The soul is a very fragile thing.
Throughout life it is shaken. It can sense the world through a million different lenses. It speaks without voice, it can hear through the deepest silence, it can touch from mountains away. The body is but a pale reflection of what the soul can achieve.
A soul is a hungry creature. It craves more than it could ever hope to get. It quests for truth, it searches for beauty, it seeks out wonder, it longs for love. It forces you to feed its hunger through romance and revolution, through bitterness and burdens. The soul can never be satisfied, not in any life that is lived.
It breaks into a billion pieces in a trillion ways each lifetime. Every moment shifts the soul into a spectrum of possibilities. Will your soul be set off with a spark? Will it reflect the beauty you possess? Will you lose your soul to the world’s problems? Will you bare your naked soul to the world? Will your soul need to be healed? Will your soul seek its missing piece? Will your soul be the truth of who you are?
Life bleeds the soul dry. Life only brings suffering to the soul, covering it in layers upon layers of torment and pain. The soul was never made for the earth, it can only know true peace in the heavens.
Life will end as it inevitably does and it is only then that the soul can finally be secure. It will rest in its jar, among countless others like it and it will know freedom from the pain it so desperately ran from in life. In the shadow of its guardian the soul can breathe like it never could. Under the watchful gaze of a thousand eyes, it can forget the pain and the burden and the hunger.
The soul will be safe.
Forever.
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Written by Karl Gaverza
Copyright © Karl Gaverza
Story inspired by “Origin of This World (Maranao)” in Philippine Folk Literature: The Myths. Eugenio. 2001.
Walo Illustration by Leandro Geniston from Aklat ng mga Anito
FB: That Guy With A Pen
Colors by Alexa Garde
Website: Lexa.us