The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.

The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked.

Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies. The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.

It's important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don't necessarily nurture soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal’s rhythm of rest and activity.

When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.

It may help us, in those times of trouble, to remember that love is not only about relationship, it is also an affair of the soul.

Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish; Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.