That alluring edge between inner self and outer world

The inner life is born of language, of music and mathematics, of images with light, color and shape. But it has no value unless it is grounded in the world, in the 10,000 things that make up reality around us. At the same time, the inner world is boundless, while the outer world is finite. Thinking about the place where the inner life meets the world, it seems to me that this is where a soul is made.

Frederick Turner, anthropologist and poet, once suggested the soul might be “the emergent attractor of a synthesizing process.” An attractor is “a set of values toward which a system tends to evolve.” An order in the seeming chaos. What if it were true? What if we make our souls as we move forward, cleaving the space in front of us with wonder, and often delight? Almost every story of a consequent life includes this idea: “I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I kept going, and then …”

As evolutionary science shows us, we inherit human genes and a human nature, arriving at birth with a unique essence. But what I would like to call the soul is the result of working with this essence over time. The soul is not given to us as a birthright, separate from the body as we once imagined, but is the emergent reality of who we each become by dint of living in our bodies, the hidden aspect of the self.

We may complain that we haven’t been given the means to become someone, but no one is given more or less in the struggle for personhood. A soul can be made from little, from mud and stones, if need be.  Awake to our families, to the literature, the history, the science, the stories we live among, we have our being. The synthesizing process goes on every day as we struggle with the chaos and order of the world. And in understanding this, everything we do matters.

Looking at the fractal edge between our inner and outer lives, the more we look, the more we see. Drilling down at this edge, the detail expands, froths, repeats. Like the boundary between waking and sleeping, this edge might be a fertile place for examining, for listening to the deep rumblings that call to us and urge us on. 

This fractal edge between inner and outer may be where happiness lies as well: in getting our inner nature to mesh with our outer circumstances. We can only be in one place at a time, have one partner, one home. The extraordinary dance of aspiration and acceptance goes on every day. Listening to our emergent attractors, we learn what calls to us. Turning to the world, we see what we can then actualize.

In my finite existence, I am a woman of Scandinavian descent in my mid-seventies living in Los Angeles. The pilgrimage begins here. I have a wealth of experience to bring to the looking. My inner world is full of words, the myriad leaves of words, which grow from the branches of a shared tree of knowledge. 

Though we humans have become as abundant on the earth as flowers, our lives as transient, every one of us matters. The making of one’s soul, one’s particular bloom, fulfills us, gives us purpose. Without this knowledge of what we are doing, life feels meaningless. A clear vision of the alluring edge between inner and outer life may help. Thus I have begun this book to look back, in no particular order, at the places where my inner self most collides with the outer world, in the hope that thinking about these things may resonate for you as well, dear Reader.