What is a Good Life? #77
Living Out Your Soul Image with Tom Hirons
On the 77th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Tom Hirons. Tom is a poet and storyteller based in Devon, UK. He is the director of Feral Angels Press and editor of Clarion poetry magazine. He teaches poetry writing, both online and in person, and runs poetry-focused wilderness fasts. Tom’s piece, Sometimes a Wild God, is a subcultural poetry classic. He has never won a poetry prize or been published in a poetry magazine, yet still makes his living from poetry. He says, "I have heard all the terrible news and I have looked into the inferno of the future, but I am still in love with this life." Tom’s latest collection, The Queen of Heaven, is out this week.
In this glorious conversation, Tom shares his journey of becoming a poet and realising how he can best apply his abilities in the world. We discuss tracking life and threads from other worlds. We muse on balancing our ascending into spirit and descending into soul, while acknowledging the beauty that can be lost if we try too hard. He also notes the significance of wilderness fasting in terms of initiation into adulthood and in knowing and living out his nature and soul image.
If you have a gnawing feeling or aching sense that there is so much more to this life than what you are presently aware of or accepting of, this conversation will point to and suggest where to explore, what there is to discover, and what life can feel like from there.
The weekly clip from the podcast (4 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (67 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
Whether from the 200+ people I’ve interviewed for this project, the thousands of meaningful conversations I have outside of it, the people I am gravitating to more and more, or my own direct experiences, I believe there is something we truly are—whether that means our nature or soul. Aligning with that nature and, as Tom puts it, our “soul image,” is the very thing we are craving. This alignment is the panacea for many of our ills.
This alignment is not about giving you “the life of your dreams” or satisfying external markers of success. While these may still be part of your experience, the focus is on feeling connected to yourself and the world around you, whatever that looks like. If we don’t return to this natural state, or if we don’t come into contact with or reveal that soul image to ourselves, we invariably suffer. For some, despite contentment in other areas of life, this gnawing sense remains. For others, it becomes a roaring discomfort that thrusts us into action and the unknown—the discomfort pushing us more so than leaping boldly.
Tom suggests that living out this sense of self unravels many of our neurotic and existential threads. He describes this process as experiencing “life in another dimension.” This expression captures how I currently feel about life. It feels like a lightning rod, while you remain very much in life with the usual stresses, reactions, joys, hopes, love, and pain. However, it all feels worth it and welcome.
I often hear about using positive talk to overcome negative talk, affirmations to boost ourselves, and developing habits of the mind to respond more favourably to situations. While I don’t discount anything that helps others, I can only speak to my own experience, but I am skeptical of the mind providing solutions to problems created by the mind.
The more time I spend observing my behaviour, thoughts, and intentions without challenging them, the more time in silence I spend listening to myself and the feedback from the world, the more my natural sense of self emerges and self-criticism falls away. It merely becomes noticing—whether that noticing would be considered positive or negative by others, and change naturally occurs from these noticings (often slowly).
When I started to live from this natural state, much of what used to bother me drifted away, and much of the fear that trapped me from living my own life dissolved.
In any moment where I have been true to myself, I struggle to regret or chastise myself for anything I have done. How can I regret decisions that felt fully in alignment with what I am? How can I imagine a time on my deathbed negatively reflecting on a moment when I did something that felt very natural to my sense of self, backed that feeling, and something didn’t work out externally?
We often set impossible tasks for ourselves when we live primarily through the interpretations of our minds, the filter of others’ opinions and expectations, and assess our actions or decisions based on external outcomes. Trying to perpetually please these three criteria makes it little wonder that life feels complicated and neurotic at times.
When we live from our natural self, all this static noise and chatter dissipates. It still exists, but it becomes background noise rather than foreground. It becomes a light drizzle rather than lashing rain. When we try to satisfy our minds, the whims and changeable desires of others, and judge ourselves solely on often random occurrences that define our effort as a success or not, we trade in our capacity to feel contented or connected in this life. We trade in our autonomy to create a life that expresses what we are.
When we focus more on how our lives look and how they stack up against a predetermined life plan that we didn’t even create ourselves, how can we ever feel this life is our own or this world feels like home?
In the course of these 200+ interviews for this project, I interviewed four Death Doulas—people who guide and support others through their last days, weeks, and months. All of them referenced the same feedback from those who were imminently passing away: ignoring their natural sense of self left them with regret. It could be a moment, a fork in the road, or an extended period of time, and it stayed with them.
From more and more conversations and connections of depth, I see that we are ascribing value and priority to things that will inherently not make us feel content in this life. This wider experiment of society to find contentment through its present myth is failing before our eyes. This isn’t a proclamation of doom, but simply an acknowledgment that something needs to change.
Thankfully, the shift or solution required already resides within you, if you are willing to listen to yourself. And it will most likely bring you back to the people and treasures in your life you have been ignoring or discounting.
3. Full Episode - Living Out Your Soul Image with Tom Hirons - What is a Good Life? #77
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4. This week’s Questions
Is there a wildness in you that seeks expression and integration?
Do you know what you are here for and are you living from what this knowing tells you?
About Me
I am an artist based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I left behind a 15-year career in Capital Markets after I became extremely curious around answering some of the bigger questions in life. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed around 200 people, to provide people with the space to reflect on their own lives and to create content that would spark people’s own inquiry into this question. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the facades we typically project.
If you would like to work with me to explore your own lines of self-inquiry, experiences I create to stimulate more meaningful group conversations and connection, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.