I am not looking forward to Holy Week. I never do. This Sunday will be Palm Sunday and then two people dear to me will have major surgeries on Monday and Tuesday. Am reminded of how connected we all are. I have always loved the notion of the soul. It hasn't gotten much press in my own children's lives, and am grateful for this poem by C.K. Williams in the Jan/Feb. issue of The Atlantic:

Brain

I was traversing the maze of my brain: corridors, corners, strange narrow caverns, dead ends. Then all at once my being like this in my brain, this sense of being my brain became unbearable to me.

I began to wonder in dismay if the conclusion I'd long ago come to that there can be nothingthat might reasonably be postulated as the soul apart from body and mind was entirely valid.

Why, as many I cherish-Herbert, Hopkins, Weil-have believed, shouldn't there be a substance neither thought nor matter that floats above both, lifts from both as mist at dawn lifts from a lake?

Here was only this cavern registering the hours of my life, and dissipating, misplacing all but so few. If I could posit a soul, might this be its task: to salvage in a convincing way all that I'd lost?

Would that be what's meant by consolation? And if there were a soul, and its consolations, would I perceive the mist and lake of other souls, too? Would I love them more than I already do?

And the lake, and the dawn, and the rudderless barque I picture there: would I love all that more, too? And the mountain behind, scribbled with trees? And the lace of the dark seeping down, seeping down?