spiritual

I live in France.  I have lived here for about two years now.  It’s interesting from time to time to stumble on how ideas which are similar are expressed differently in French compared to English.  So they are similar but not the same.

Here is an example – in English, where we talk about “giving up our soul”, in French the equivalent translates as “giving back  our soul”.  What a difference.  In both, the idea that the soul has an existence beyond ours, but the French is much less individualistic.  Our soul is something which we have been lent and must return.  ‘Soul’ as a life-force in the physical body, as long as the physical body can endure.  And when it dies, the soul returns and becomes part again of the source.

I don’t believe in past lives.  But I do believe in a ‘soul thread’, a continuation of each one of us through our actions and our words, through our relationship with each person we have ever met, the means by which we have changed them and they us…   the way in which we have affected them, which will alter in some small way how they in turn affect others.  And so the soul thread is eternal, and perhaps what we give back is the means our bodies have on loan to keep spinning that thread by connecting with others.  It is temporary.  But when we stop spinning, our part of the soul thread is still there.  That is the soul’s eternity… and ours.