Express Yourself

 

You Be You

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”

Emily Dickinson

          As we know, Emily Dickinson, was a Victorian woman who always dressed in white—no matter what the season. Some people called this “verve” because, at a time, women wore dark, severe colors and laced up bodices. But Emily was always different, always leaving the soul ajar, and always inviting the ecstatic state. Some would call that dissociation but for her it was rapture. Perhaps white was the color she identified with ecstasy.

          I have had limited contact with ecstatic experience, and honestly, I prefer to keep it that way. I’m quite happy staying in this mundane plane of existence. I believe anyone who does not buy into our consumer economy and order a different, socially sanctioned wardrobe every season can have “verve” simply by rearranging the clothes in their closet and putting them together differently. The way we dress expresses our personality and our life choices as much as anything else about us. We can make a statement about our desire to recycle, reuse, reinvent by innovating what we already have just as much as by putting our plastic and cardboard on the curb once a week.

          Leaving the soul ajar is one way of expressing openness to new information coming from the Self—the divine spark within. We don’t have to live a monastic existence, as Dickenson did, and we don’t have to clothe ourselves in the color of clouds. We only need to listen within and to know ourselves well enough to follow our own dictates and not those of the crowd. It means choosing to be yourself, not the creation of a consumer economy. It means taking the narrow path and not the wide and well-trod one. And that, all by itself, can be an ecstatic experience.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane