As I was doing a read-through of yesterday’s post to make sure I wasn’t letting any typos slip by, I realized something as I read through the first paragraph. The reason for all this disconnect may not be so much an issue of my complacency as it is an issue I have with intangibility. Writing, ideas, social media – it’s all untouchable. You can’t put your hands on it, you can’t look it in the eye. It’s ethereal, mysterious. To understand it you have to rely on your spiritual wiles, something deeper than flesh. You have to attune your brain and heart to work together, to play a sonorous chord of the soul. It may not be something readily attainable, as I believe that – while we all have souls – we can be so neglectful of them we have to reconfigure our bodies to recognize them as an active entity within us.
I believe this is why the beach resonates so much with me. I can see the sand, I can see the ocean, but I can’t see the rushing, crashing sound it makes. It’s something I want desperately to understand, but fail to translate. With people, we can see where their brains go and where their hearts are located, but we can’t see what connects the two to make that person a viable human being. The ocean is wild, and the tides rise and fall as they please. The wind is its soul – pushing and pulling. The ocean lets itself go, moving with the hand of God. We get so caught up with ourselves as physical beings it keeps us from seeing what we have inside of our shells. Our world is material and shallow, because we don’t know how to plunge into the depths of who we are. We live through our things and through our flesh, instead of through our minds and hearts and souls.
Until we learn how to puncture the surface and dive into our own souls, we can’t see other people as anything more than we see ourselves, and we certainly can’t truly maintain a connection with our creativity and imagination. We have to find the strength to shove the shovel through the threaded roots of the earth. We have to stop wasting energy on petty worries. They don’t matter. We have to use our energy to delve into our souls and the souls of others; we have to make an effort to understand this invisible, untouchable part of ourselves that God gave us. Only then can we grasp life’s intangibilities.