Hyacinths for the Soul

While organizing a cupboard this morning, I came across this story that my husband's aunt gave to us when we got married. I reread it and thought how very important it is to have Hyacinths for the Soul.

I hope you enjoy reading it!

"When I was a student nurse, I baby-sat during off-duty hours to help pay my way.  One day I got a call to sit for a whole weekend.  All I knew when I headed for the job was that the couple wanted to "get away" from their two kids for a few days.  Expecting that only rich people would be able to do that, I was surprised when the address turned out to be a tiny house.

Ted, the husband, had just joined an architectural firm.  His wife, Ardeth, looked terribly tired. They waited, obviously anxious to be off, while I got acquainted with the children, two years and ten months old.  I held the baby against my shoulder while Ted gave me the name of their hotel.  "You'll be there the whole time?" I asked.

"That's headquarters," Ted answered. "We'll sleep late, prowl around town, eat when we get hungry, visit the art galleries..."

Mentally, I added up the cost of all that, plus my fee--ten dollars. "But won't that be terribly expensive?" I blurted. I had adopted them already.

"Why, yes, I guess it will," Ted said. "But it's important. We're both tired and snapping at each other.

Ardeth, especially, needs to get away."

Ardeth smiled at me.  "Don't you know about hyacinths to feed the soul?" She took a volume from the bookcase and opened it to a poem called "Gullistan" by Muslih-uddin Sadi, a sheik who lived more than 700 years ago:

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,

And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,

Sell one, and with the dole buy hyacniths to feel the soul.

That poem taught me a good deal.  Those two didn't have enough money for the trip, but they were tuned in on a set of values I'd never even thought of.  Sunday night, when they came back, they looked like teenagers who'd just discovered love.  And my ten dollars was tucked under the ribbon on a pot holding lavender hyacinth.

Over the years since, I've made a hobby of noticing people and whether or not they know about using nonessentials and extravagances occasionally to feed the soul. The happiest people do.

A no-nonsense mother I know lets Christmas and family birthdays release her usual tight lid on frivolity.  "When I was a child," she explains, "gifts were always sturdy shoes, warm gloves, underwear.  After I got married, I decided that we'd somehow manage the essentials, that the special occasions would be for fun.  Now my husband and I give each other and the kids wild things we'd never dare include in the budget."  Her idea of zingy gifts: tickets to a far-out play, a white-velvet coat she has worn twice and had cleaned twice but which makes her feel postively elegant: for the children, redeemable coupons for gooey treats at the ice-cream store.

Flowers given on birthdays or other predictable occasions are hardly hyacinths. But when bouquets are offered to celebrate Monday, or "the anniversary of the day we got the car paid off", or simply as "thank you for putting up with me so long"--what a different matter! When our stomachs are empty, we get hungry.  Symptons of soul starvation are subtler.  Tomorrows and tomorrows are rolling by.  Paychecks are being spent on bread and shoes and rent, while the walls of the souls are often bare. 

 If this matters to us, we can do something: we can buy hyacinths."

---------Carol Amen

Be Nice to People,

Julie