The Tao Te Ching says (chapter 64), "He brings men back to what they have lost.  He helps the ten thousand things find their own nature, but refrains from action."  This is a perfect description of one who cares for the soul.

More profoundly, though, a symbol is the act of throwing together two incongruous things and living in the tension that exists between them, watching the images that emerge from that tension.

One who cares for the soul becomes someone at ease with idiosyncrasies and the unexpected.

Truth is not really a soul word; soul is after insight more than truth.

In the midst of everyday struggle we hope for enlightenment and some kind of release.  In our prayer and meditation we hope for fulfilling ordinary life.  Jung always taught that these two, anima and animus, are capable of a mystical wedding, the heiros gamos, a divine union.  But it is not an easy marriage to effect.  Spirit tends to to shoot off in it's own ambition, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and perfectionism.  Soul gets stuck in its soupy moods, impossible relationships, and obsessive preoccupations.  For the marriage to take place, each has to learn to appreciate the other and to be affected by the other - spirits lofty aims tempered by the souls lowly limitations, soul's unconsciousness stirred by ideas and imagination.

Soul enters life from below, through the cracks, finding an opening into life at points where smooth functioning breaks down.

But this is human life: the war, the deeds, the disappointmrent, the anxiety.  Imaginations struggles, far to nigh, all human; bearing in themselves this good, that they are still the air, the subtle food, to make us feel existence.  This is the "goal" of the soul path - to feel existence; not to overcome lifes struggles and anxieties, but to know life first hand, to exist fully in context.

It takes genuine wisdom to be a mentor, the pleasure of which comes from instilling fatherhood rather than embodying it.

When we are narcissistic, we are not on solid ground (earth) or thinking clearly (air) or cought up in passion (fire).  Somehow if we follow the myth, we are dreamlike, fluid, not clearly formed, more immersed in a stream of fantasy than secure in a firm identity.

The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity.  We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.