Extract from 'The Family of the Soul'
By Thomas Moore
"The key to giving the soul the family it wants, and to giving family life the soul it needs, is to appreciate the poetry of what family is. Family is not an abstract cultural ideal: a man, a woman, and children living blissfully in a mortgaged house on a quiet neighbourhood street.
The family the soul wants is a felt network of relationship, an evocation of a certain kind of interconnection that grounds, roots and nestles. This connectedness doesn't have to be perfect or whole in order to do its business and give its gifts, but it has to be able to stir the imagination and move the emotions in a way that is particular to "family".
The soul family is an echo, a poetic reverberation of the literal family; it exists in the time of myth even before the actual family gives it life. Since, to the soul, family is not a literal entity, it may be evoked by many different things - a single parent, a satisfying house, ..etc There is a constant dialectic between the soul family and the actual family, so that memories of our childhood play a significant role in the forming of the imagined family, and our imagination affects the way we relate to our actual families.
The soul needs a felt experience of family, whether we are children getting the most of our family 'experience' at home, or adults looking for a 'group family' in the workplace or neighbourhood.
In the extended sense 'family' is no mere metaphor, but a particular way of relating that can take many forms. It always provides a fundamental relatedness that doesn't depend upon attraction or compatibility. People working on a project together, for example, may feel the presence of family as they talk, work and get to know each other.
When we hope that a nation can hold together as a family, or that the family of nations could live in peace, these are not metaphors, but rather the expressions of a profound need of the soul for a special grounded way of relating that offers deep, unconditional, and lasting support and security."
... don't know what happens, but some photos just seem to disappear ! (note : march 2010)
a tired family soul, uplifted by the young one
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