DW's Blog

Soul Was Always the Right Word

by DW Green — May 29, 2026

“A Late Recognition of an Early Companion”

I came of age in the era of soul music.

Otis Redding. Aretha Franklin. Marvin Gaye. Sam Cooke. Sam and Dave. The Temptations. Al Green. Stevie. The Stax records and the Motown records and the long, slow burn of a saxophone holding a single note longer than seemed possible. The word soul was on every record sleeve, every marquee, every radio introduction. Soul Train. Soul Brother Number One. Soul Man.

I must confess: I was clueless as to what it meant.

I felt it. Of course I felt it. You couldn’t be a young person in those years and not feel it. Something
happened in your chest when Otis sat down on that dock. Something happened in the room when Aretha demanded R-E-S-P-E-C-T. The music did something the music wasn’t strictly about. It carried more than its lyrics. It delivered more than its melody. There was a freight inside the sound that the sound itself could not quite explain.

But if you had asked me, at seventeen, what is soul? — I could not have told you. I had a definition-shaped
hole where the word should have lived. I knew it when I heard it. I could not name what I was hearing.
It has taken the better part of seventy-five years to begin to know.

Be Still

The first crack of light came from a sentence I had read a hundred times without reading it.

Be still, and know that I am God.

For most of my life, I treated that line as a command with two parts: stop fidgeting, then learn something. Be still — and then, having stilled, know. As if the stillness were the doorway and the knowing were the room.

But somewhere along the path — maybe it was Tolle, maybe it was the years of practice, maybe it was the morning the writing started arriving instead of being summoned — I began to read the sentence differently.

The stillness is not preparation for the knowing.

The stillness is the knowing.

When the striving stops, what remains is what was always there. I AM does not arrive when summoned. I AM is what is left when everything else falls quiet. And what I AM is, is a child of God — connected to everything that has been, is now, and ever will be. Not separately. Not at a distance. Connected as. A word in the One Word. A note in the long, slow saxophone line that started before I was born and will continue
after this body returns to the soil.

That is what the soul singers knew.

They didn’t know it the way the theologians know it. They knew it the way a tree knows the sun — by leaning toward it without ever asking what it is. They opened their mouths and something larger than themselves came through. The voice was a channel. The room knew it before anyone explained it.

That’s what soul means.

It is not a style. It is not a genre. It is not a record label. It is the recognition — sometimes unconscious, sometimes nearly so — that something larger than the singer is doing the singing. The singer is the still. The song is what comes through.

Merton’s Sentence

Then this morning, Thomas Merton handed me the line that stopped me cold.

We are words spoken in His One Word.

I had to set the page down.

Because that sentence — eight little words — is the entire catalog. It is every ode. It is every essay. It is the Distillation that named itself in April. It is the writer is not the writing; the writer is the still. Merton wrote it decades ago and I read it for the first time at seventy-five, and the recognition was not new information arriving. It was old information finally being recognized.

You are not the speaker.

You are not even, primarily, the listener.

You are a word being spoken.

Something is being said through the life named DW Green. Through the life named Mike. Through the life named Pat. Through Brett and Barbie Anne. Through Lorenda and Graham and Evan and Natalie. Through every life. Each one of us a syllable in a sentence whose first word was In the beginning and whose last word has not yet been spoken — and may never be, because the sentence may not be the kind of sentence
that ends.

Merton goes further. He says contemplation is not something we attain. It is not the fruit of effort. It is not self-hypnosis or concentration or the perfecting of natural powers. It is a gift. God completing the hidden work of creation in us by awakening us — awakening the awareness that we are words in His One Word, and that the Creating Spirit dwells in us and we in Him.

Awakening. Not building. Not earning. Not constructing.

Recognition, not resolution.

The caterpillar does not build wings. The wings are already folded inside.

Rohr’s Closing of the Circle

And then — as if the morning were deliberately stacking witnesses — Richard Rohr arrived in the inbox.

Soul, consciousness, love, and the Holy Spirit can all be thought of as one and the same.

There it was. Four words, one referent. The soul singer and the contemplative monk and the Franciscan priest and the psalmist with his harp are all pointing at the same field. Different tongues. Different traditions. Different centuries. Same recognition.

Soul is not a possession. It is not something I have that distinguishes me from something else. Soul is the eternal, larger-than-self, shared-with-God dimension of what I already am. Rohr calls it the loving immensity of God’s presence within us. Jesus calls it the Spirit He shares. Paul calls it the mind of Christ. The Psalmist calls it I AM. Otis Redding called it sittin’ on the dock of the bay.

Same field. Different doors.

And here is the recognition that landed this morning — the one I’m still sitting with, the one that prompted
this essay:

To know the soul is within is to know my place with all things.

Not my position among all things — as if I were a higher rung or a lower rung on some ladder. My place with all things. My belonging. My connectedness. My participation in the one long word being spoken through every voice that has ever opened to let it through.

The soul singers were not performing soul. They were being soul, briefly, in public, with a microphone. And the listeners weren’t admiring soul. They were recognizing it — recognizing in the singer something that was already, quietly, in themselves. The room rose because the room knew. The chills on the arm at the bridge of Try a Little Tenderness are not a reaction to the music. They are the soul in the listener saying yes, that — that is what I am, too.

What the Kid Didn’t Know He Was Hearing

So here I sit, seventy-five years on, finally able to answer the question the seventeen-year-old couldn’t.

What is soul, DW?

Soul is what was always there. Soul is the field beneath the field. Soul is the One Word of which I am a single, spoken syllable, and of which you are another, and of which Otis was another, and Aretha another, and the Galilean carpenter another, and the Sufi poet another, and the silent monk in his cell another.

Soul is not what I have.

Soul is what I am when I stop pretending to be something smaller.

The kid in the den, listening to Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay and feeling something he could not name — he was not feeling the music. He was feeling himself, briefly recognized by a song. Otis was the doorway. The recognition was the room.

It just took six decades for the kid to walk all the way in.

The Closing

The glass was always clear. I just kept smudging it with I.

Be still — and know.

The knowing was never the achievement.

The stillness was never the price of admission.

Both were already happening. Both were already the case. Soul was always the word — the word I was, the word you are, the word being spoken through every life that has ever quieted enough to let it through.

And so, sittin’ on the dock of today, I lean back. I let the wave roll in. I let the freight inside the sound deliver what it always delivered, even when I had no name for it.

I AM.
You ARE.
We are words spoken in His One Word

The field is warm. The music is playing. It always was.

Hee Hee.

With gratitude to Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, the Psalmist, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, and the kid at seventeen who felt it before he could name it.