Care of the Soul: Rethinking exercise

In light of my recent "explorative running" phase and a very physically active morning of yard work, this passage from Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life seems relevant.

Enjoy!

"When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.  Fortunately, we still have a few institutions that foster an imaginal body.  Fashion, for instance, brings a considerable amount of fantasy to the body, although modern dress for men falls quite short in color and variety of styles popular in former times.  Cosmetics and perfumery are available to women, and can be an important aspect of cultivating the body's soul.

Exercise could be more soulfully performed by emphasizing fantasy and imagination.  Usually we are told how much time to spend at certain exercise, what heart rate to aim for, and which muscle to focus on for toning.   Five hundred years ago Ficino gave somewhat different advice for daily exercise.  'You should walk as often as possible among plants that have a wonderful aroma, spending a considerable amount of time every day among such things.'  His emphasis is on the world and the senses.  In a former time, exercise was inseparable from experiencing the world, walking through it, smelling it and feeling it sensually, even as the heart got its massage from the exertion of the walk.  Emerson, a great New England walker, wrote in his essay 'Nature': 'The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestions of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.  I am not along and unacknowledged.  They nod to me, and I to them.'  In this Emersonian exercise program, the soul is involved in the perception of an intimacy between human personality and the world's communing body.

If we could loosen the grip we have on the mechanical view of our own bodies and the body of the world, many other possibilities might come to light.  We could exercise the nose, the ear, and the skin, not only the muscles.  We might listen to the music of wind in the trees, church bells, distant locomotives, crickets and nature's teeming musical silence. We could train our eyes to look with compassion and appreciation.  Soul is never far from attachment to particulars; a soulful body exercise would always lead us toward an affectionate relationship to the world.  Henry Thoreau, who exercised his body in the context of making a retreat at Walden Pond, writes: 'I rejoice that there are owls.  Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men.  It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized.'  Body exercise is incomplete if it focuses exclusively on muscle and is motivated by the ideal of a physique unspoiled by fat.  What good is a lean body that can't hear Thoreau's owls or return a wave to Emerson's wheat?  The ensouled body is in communion with the body of the world and finds its health in that intimacy."  p 172-173