Soul's Code

PhyllistheAuthor — In the 22 years we have lived in Williamsburg, we have driven the three miles from our house to the historic area probably on average once a day. When I taught at William and Mary and when our son was in the Colonial Williamsburg fife and drum corps, we traveled the route so often that we joked that our car automatically went that way.

Yesterday as part of our training for our pilgrimage in Spain, we walked to the historic area along the route we had so often driven. My husband spotted prehistoric scallop shells in a deep ravine. Traveling the route by car, we had never seen them.

The sea once covered Williamsburg, and the shells are about five million years old, give or take a few million years. We were especially delighted to collect a few shells since the scallop shell is the symbol of pilgrims who travel the Camino to Santiago de Compostela. Pilgrims today, as they have for 12 centuries, wear a scallop shell.

Every year we enjoy seeing the azaleas that festoon the homes in Williamsburg. This year we didn’t zip by them as we usually do. Rather we were able to experience their lushness as we walked.

PhyllistheAuthor — In order to be able to walk for 250 miles on our pilgrimage beginning May 23, we have been walking various trails in our area. Today we visited the Powhatan Watershed Natural Area about three miles from our house. One of the surprise benefits of our training has been that we have rediscovered our local area. Another benefit is that the additional walking we have been doing has made us feel great. It’s a great prescription for anyone looking to clense their mind or get into better shape. “Praying with your feet,” it’s called.

Our son, Alex, visiting from California, joined his mom and dad on today’s hike. Shown here is a natural arch that resulted from a tree damaged during an ice storm. I remember several ice storms during my time in the area. We certainly lost our share of trees to them. It’s amazing that this one has managed to survive.

Alex photographed this butterfly so we could identify it. I have searched through our Audubon guide to butterflies and I haven’t found it. Does anyone know what it is? It has brown wings that are ringed with a black rim and white spots.

I snapped a picture of a wild iris. Can you spot it? It is near the center of the picture. Seeing the iris growing wild made me think of the silent beauties of the world that grow, and too often go, un-noticed. Sometimes you have to just have faith that somebody will come along one day and appreciate the beauty you’ve been quietly cultivating. On seeing the iris, my husband commented on how as a boy he would go fishing and bring back wild irises

for his mother.

Poets who commit suicide use “I,” “me” and “mine” in their writing more than poets who don’t take their lives, according to a study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine. Discover Magazine picked up the study in 2006, which compared 156 poems by nine poets who committed suicide to 135 poems written by poets who didn’t take their own lives. The “stable” poets used words such as “talk,” “share” and “listen” more as well. Discover compares “An Appearance,” by Sylvia Plath to “The Ache of Marriage” by Denise Levertov and the difference between the two is telling.

“Pain bodies don’t like to be looked at . . . they thrive in non-attention,” spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says in the short video below.

It speaks directly to the psychology of Seung-hui Cho, a child immigrant from South Korea who grew up in the Washington suburbs — and this week, transformed himself from a Virginia Tech English student into a mass-murderer.

Tolle’s point in the video is that there is an addictive quality to the thoughts of anger that cycle through each of our heads — and our consumption of external images in news, TV and movies (like Taxi Driver) of angry characters acting out violent scenes. They feed a little entity in each of us, an unconscious program we’ve embedded in our personalities. Tolle’s term of art for it is “the pain body.”

Cho’s pain-body seemed to thrive in an atmosphere of extreme inattention, due both to his loner social-status and lack of a center in his own psyche.

According to a report compiled by the L.A. Times, Cho had no close friends, gave people who addressed him one-word answers, and didn’t date — although he was reported, and treated, for stalking behaviors.

Soul’s Code is devoted to charting the path of Your growth, and evolving just as you do — from thought to thought, and action to action. Here’s walking the talk: over the past few days we’ve introduced a host of new functions and features for you to grok and try out.

1. New voices join the choir. Read Dr. Stephen Omohundro’s fire walking experience, or check out Cyndi Ingle’s review of Edward de Bono’s new book. These are great pieces you can’t get anywhere else.

2. An interesting question we have asked ourselves: “What is the most loving or kindest thing anyone has ever said to me?” We created a page for you to post what comes to you. There is road-rage, office politics and all kinds of negative noise out there in the world. Here is to sharing positive passages, and creating a Love Scroll of these experiences.

3. We wanted to give you a chance to send a missive to Santiago de Compostela in Spain to be personally delivered by one of our Soul’s Code contributors. Check out the details.

4. Every journey needs a journal, as the Wall Street Journal likes to say. We take it literally. We’re working very hard to give you a place to express what you’ve discovered about yourself, join a conversation with a like-minded community and create a kind of digital spiritual scrapbook. You can see the first-draft of what we’re

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee figured out the grace of the Blind Side

BY PAUL KAIHLA — There is a crisis in America. That crisis is divorce. It is easier to get out of a marriage than (to get out of a) contract to buy a used car.
– Mike Huckabee

Another governor of Arkansas is always running for president — this time, a Republican. Incredibly, Mike Huckabee was even born in the same small town as Bill Clinton (Hope, Ark.). And Huckabee also has a marriage problem, although his isn’t personal. It’s policy.

HBO called on documentary stars Barbara Koppel, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles to create the most ambitious series ever about addiction. But the slant is more science than spiritual

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Our friends at Entertainment Weekly invited us to the premiere of the HBO documentary mega-project, Addiction. It’s anchored by a 90-minute feature, which kicked off the series on HBO on March 15, followed by 13 half-hour episodes. HBO recruited some of the top documentary talent in American history for this effort:

There’s no doubt American poet Wallace Stevens was a searcher. He wrote surrealist, transcendental poems such as “Of Mere Being:”

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

I ran into a solution for overcoming obstacles when I first started writing. I met a god named Ganesha who helped me through writer’s block. I keep a postcard with his picture above my computer, and he helps keep the words flowing. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that an elephant-headed Hindu deity is watching over you. That axe you see in his hand — it’s for cutting the bonds that tie you down or hold you back. A really useful tool.