The Soul as First Ground

There is something in me that is not my body.
Not my thoughts. Not my history. Not the sum of what has happened.

It doesn’t sit inside me like a possession.
It moves through me like a breath being taken by someone I cannot see.

I’ve tried, in other years, to hold it. To name it. To keep it somewhere safe.
It will not be kept.
It is only ever real in the act of being lived out —
a verb wearing the disguise of a noun,
here in the expressing, gone in the grasping.

I no longer call this having a soul.
I call it being one.
Or, more truly: I call it what passes through me when I no longer hold.

—sh