What drains your soul? Also, Soul Scribbles.
Your soul is that thing that ties you to all planes. It’s the part of you that has nothing to do with your physical body. It’s existed since the beginning of time and will continue to exist. It does not have gender: it is beyond such trivial physical aspects. Sure, it may seem imbalanced in some way. Perhaps it is more yin than yang. Perhaps it is more night than day. Perhaps it is more earth than thunder. The soul can be wounded, weakened, hardened, but it cannot die. It is from this that we learn that there are worse things than death. The husk is what changes.
The soul cannot die, but it can be crushed. The Nine to Five, cubicle shoebox in the IT department with a 2 hour one-way commute sans-traffic. Eighty hour work-weeks. Emotional distance and abuse from people I love. Clutter crowding my house. Having no control over my life in any capacity. Those things crush my soul. All of those were my life before I met my husband.
I discussed this particular question over dinner to my husband. He agreed that the nine to five was crushing his soul, and he’d remedy it by going home and working on screen printing. Thought he noted that the screen printing wasn’t a true remedy: it was a patch.
Recharging or healing my soul is not a consistent thing. Sometime all I need is 2 hours of coop FPS games. Sometimes I just need to do a little gardening and talk to and molest the plants. Sometimes a day laying on the couch napping on front of T.V. Sometime I need to leave town and run to the mountains and spend some time in wine country. Sometimes it takes someone touching my soul gently.
The number of people I’ve let into my soul is very low indeed. It’s a terrifying practice, because my soul is beautiful, and it is ugly. It is strong, and it’s vulnerable. It both loves people, and despises them. Very, VERY few people in my life have been able to love not only for my positive attributes, but also my negative ones. Most people are scared away, or decide that I am being dramatic, and leave me alone. But if they can weather the dark parts of my soul, the beauty of the other side is so worth it.
The people that make this cut are never the people I expect, either.
Part Two: Soul Scribble
Visualize your soul for a moment. Now scribble, sketch, or rip up those old magazines you have lying around, and create your take on what your soul "looks" like below.
"If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as i can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the mystery."
- Tom Robbins
As an artist who tries to get in touch with herself on the regular, as you can guess, i draw my astral form from time to time.
When i was in highschool, i began an art series called The Room. Basically, that place you go in your head when you attempt to flee reality. Or at least reset.
These two are from college: 2003. They were collaborations with Mieka.
Wisping, smokey shadows. The come from within, and they come from without. I bleed black.Sometimes it helped me fly. Most times it really just held me back.
Below are a couple of WiPs from the past couple of months.
I am including this visage in my art ID. A palatable way of baring my soul to the populace. The black sillouette is an reflection of my soul. It has retained the black, inky, smokey effects, the claws. My teeth and hair are honest parts of my physical form. My soul, in it's underhanded and mysterious way, finds ways through the armor of others.