Ken’s house.

Standing on the bridge over the stream, I will drop two carefully chosen sticks, matched as closely as possible for size, into the frothy water on one side of the bridge and, watching them both as the current catches them, try to guess which one will emerge first on the other side. Crossing the bridge I will lean over the railing and happily await their appearance.

A child’s game that I love.

What do you yearn for? Maybe you already live in your perfect, soul-nurturing spot. If so, God bless and well done you. But, if not, let’s go right past the easily obtained chocolate to the big stuff. What place, space, nurtures your essential being?

My cottage in St. Mawes, Cornwall, England did that for me. But it’s gone now.

I can’t help but think that once having identified that longing for space, water, mountains, a certain city: having awakened to that necessity within us, we—all of us—need, for our spiritual health and well being, to fulfill it as often as possible.