A few days ago I posted some quotes from author Pico Iyer. Then I decided to bring one of his books along on my upcoming travels and selected The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. He wrote it at the turn of the century, such a distant time. It was published in 2001, well before we all carried smart phones around. I’m curious whether his thoughts will seem dated to me or will still resonate.
This morning I poked my nose in the book (Kindle version; I love having 90 or so books to bring on the road) and discovered that Iyer (like all great writers) points me to the thinkers who’ve inspired him. The Global Soul doesn’t get very far before reminding me how much I loved Ralph Waldo Emerson back in my college days.
Here’s Iyer describing an Emerson passage from his essay Nature: “There is a “universal soul” behind us, Emerson writes in Nature, and shining through us, that is “not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property.”
I stop on this idea for a couple of reasons. The first: Emerson’s essay was published in 1836. Think of it, an 189-year-old essay still echoing across time. The second: The idea that we all belong to a universal soul; something larger that we are part of. It reminds me of the “infinite biological pathways” among trees described so beautifully by Suzanne Simard in a 2016 Ted Talk.
I’m excited to start this new adventure with this idea as a kind of internal base to come home to while I’m traveling.
A few months ago, I read Peter Stark‘s deeply moving book The Last Empty Places. Stark also references Emerson and his role in inspiring the nation’s best naturalist writers.
Maybe it’s also time to go back the American master himself.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 