soul food

Some are hungry for our own souls, or portions of ourselves that seem to elude us. Somethings more than others seem to bring us nearer to the depth of being we know we lack - fire, good food, the beauty of animals, totems, words that pierce our armor. Always hungry we are drawn out under full moons or by rare visitations of comets which we believe will bring us our lost inheritance, being that expands far beyond what we've been told are our borders.

Marion Woodman, a psychoanalyst who has worked a lot with anorexics and bulimics and people suffering various other psychic afflictions and who writes with staggering lucidity about the stages on the paths of people whose souls reach out for their lost essence, luminously reflects on this sense of the expansive soul:

So long as we are in this world, the psyche is enacted through the medium of the body. William Blake described the body as "that portion of Soul discernible by the fives Senses." The soul is, of course, much more than the bodily "portion" of itself. It is not limited to manifesting in the physical body; it manifests also in that infinite body which constitutes the "body" of the imagination, a body that includes the entire visionary world of the arts – music, sculpture, painting, poetry, dance, architecture. Each of these visionary or imaginary worlds may be thought of as larger human bodies, or a single giant human body. That is may act in another world, of which the arts are an expression, is one of the oldest speculations about the immortality of the soul, and art as an expression of it.

The Pregnant Virgin, p. 56