The Aperture

An essay by Spike Humer

I do not believe the soul is something I possess.

I believe it is something I express.

It is not an object I carry. It is not a possession set somewhere inside me, waiting to be uncovered or earned. It is closer to a verb wearing the disguise of a noun. It is only real in the act of being lived out. The showing is the soul. The expressing is the having.

Which means that becoming — slow, ordinary, sometimes invisible — is how the soul makes itself known. Not as proof. Not as performance. As passage. Life is as it is, unless and until it changes. We remain, unless and until we become. I wrote those words before I understood them. Now I see they were never about effort. They were about expression — about the soul moving, in its own time, into form.

I do not stand on the soul as ground beneath my feet. I stand in it, as the place from which I see. It is the aperture, not the destination. The opening through which becoming arrives — and through which, on my better days, something honest passes back out into the world.

This is the ground I write from. The ground I love from. The ground I am still learning to live from.

Everything that follows is what grew from there.

I came into my fullness late.

That sentence used to feel like an admission. It feels like an inheritance now.

For most of my life I believed the years before fullness were the cost of arriving at it — the long detour, the price paid. I do not see them that way anymore. The years were not the obstacle. They were the shape. The constraint was not what kept me from becoming. It was the form by which I became. I would not be the man writing this sentence if I had arrived sooner. The man who arrived sooner would have been somebody else, and that somebody else is not who the soul was expressing toward.

There is a peace in this that took me decades to find. The peace is not in having arrived. The peace is in recognizing that the long way was the way. That every constraint, every late beginning, every closed door and slow learning, was the soul finding the only shape it could move through to become this.

I did not arrive alone.

Michele is part of this arrival in a way I will not try to name fully here, because the truest part of what we share does not belong on a page. But this much I will say: no one comes into their fullness in isolation. A life that becomes spacious enough to express itself does so because somewhere along the way, someone made room. Someone stayed. Someone saw who was forming, and did not look away, and did not require it to hurry. The fullness I came into is partly hers. It was made possible by her presence in it.

I arrived late. I arrived shaped. I arrived held.

That is the only kind of arrival I trust.

I do not write to build monuments.

I write to keep someone company. Sometimes, even myself.

The books, the meditations, the daily words — they are not artifacts of having understood. They are companions for the not-yet-understanding. They are what I would have wanted on the harder mornings, and what I want to leave for the ones still walking through theirs. The page is not a stage. It is a hand offered across a small distance. Most of what I have written has been one form or another of you are not alone in this. I am here too. I am still here.

I did not invent the voice that does this. I inherited it.

My mother is part of that voice. Not through her words. Not even through what she did. Through something quieter — a soul energy that lived in her and lives in me now, and shows up on the page in ways I did not place there and do not fully understand. The Gift of This Day Book One was written for her, and as I wrote it I felt her near, the way you sometimes feel a presence in a room you have not entered alone. She is in the voice. The voice carries her. That is the only way I know to say it.

And she is not the only one. The voice also carries writers I never met and friends I have known for decades. A sister whose closeness has shaped me more than she knows. Quiet teachers, grief, hours alone with a notebook, the long thread of people whose attention made me believe my own words might be worth setting down. The work that goes out from me has many hands inside it. I am only the one who happens to be holding the pen.

This is where the gratitude lives. Not as sentiment. As accuracy. Almost everything I have to offer was given to me first. The capacity to write, the time to write, the people who made the time possible, the soul itself doing the expressing — none of it originated with me. I am a steward of something older than I am. The work is how I return it.

And so the offering and the gratitude are not two things. They are one motion, breathing in and breathing out. Received, therefore given. The giving is how I keep receiving.

This is who I was: a man becoming, often without knowing it.

This is who I am: a man becoming, now with eyes a little more open.

This is the becoming itself: the soul, expressing — and I, here, still in the act of being expressed.

May I never mistake the gift for my own.
May I never stop offering it back.

—sh

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