Kindredness

Reflections on the soul

Kindredness

I don’t like soul mate very much. I don’t know if it’s the shape of the words, the triteness of the term, or the implication. Perhaps it is more beautiful in French and the meaning less adulterated.

Soul mate. The ethereal is mixed with the carnal. Soul mate… are we a whole split in half trying to become whole again as in Greek legend? Man and Woman? It sounds to me more like the the attempt to attach greater meaning to Eros.

Popular culture’s concept is even more frustrating. Are souls commodities, and we were born with the expectation that we are meant to acquire another one before we die? How very soulless.

My musicology friends believes that the soul is the product of the Enlightenment. He believed concepts of individuality were born then. While I can respect that Western concepts of the soul might differ from Eastern ones, I believe a sense human’s sense of selfishness and selflessness go back much further. I don’t believe a soul can have a mate. There is so much in us that is unknowable — mysterious even from inward turned thoughts. Can the gap of language and flesh really ever be fully bridged? Can two souls really be one?

Kindred: to be of the same kind. It can be literal as in family — particularly blood family but that is too limited for our modern sensiblity. So let us stick with the more abstract. To be of the same kind — perhaps to find same-kindedness. When a painting speaks to us, do we assume that the soul of the painter is reaching through the paint and touching us? That is too metaphysical for me. Such thinking can be put in the same place as horoscopes and energy stones.

Instead, I would propose that through the paint I can see a perspective that is more than just my own. Something can resonate. A sense of shared understanding captured for a moment on canvas but as timeless as the paint can survive. I may have never met that painter. I don’t know whether they were a generous a lover or what their breath smelled like in the morning. BBut an experience encapsulated in pigment can still resonate. A sense of sameness captured — of the same kind.

We have a marvelous ability to understand the world by relating to it. It’s hardly objective, but we can find kindredness in a bending branch or gurgling stream or the eyes of a cat. When we do, we feel lucky. It is a privilege to connect something outside of us. Different but of the same kind.

What is a kindred spirit? It is getting very lucky. It is a sense that another set of eyes know clouds like you know clouds. That a juniper berry can have same sharp shape on the tongue. In despair, as much likeness can be found, as in joy.

The soul may never be understood. Two souls may never merge. But the cosmos no longer needs to be seen just by me. I’m not alone.