In his book Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore writes about a client he saw in counseling who was having problems with food and dreamt that her esophagus was made of plastic and wasn’t reaching her stomach. Moore says:

The esophagus is an excellent image of one of the soul’s chief functions: to transfer material of the outside world into the interior. But in this dream, it is made of an unnatural substance that stands for the superficiality of our age, plastic. And if this soul function is plastic, then we will not be fed well. We will feel the need of a more genuine means of bringing outer experience deep inside us.

“The soul,” Moore says, “feeds on life and digests it, creating wisdom and character out of the fodder of experience.”

As writers, we can explore such soul work through metaphor. Taking off from Moore’s example of understanding the symbols in his client’s dream, think of your body and its parts, ones for digestion, for locomotion, for weight bearing, for sensing.

Make a list of organs, muscles, ligaments, and bones and then assign materials, natural or unnatural, of which you say these body parts seem made: eyes like glass marbles, fingers like seaweed, calf muscles like stones, intestines like a coil of jute rope, hair like a tattered flag in the breeze. When one of the particular parts or organs and the image you have of it strikes you as worth investigating, do a freewrite.

For example, I might begin:

When I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window, I saw my hair blown back by the wind. It looked like a tattered flag, like something left up a pole and never tended to. And I thought about my hair and how I’d neglected to get it cut. But I thought about myself as the pole, out in any weather, straight and strong. I was glad for what I’d brought myself to Arizona to do. I was….

From there, I can go on to describe what I’ve come to do and why it is consuming me and making me neglectful of sprucing up my appearance.

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Six More Exercises for Continuing

1. Do a similar list about someone you care about very much. Write a freewrite on a part of their body and what material you have “found” it made of.
2. If you had to say that the people of your community are suffering because a part of them is made of the wrong material, what part would this be, and what symptoms indicate the material is what you say it is? For instance, when you look at people’s eyes behind sunglasses, are you tempted to think you don’t see eyes at all, but cursors like on a computer screen? What happens as a result of people walking around not with their eyes but with cursors? What place is the cursor holding?
3. Think of the ways people in your community are made of strong stuff. Write about that strength by designating a particular organ or body part in the group that you can say, metaphorically, is made of something particular. Name that material and show how it is viable for enhancing the people and the community.
4. If you could, figuratively speaking, give your “best” organ to someone in particular who is having difficulties, what organ would it be, and why would it help this person?
5. If you could receive, figuratively speaking, an organ from someone else, what would it be, from whom, and why? Or, if you could have two of one part of your body, which would it be?
6. Identify a strong organ in your body and one you feel is weaker. Let them speak to each other in a dialogue where the weaker one is asking the stronger one how he/she keeps so strong. Write about the information in the exchange.

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Writing this way may seem a little bizarre and out of your comfort zone, but that is when we come up with our most original, moving, intense, and often poignant work. As weird as it might seem to think this way, let yourself and you will feed your writing and your soul. Go for it!