The Old Soul in You
Runa's Oracle ♥
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver
Michael Meade, mythologist, says that there is an Old Soul in everyone. It is the seat and personification of our Inner Wisdom. He also says that we all have a little-self. I've talked about the Higher Self as Old Soul (Inner Wisdom) for a long time, but I hadn't used "little-self" before.
It makes me think of Napoleon - little man syndrome - because it refers to our (unhealthy) egos.
There is an OLD SOUL in YOU!
Isn't it funny how we humans like to categorize people, others and ourselves. It's so easy to come up with a meme that says that Old Souls are.... and then list off a bunch of requirements for membership.
Everyone walks with the Old Soul and the little-self. Like the parable of the two wolves, attributed to the Lakota tribe of North America, the one with power is the one we feed.Do you recognize that you have a little-self and an Old Soul? Like an angel and a demon, one on each shoulder, we can feel pulled one way or the other depending on our awareness and our circumstance.
If you believe that this is our only lifetime, then none of us has a soul any older than their years, but that isn't what we mean when we say Old Soul. If you believe in multiple lifetimes, then you are likely to believe that time isn't linear (except for how we perceive it) and therefore "old" has no relevance anyway.
For me the OLD simply means that it precedes this lifetime, but I am open to the idea of reincarnation and past lives.
We all have a soul that is connected to us since before birth, and that soul will follow us after death. All of us here, alive on earth, have the opportunity to recognize that this very pre-birth/post-death soul accompanies us in the here and now.
We all have an Old Soul. When we are connected with it, we ARE the Old Soul as it is embodied in us. Some of us, however, have not awakened to this wisdom-source within and therefore don't always show the attributes that we consider an Old Soul to have. If you're reading this far in, you probably recognize, at a minimum, that you have access to wisdom that is both at the same time outside of you and within you.
In a future post, I'll break down some of those fun (but potentially flawed) lists of Old Soul attributes. Sometimes they are a little off base, and sometimes not even in the stadium!
When did you first come to realize your own Inner Wisdom? (I ignored mine for decades. See Meet Runa.)
