All that you have is your soul
Values based practice #1
Listen to this essay on audio here, or read below…
The title of this post is a Tracey Chapman song, suggested to me by YouTube one upset early evening in the bath.
I was getting ready to present at a parish council meeting (don’t ask) and I was upset about it. Life seemed, in that moment, like endless tasks backgrounded by constant loss, and without ever having the reprieve of loved ones at home to be doing it all for.
This song came on (well, I tapped the video on the streaming service), and it chimed so deeply with my own beliefs that it reflected back to me the truth about myself that I needed to hear ~ and I believe this: all that you have is your soul.
I feel very much, when I lose and lose and lose, that all that I have is my soul. No one else can take that away from me. I can only give it away if I choose to do something I don’t believe in.
It’s even more important after the loss of my children. They were the life I wanted. I come from soil and tree and open fire. I just wanted to raise them like a rural trad wife but without the trad or wife part (or without the husband part—two trad wives cancels out the bad politics, right?), in berries and dungarees and wilderness.
I was upset because I was thinking about something I have to weigh a lot these days ~ the balance between endless tasks and having nothing and no one to complete them for, as if the balance is off, I tack very quickly down. I’m not a believer in the idea that work is inherently virtuous. Nor am I materialistic, or moved by praise, accolades, and reaching exterior milestones. I’m motivated by my relationships. I love my people, and I’ve lost my favourite five.
When life can be so full of the meaningless tasks of living under capitalism, and when I can’t magic up living children or romantic love, the balance has to be found in things that feed my soul.
Listening to Tracey, I thought about what keeps me going. I live an authentic life. I don’t hurt people with it. I write to change the world. I’ve dedicated my life to study and thought and care. I’m learning to tend community. I host on a podcast that may well be career suicide, but nobody else will have the conversations we are having (last month we interviewed Senator Lydia Thorpe about ongoing genocide against native peoples in Australia, which to me knits in with the wars on Gaza and Ukraine and this article on Sacagawea and so much of how some see a hierarchy of humanity ~ it’s all the same thing, at the end of the day) and that, to me, is a reason to be there.
If I suddenly put on make up and went corporate (whatever that broadly means) and charged a good whack for my community journaling workshops, and wrote stories I didn’t mean all the way through to my heart, and lied about what was meaningful to me and what wasn’t, I think I would feel much emptier. I would earn more; I would be a better cog in a machine I feel doesn’t serve us, and maybe I would experience less panic about money specifically, but I honestly don’t think life would be easier.
All that you have is your soul.
All that I have is my soul.
And having my soul is very comforting to me. Having peace with it is a balm. I wonder if we all protected our souls, what world we would live in. If we never kissed arse, or liked what we thought we had to, or made choices that harmed the planet, or did jobs that didn’t benefit anyone. (If you’re in finance, this is your sign to stop.)
For my soul, recently, I have:
left Spotify (billionaire owner Daniel Ek, who has made his money off the backs of destroying the incomes of many artists, claims the “cost of creating content is close to zero” and also because tangibility heightens my enjoyment of art)
started a crochet project for food aid in Gaza (I will write more about this on substack soon ~ but you can already pre-order items here; they will drop 26th August. All pre-orders will be posted on the above date.)
plus, I recently submitted a book proposal for my children to my agent. It’s been hard to write because it’s about losing them, but it’s also been really meaningful to have reached a point where I’m able to, safely (in terms of my mental health), include them in my practice.
This all relates to my thoughts earlier this year about Values Based Practice. I’ll be writing more about that soon, and going into detail on living a values-based life and working life authentic to us as individuals, writers, and artists, sharing earth together.
What have you done recently for your soul? Is there anything you can stop, or start, to soothe it?
Coming up:
autumn journaling news (last four workshops of the summer available to book here),
Gaza food aid crochet drop (remember to pre-order here),
and a book announcement…
Imbibing, currently:
Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfeld ~ enjoyed. For fans of wlw/speculative/sea facts/grief processing/Rowan Hisayo Buchanan;
Many Hands Make A Quilt: Radical Histories of Quilting by Jess Bailey of publiclibraryquilts ~ enjoyed. Sobbed a little. Short and interesting. My first purchase from Common Threads;
on audio, this aforementioned New York Times article about famous Native American figure Sacagawea; also about who creates truth and fact, unsettling hierarchies in written settler history versus indigenous storytelling histories (something we touched on in this episode of the pod), and a new book on Sacagawea entitled Our Story of Eagle woman, Sacagawea: they got it wrong, that sounds right up my street,
and Rooibos, brewed, cooled, and poured over ice to make ice tea (with 50/50 Rooibos and water as I don’t like it too sweet).
Love this, thank you for sharing. I need to look after my soul