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The Soul’sGeology

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A change in a voice.

A silence.

Another person’s distress
becoming the center of my attention.

My own needs waited for language.

I learned to anticipate
what others needed
before I knew I was allowed
a life within it.

That vigilance shaped how I loved,
what I carried, and whose pain
I felt responsible for relieving.

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Where the Stone
Began to Speak

I did not set out to understand
my life through geology.

The recognition came while traveling
through Alaska’s Misty Fjords,
where our float plane landed
in a narrow passage
between towering walls of granite.

I remember lifting my eyes
toward those immense formations,
following the delicate threads of water
descending their faces.
Across the stone were variations of color,
fissures, grooves, and markings
whose origins reached into geological time.

What appeared immovable
had been undergoing transformation
for millions of years.

The human soul also carries a geology.

We inherit formations laid down
before our arrival: ancestral histories,
unspoken grief, familial loyalties, fears,
expectations, and ways of belonging.
Under the pressures of childhood,
these inheritances become embedded
in the architecture of our inner lives.

We may spend decades
inhabiting formations whose origins
we have never examined.

And yet, even the most enduring stone
carries a history of being changed.

Water finds its passage.
Pressure alters the terrain.
What once appeared permanent
reveals itself as part of an unfolding process.

I began to recognize my own history
in those granite walls.

The writing that began decades earlier
had been doing something remarkably similar.
Each memory brought to language,
each inherited assumption examined,
each previously unspoken experience
given expression had begun to reveal
the contours of a life shaped by forces
extending far beyond its beginning.

We inherit a landscape,
but we also participate in what becomes of it.

That recognition became the organizing vision
for The Soul’s Geology.

What follows is one life read
through water and stone,
an exploration of the formations I inherited,
the pressures that shaped me,
and the gradual emergence of a terrain
I could finally recognize as my own.

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The Soul’s Geology
listens beneath words—

where memory lives as sensation,
an inherited voice speaks
with the authority of our own,
and an image holds what understanding
has yet to unfold.

Fragments of my history provide the ground:
a remembered room,
a familiar song,
a reverie,
an encounter whose significance
ripened over decades.

I return to them with the discernment
the intervening years have cultivated.
The woman writing now can hear
what the child absorbed,
what the younger woman reached toward,
and what had yet to find language.

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Stories beget stories

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As you enter these passages,
a memory may surface,
an old allegiance reveal its origin,
a familiar experience
acquire another meaning.

Here is an invitation to write
from the ground of your own perception—
to give inward experience a voice
and listen for what emerges as you do.

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Enter at Bedrock

Listen for what has traveled
through other lives
to reach your own.

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