The Untamed Soul

There she was.  I was traveling along the highway at 60 miles per hour when I noticed her. She had simply popped up alone right in the middle of a tall and incredibly dense patch of field grass.  She couldn't help but do what she had been called to do—push up through the dark soil.  Even when the grass didn't really want to make room for her.  Even when she had no one to join her.  Even when she didn't have a bevy of on-lookers ready to “ooh” and “ahh” over her.  It was as if the grass wanted to keep her from showing off, but she simply wouldn't give them the satisfaction.  She knew she had to spread her purple and white petals for all to see and so she did.  I named her “the iris that wouldn't be tamed.”

Most of us have, at one time or another, felt the inner crunching that comes from others wanting to tame us.  It is as if who we are, and what we feel called to do must fit  into some pattern and design that is foreign to us.  In order to avoid unpleasant feedback, we keep to the place others have laid out for us, we fit in with accepted norms, we refrain from shining too brightly.  Still, deep in the heart of us, there is a spirit that won't be tamed.  Our soul will not endure the dark void of anonymity.  Herman Melville said it well in the classic novel, Moby Dick, “You cannot hide the soul.”

The ember of unique identity and purpose that was given to us even before we were born is anxious to be birthed.  We somehow know we must be true to the movement of this identity and purpose within us.  It may take heroic effort to discover, but when once a glimmer of it peeks through the darkness, we will push up and out through the dense grasses until we grace the earth with the beauty of ourselves.