The Soul Journey as a Puzzle?

© Lorne Craig

Break by Dorianne Laux

We put the puzzle together piece


by piece, loving how one curved


notch fits so sweetly with another.


A yellow smudge becomes


the brush of a broom, and two blue arms


fill in the last of the sky.


We patch together porch swings and

autumn
trees, matching gold to gold. We hold


the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair


of brown shoes. We do this as the child


circles her room, impatient
with her blossoming, tired

of the neat house, the made bed,


the good food. We let her brood


as we shuffle through the pieces,


setting each one into place with a satisfied


tap, our backs turned for a few hours


to a world that is crumbling, a sky


that is falling, the pieces


we are required to return to. © Dorianne Laux *

Recently I was searching for a poem to begin a spiritual coaching session and found a web site (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/180.html) that proved very helpful. The poem numbered 180 was titled Break and it immediately resonated as a poem that related to the journey of the soul. In fact I am not sure when I realized that it was about a jigsaw puzzle; I think it was as the words tumbled from my lips during the session that I sensed that the author’s intention and my initial perception could be quite different. I saw the journey of the soul gently unfolding through the poem; the language of the soul is metaphor and symbol rather than words and this poem captures for me the exquisite way that sign and synchronicity, serendipity and symbol reveal the destination step by step like pieces of a puzzle and we may not see the picture as a whole until the last piece is slotted into place. The child is the ego self that is frustrated by the stately progress of the soul; the ego wants outcomes rather than experiences while the soul has a different agenda. When we engage in Soul work it as though for a time we escape from the concerns and considerations of our normal world and its demands yet somehow it is what “we are required to return to.”

My musings led me to wonder whether Dorianne Laux had ever considered the poem through the lens of the Soul. I recall the renowned American philosopher Ken Wilbur in his book Eye of Spirit observing that art contains no one meaning. The work will reflect both the conscious and the unconscious intention of its creator and then the viewer adds yet another layer of possibility. This is the one of the gifts that poetry gives us; thank you Dorianne for this beautiful piece