We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment…. but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’, is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a full union with the world.

The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the biographer’s conundrum, an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a continual unstoppable flow, an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart and leave; a pilgrim suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who is willing to fail, often spectacularly, at their own life rather than succeed drably at someone else’s.

David Whyte