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Reaching for The Sweetness
As he spoke, this professorial Frenchman in his chef’s white apron gestured and moved his head and hands in ways that struck me as undeniably English. Languages are not just spoken or written but also physically performed, and every language comes with particular gestures and facial movements. The chef had been looking and gesturing in the “French way” seconds before. Perhaps unconsciously, as he spoke to me, he had slipped back into being the person he had been for the 12 years he had lived in Lincolnshire.
— Arundha Roy
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Care of the soul is a fundamentally different way of regarding daily life and the quest for happiness. The emphasis may not be on problems at all. One person might care for the soul by buying or renting a good piece of land, another by selecting an appropriate school or program of study, another by painting his house or his bedroom. Care of the soul is a continuous process that concerns itself not so much with “fixing” a central flaw as with attending to the small details of everyday life, as well as to major decisions and changes.
We think of the psyche, if we think about it at all, as a cousin to the brain and therefore something essentially internal. But ancient psychologists taught that our own souls are inseparable from the world’s soul, and that both are found in all the many things that make up…
