Building a Tool Kit for the Future
...focusing on soul work for the days ahead
In my fairly long life, I never expected to encounter a moment in history like this one. A time when humanity is fractured, democracy is dismantled, intelligence has become artificial. A time when greed, violence, and self-interest run roughshod over justice, compassion, and peace.
This year is only two weeks old, and yet the events of those two weeks prove this is a time when we are just about as far away from our souls as we can get.
It’s a time that calls for each of us to create a toolkit to help us in the living of these days. A toolkit filled with the kind of medicine we need to nourish and heal our broken hearts; ease our troubled minds; and soothe our weary spirits. We need to find ways to invite the bright and shining parts of ourselves out of hiding, those parts that feel too tender for this dangerous world.
Because ultimately, I believe it is this tenderness and authenticity that will save us. In listening to the sound and rhythms of our souls and allowing them to speak in us and through us, we will find not only the medicine we need to heal ourselves, but also the creativity, imagination, and fortitude to build a new world in the generations to come.
When I started writing on Substack in 2022, I was just beginning to explore living from a posture of contemplative spirituality. I wanted to document the journey on that new path and record field notes for all I noticed along the way. That path is becoming more and more familiar, more deeply beloved. I’ve learned new ways of being that offer counterpoint to the cacophony of the world around me.
Now it’s time to go even deeper in and make the radical changes that living from soul requires.
So, not resolutions for 2026. But instead, a stated intention to shift focus and explore; to embark on a mission to reclaim the ways and wishes of my soul, its sounds and its rhythms so I can allow it to guide how I live and move and have my being in the world.
“Return to your longing,” writes Sue Monk Kidd, in her lovely new book Writing, Creativity, Soul. “It will teach you everything. Longing is one of the most eloquent and insistent ways the soul speaks.”
And what is my “longing,” except the sound and imagination and reaching of my soul?
It’s evident in my longing for home. My longing for connection. My longing to belong. My longing for hope and beauty; landscape and life; ideas and dreams; melody and music.
In the past several months the many ways I have lost sight of my own soul – or shoved it aside, or let it be stolen, or never really knew it at all – have become increasingly clear. It’s evident in my body, and a heaviness that pervades every anticipated action. A sense of being bone tired; of shrinking and fading away. Of finding no joy in things that once brought it in abundance.
Reclaiming it means taking time to slow down, listen, remember, dream. It means reacquainting myself with the longings that existed within me from the moment I was born, deep longings that are uniquely and only mine.
To build my toolkit for the living of these days means, first, to return to those longings. To the through-lines from childhood, the memories of a particular kind of contented excitement, a sense of being in the exact right place and doing the exact right thing.
Like a Golidlocks spot – just right.
Always those earliest of sense memories involve books and reading. At the top of this new year, I’m placing reading first in my toolkit. Of course I’ve read books continually throughout my life. But I feel invited to reframe reading from a pasttime to a life practice; to be intentional and reflective about it. To offer it my best attention. To let it guide me, heal me, companion me.
As a way to begin, I’m even offering my reading practice its own home here on Substack. It’s a place to ponder how living life as a reader companions me during the living of these days.
It’s called Bookstack, Reflections on a Lifetime of Ravenous Reading.
I hope you’ll join me there. We can begin building our tool kit together.
Yes! "... Feeling a particular kind of contentment... Like a Goldilocks spot - just right." Love this description. You words speak to my soul. Thank you. Namaste. 😌