Prayer doesn’t always seem to fit naturally with talk of a soulful life. Perhaps prayer seems more suited to the ‘upward’ journey of transcendence – mystical union, expansiveness, light. Not to the messy, downward, inward journey of soul. But to me, these two journeys are not separate. They are one and the same. Our bodies are the portal to the divine – to above, and to below.

I pray, even if I don’t call it that.

Sometimes, I catch glimpses of the soul as a mysterious animal, always just darting out of sight. This animal lives in the woods. It is mysterious – wise, kind, playful – and never completely knowable.

Somewhere between your everyday life and the one you sense is waiting for you, there is a longing. It is this longing that makes you look for signs. Read books. Take courses. All the while, you wait. Maybe for years. You wait for certainty; a way to trust what you sense.

You get glimpses of who you are and what you are here to be, but it always feels just out of reach. Maybe you think you are imagining it.