Finding the Soul
by Diane Lundegaard, Dix Hills, NY
The flickering crimson and golden glow coming from the hearth might have held Lori’s gaze longer, but something inside the high school senior was drawing her outside. She headed towards the front door, grabbed her hooded down jacket from the staircase newel and put it on without zipping it up. “I won’t be long,” she said to her parents who were relaxing on the sofa. Lori’s mother started up from where she sat scrolling through her iPhone. Her husband gently pulled back his wife. “Let her be,” he said.
While lost in her thoughts, the most recent concerning an Earth Science lesson about star dust and universal DNA, Lori headed towards an old farm field that lay across the road from where she lived. On her way she barely noticed the spread of tangled frozen vines covering the field’s ground, an outwash plain where some 21,000 years ago a glacier had gouged its way. Nor did she seem aware of the pine forest that wrapped its arms around the edges of the field. Flocks of crows flying in from different directions congregated at the tops of those pine trees where they cawed emphatically to each other before heading to their main roost a mile or so away. Not only crows flooded the Island’s south shore sky but also bands of black capped chickadees. Although the chickadee flocks were smaller, they flew with a touch of color owing to the red breasted nuthatches that joined them. She barely noticed all this activity as well. It was if her mind encroached upon her senses until they were dull to the world existing outside of herself.
After several minutes of this walking rumination, a brisk cold air swept across Lori’s brow. She heard an owl shriek and watched as the powerful creature hovered over a stand of big tooth aspens. She turned her eyes away from the trees whose leafless branches were splayed eerily against the twilight, a scene which brought back and underscored one of her most painful memories. Lori felt the cold and zipped up her jacket. She didn’t realize it, but slowly after exiting the past, she would enter the present.
Had Lori’s sixth grade teacher considered the maturity level of his students perhaps he might have anticipated the effects his science lesson might have on them. Attentive and eager to learn, Lori looked closely while he pointed out the ribs, sternum and vertebrae in an X-ray of the human torso which he held before the class. Perplexed, she raised her hand and asked, “Where’s the soul?”
“There’s no soul bone in there, stupid,” answered one of the students. A round of jarring childish laughter filled the room. Lori sat there, feeling very much alone, while the center of her being felt as if it were shifting out of her life, carried off by a force such as the heaving and grinding massive block of ice that created the glacial outwash plane where she now stood with her feet tangled up in that frozen moment along with the frozen vines.
A sudden rustling in the brush not far from where she stood startled Lori. Her shoulders relaxed when she saw it was a squirrel, probably seeking shelter for the night. The chance sighting of the hardy little creature worked as if it were a signal guiding her gently into the present where she followed her impulse to stay. With her anxiety slipping quietly into the background of her mind she continued walking. As she did so the sun set and the stars appeared.
The stars being more visible during winter nights, made it easy for Lori, now centered calmly in the moment, to find the Big Dipper. From its handles, the pointer stars, Merak and Dubhe, she located the North Star. Next, she spotted Sirius the brightest of the stars and then she saw an arm of that great celestial pinwheel, the Milky Way, the sight of which rippled through her, filling her whole being with awe. From her outwash position on Earth, a position surrounded by pine trees, crows, squirrels and black capped chickadees, a position located within a neighborhood comprised of others like herself, Lori began to feel her way into another way of thinking. Her mind opened to the thought that the soul she once sought on an X-ray image so many years ago in a middle school class might not be something to be seen in that way. The soul, if not a body part or attached to a bone or a muscle might be manifest perhaps through an aspect of the Divine universe, including star dust and universal DNA. This understanding of the soul would render everyone their own uniqueness as well. She felt comfortable with that thought, actually more than comfortable. She could be herself and also part of something Divinely grander than herself which made her feel safe and peaceful whether anyone laughed at this or not.
Diane Lundegaard is a freelance writer, and environmental educator based on Long Island.
