A Soul Within Your Soul

Years ago, I heard someone describe a friend who thought deeply about things, sometimes to the point of distraction.

As they were speaking about their friend, they said something beautiful. 

"Her inner landscape really must be vast." 

I remember feeling a kind of electricity run through me when I heard that sentence.  It resonated with me in a way that I didn't expect.  And, of course, it got me thinking about why it charged me so much. 

I thought afterward how much I wished someone would use that sentence to describe me. I longed for it.  In my heart, I had this feeling that it was one of the truest things I had ever heard about myself, even though it was being said to describe another. 

Over the years, I've heard that phrase (or at least something like it) only a few times.   And every time I heard it, I had that same feeling of an electric current flowing through me, followed by a deep, deep longing. 

And then, one day, not that long ago, I had an epiphany as I was reading and journaling about the journey to inner peace and purpose that so few of us choose to take.  

I suddenly knew that phrase felt so electric to me because it was the spoken revelation of a universal truth.  In other words, every single one of us has a vast inner landscape.  Every single one of us has a universe within our soul.  

And this universe within is both known and unknown to us.  It is the space where all the terrible and wonderful things we've experienced in life go to dwell, awaiting some resolution, great kismet, or reckoning.  

The other day, I read a wonderful poem by the 13th-century poet Rumi that spoke directly to the very epiphany I experienced.  

there is a soul 
within your soul 
there is a treasure
in your mountain 
seek it out 
a mystic in motion 
if that's what you are 
don't seek out there 
seek inside 

seek it out

There is so much truth and beauty in that short poem.  It speaks of that vast inner landscape.  Of a world with mountains containing treasure.  And it takes a "mystic in motion" to find it, to discover the soul within the soul.  

And what is a "mystic in motion?"  

It's someone just like you and me who wakes up at last to the reality of who they really are.  It's someone--everyone---who keeps moving through the world outside but who also can travel quite well and truly in the world within.  

This is God's doing---the One who creates humans in God's image, imbued with the depth of a Creator who fashions worlds and inhabits them alongside the Created.  

And this inner world of ours that we've designed is full of wonder and is nothing to be feared despite the shadows it contains.  Because it is in this world, this universe, this vast landscape that we find ourselves and discover who we are meant to be and how we are meant to live. 

No one "out there" will bring us real happiness. 

Nothing "out there" will give us true purpose.  

Nowhere "out there" will offer us real peace.  

Seek inside.  Find the soul within your soul. Discover the Divine within.  

May it be so for you today and every day from this day.  And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always. Amen.