"My Soul Has Grown Deep"

"My Soul has grown deep, like rivers"
--Langston Hughes

I have an uncle who sends me poems from time to time. Recently he sent me the poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes. There was a particular line in that poem that just jumped out to me, it was almost as if I could feel the words in my body, "my soul has grown deep, like rivers." To me, that is life, to live, to experience, to grow deep into soulfulness, into the world, while we go upwards to spirit. We grown down, and we grow up.

To grow down is to grow into the world, into the sorrows of the world, to all that is passing, and to live anyway. As Joseph Campbell says, "to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world."

I learned just yesterday, that a friend, who up until the last year or so had been diligently walking his path, committed suicide. He was a good human being. He had worked so hard on his path. He had committed to his Self, but he ran up against a place in himself, in his ego, that just was relentless, and despite our best efforts no one that I knew could reach him. He just disappeared.

Evidently, the police found his cell phone and called around looking for next of kin. That's how I found out.

It's hard to know what to say.

You see some one open to their Self, open to life, open to their heart. And then you see them shut down, close out their self, their life, their heart. Just like that. You remember those moments when they were alive, when they were themselves, and you remember those moments that were hints of what was to come, things they said, things they did, the way they acted.

What can you say? His work will continue on a plane other than this one. My prayer for him is that eventually he'll let go of his anger and his self hatred and he'll come back to his Self, to his Soul, to who he truly is, to who he has always been.

And so we live, and our experiences shape us, define us, and we grow deep, etched in stone, like rivers carving out canyons in our souls, places that take us deeper into life, into this world, and ourselves, into the living mystery.