Let The Sun Shine
On your soul, and other parts
Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash
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After finishing a big meal at a local Chinese restaurant, along with the bill came a few fortune cookies.
I should pause here and say that I love fortune cookies. Not only the crispy sweet treat but also the slip of paper inside. I have many faves tucked into my wallet, taped to computer monitors, and floating around my desk.
I love the jokey fortunes, the sort with sharp wit, even the solemn words. I love it all. Yes, I’ve even bought lotto tickets with the lucky numbers on a fortune cookie fortune. Didn’t win, didn’t matter.
But on this day, when I cracked through the sweet cookie shards and unraveled my surely personal fortune inside, I was left puzzled.
Photo by the author, ©2019 Karen Fayeth
Let the sun shine on your soul? Not be be pedantic, but…how though? How does one get sunshine into one’s very soul?
Later that same day, I noticed my cat lying flat on her back letting a sunbeam from a nearby window warm her tummy, and I thought maybe she was on to something.
I tried standing outside facing the sun. I thought sunshiny things. Googling the phrase found me a fellow kindred spirit on Yahoo Answers from six years ago asking the same question, and who received some pretty lame responses like:
…live happily and lighten others in your lifetime with your joyfulness
Is that it? Do I let the sun shine on my soul by being happy and joyful? By actively brightening other’s lives? I’m not sure that is correct, actually.
Shine the sun on your soul is an imperative. It asks me to take action, and that would be more in line with the bit of advice quoted.
LET the sun shine on your soul, as the fortune says, is more passive. It means allowing something to happen. To get out of the way. To raise the window shades and allow that sunbeam in to warm your furry (or not-as-furry) tummy.
As I type, I am recalling a recent day when I was staring deeply and meditatively into the fridge, willing something delicious to appear (such as, but not limited to: Chinese leftovers) when I felt a distinct warmness on my buns. The back of my front. The sittin’ parts.
Fearing I’d backed into the oven, I whipped around to realize it was the warm late morning sun toasting my personal dinner rolls. It was nice. Like a loving and warm unexpected, but not unwelcome, caress. Ol’ Mr Sol may not have been shining on my soul, but it certainly cheered me up a little on a cold winter day.
Is that the answer? Is it both as simple and as complicated at that? Step out of the shadows, throw open the windows, and warm both your ‘tocks and soul in the rays of that bright gaseous star? Both figuratively and literally.
Is that really the path to a better life?
Hell, I don’t know. I certainly don’t have the answers.
And now I’m craving potstickers.
