We just listened…..and his soul spoke.

I do love many of the entertainers on the TV talent shows, but tonite my thoughts are with a specially talented ‘winner,’ a friend from 50 years ago.

Meet Danny (that’s his real first name), one of about sixty of us, who lived in an orphanage-type ‘home for boys’ in Western Canada.

“Danny’s telling stories!” That’s all it usually took. A group of us kids would crowd around Danny as he enticed us into another of many episodes from his vast mental library of cowboy shoot-em ups, comedy, air combat, or sport and super-hero stories.

We were always so amazed at the full descriptions of the heroes and events in his stories, yet he had lived most of his young life in that ‘home.’ Whenever we interjected with our “What about…?” he merely rolled it into the story and kept going, giving us the odd sense that he might have somehow witnessed the events.

Was he one of those ‘naturals’ that we hear about, with the gift of a story-telling imagination? Maybe he was, but there seemed to have been an oversight in one area of his ‘gift’. He stuttered a lot. Quite a lot, actually.

Nevertheless, we were so rapt in the adventures and surprises that he shared, that we overlooked the many pauses in his sentences as he struggled to articulate his full thoughts.

Danny seemed to be drawing from a deep interior spark or source of his life……maybe something he had been fully granted when he was born…..like a gift from the soul.

Plotinus said, “The soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.”

In his research, author James Hillman, has referred to our soul and the acorn with which we each start our life…….the acorn holds our very destiny inside, a destiny that opens and grows for us as we live. So many of us set this aside, influenced by our parents, society, our environment. We choose to do something that has us be a ‘fit’…..to provide something else, deemed to be ‘more worthwhile’ in the judgment of others.

Danny had no one to tell him that stutterers make for poor story tellers (he was a great story-teller).
There was no panel of judges who might have buzzed him off because he wasn’t ‘the best’, (whatever that is).
We provided only non-judgmental appreciation. We didn’t know we were supposed to evaluate him according to ‘the enlightened rules of proper diction.’ So he entertained us with his wonderful narratives, and we created a safe community for him to express what made his life light up!

We needed Danny as much as he needed us! And it was perfect! So, maybe his real passion or purpose wasn’t in the stories but in the resultant pulling us together as a little community. Hmm. Interesting thought.

How do we know our real purpose? I suggest we each discovered a piece of our own gift or purpose by our contact with Danny, and each other, for that matter.

When we feel we have lost our Passion, it is usually the resistance to our soul’s urgings that causes any suffering. And conversely, when we have said Yes to our soul’s urgings, we may be thrown into a sort of trauma that comes as a healing crisis.

Unfortunately when this occurs, we tend to take advice from those who have no idea about the workings of the soul, so we are pushed back into the substitute life that caused the grief in the first place.

If you are like me and have gone through some of this inner turmoil, you’ll also have experienced a similar sense of relief when finally deciding to test out what we have felt compelled to do but were somehow thwarted.

If we choose to ignore those urgings, do they go away? No, for they are at our core. They will search for another and another way to reveal themselves, maybe causing us a bit more grief. They persist long after we may have given up. I think that is very good news.

When we listen to artists share parts of their lives, we hear them telling us of the struggle to persist in what they know they must do. This is what brought Danny to mind. Did he find continued support to continue to do what he loved so much? What are the odds?

Our gift may be ours alone, but usually a community of support is necessary in order for us to fully discover and nurture it. Danny and his gift might have had a different fate if we had not been there to just listen, or if we had been critical of his dialogue.

To further paraphrase author James Hillman:

“We moor our callings in the world by seeking the aid of anyone or anything that will help us touch the common ground so that we can reach for the uncommon ground.”

So, I wish every contestant out there, the best of luck and hope they aren’t persuaded to give up on their dreams. Tonite, however, my thoughts are with someone I knew in another lifetime, it seems. Danny, I hope you are still there somewhere, telling your grandchildren beautiful stories that thrill them to the core, like you did for me so long ago.

That will matter tremendously to you, to me, and to the Universe…..so that we all will be complete.

Rich

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