Searching For Wholeness

Terry Hershey, in her book, Soul Gardening wrote: “To be human is about regaining what has been lost in the shuffle when life has been relegated to keeping score and making waves.  To be human is about cultivating the good life.  To be human is about gardening the soul.”
 
I like to think that’s what we’re doing here at Journeys; tending to our souls, turning over our rich soil in order to grow in self awareness and deepen our spirituality and compassion for one another. Each time I write a reflection, I go through a process of self-discovery, and it was a chapter in Elizabeth Lesser’s “The Seeker’s Guide” that started me thinking about this search for wholeness, and led to my new understanding of what it means to be “whole”.

In it, she discusses the role of feminine and masculine archetypes and how in order to be whole we must balance both of these archetypes within ourselves. Her ideas of finding wholeness and her thoughts about the importance of respecting both the feminine and masculine within ourselves, kept creeping into my consciousness during meditation, and so I found myself going back over my life, turning over the soil of my youth, to see where I had embraced both the feminine and masculine in myself and where I had not.

Looking back to when I was a young girl, I can clearly see how I naturally and unashamedly displayed both my feminine and masculine qualities. When indoors, my days were filled drawing or singing and playing the piano. I also loved to cook with my mother and I have many fond memories of making homemade cookies and Easter candy with her and my brother. Outside, my time was spent traipsing along the shore of the river, whose bend was in my backyard, or rowing the boat my father built for me, pretending to be on some grand adventure. I was an explorer collecting rocks and shells and building forts in the woods near my home. When I was allowed, I would follow my older brother and his friends to a field for a game of pickup baseball or football. I was fiercely competitive and I loved seeing the look of shock on a boys face when I would make a good play.
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