SOUL

Soul is the appetite, driving us

to eat from the banquet of life.

People filled with the hunger of the soul

take food from every dish before them,

whether it be sweet or bitter.

We are not born with guarantees

that we will have strong souls.

No, we must work on our souls,

enlarging and expanding them.

We do so by experiencing all of life -

the beauty and the joy

as well as the grief and the pain.

Soul work requires paying attention to life,

to the laughter and the sorrow,

the enlightening and the frightening,

the inspiring and the silly.

"There is a time for being born,

a time to grow, a time to laugh,

a time to play, a time to learn,

a time to fall in love, a time to have children,

a time to labor, a time to suffer,

a time to mourn and there is a time

for going home to God." (Reuter)