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The Lost Homeland
When Marsilio Ficino wrote his self-help book, The Book of Life, five hundred years ago, he placed emphasis on carefully choosing colors, spices, oils, places to walk, countries to visit — all very concrete decisions of everyday life that day by day either support or disturb the soul. 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 nature and culture.
So, the first point to make about care of the soul is that its goal is not to make life problem-free, but to give ordinary life the depth and value that come with soulfulness. In a way it is much more of a challenge than psychotherapy because it has to do with cultivating a richly expressive and meaningful life at home and in society.
— Thomas Moore
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn perhaps said it best. Those who have chosen power as their method must choose the lie as their principle. Solzhenitsyn insisted that what fascists most fear is not counter violence but art. He used to say that beauty will yet save the world. Even though white supremacy, patriarchy, nationalism and anti-intellectualism seem very powerful in our time, we need not live in fear of them…
