Sourcekeeping as Soul Work

What happens when we apply the principles of Sourcekeeping to our Soul Work?

Sourcekeeping is a term that I learned in 2024 which radically changed my perspective on how to structure leadership and power within the projects that I steward.

While Sourcekeeping is often used in the context of organizational and project development, it’s also a frame that can open us into a larger holding: Sourcing our lives from and as Soul.

This essay is about just that.

To learn more about Sourcekeeping, see this excellent overview, this deeper dive book, or this conversation below that I had with

Daniel Thorson

&

Cheryl Hsu

on the topic.

Sourcekeeping is the actualization of Soul manifested in material form and transmitted through the energetic signature of our human uniqueness inter-reflecting its universal love, which shows up in the form of deep care. A care that’s worth dying for. A care that’s demanding what we live for.

I define Soul as the universal love that is paradoxically unique to each of us, asking and often commanding us to show up and step up into this wild & precious life of ours with a particular form, flavor and fortitude.

When we’re most in touch with Soul, we’re most in touch with both our greatest aliveness and that which is of highest service to not only our lives, but to Life itself.

Sourcekeeping is a living relationship with Soul. It’s in-forming our being as offerings of our devotion to that which we know in our bones is good, true and beautiful.

Becoming intimate with and as Soul awakens a liberating flow that is endlessly delicious while also enshrining us with the responsibility to show the fuck up for life, as Life, with a power that will inherently push us to our edges and ask of us, well, everything.

Sourcing our lives from and as Soul is not a part-time job. There is no on and off switch. It is a total giving of one’s self to the Mystery. It is an ego death by infinite cuts.

Sourcekeeping is a choiceless choice: it would simply kill us not to take up the call of that which we are.

When Soul enraptures you, you die, only to be reborn as its slave. Except the paradox is that in the depths of enslavement lies a liberation so delicious that its only proper name is Home.

This Home is the always-unfolding alignment of Soul with our uniquely embodied beings. It’s a marriage till death do us part.

It’s a YES to life, to each moment, even when we’re screaming FUCK THIS SHIT. Inside of that fuck is the orgasm of Yes that knows its resistance is simply power waiting to be reclaimed.

Sourcekeeping is something that is felt and experienced in one’s bones, body, soul and heart. It is the viscerally-cohered knowing of who we are, what we’re here to do, and who we’re here to serve.

I want to honor a great teacher of mine, Bill Plotkin, whose work on Soul-initiation literally saved my life and killed it at the same time. Plotkin invites us to become a devotee to the “mythopoetic identity” that may - or may not - grace us through its devoured takeover of our being.

Sourcekeeping is a Soul possession. It’s when we’ve been so fully enraptured by the truth of our existence that there’s no choice but to live our dharma as our karma.

Through the life practice of Soulmaking, we become apprentices to the mythopoetic image that illuminates our soul essence, that which is the DNA of our incarnation and unfolding as its every particularity.

This intimacy with and as our soul self is an evolutionary, co-creative lovemaking that can simply be described as holy art.

Sourcekeeping is inherently soul-making. The practice of Soulmaking is a doorway into Sourcekeeping. It’s a technology that creates a living relationship with that which we source, and that which is sourcing us.

When this underworld dance is echoed by the empty openness of imminent transcendence, a sweet simplicity arises as a bones-deep knowing: God is choosing this.

This moment, this experience, is God’s gift to itself. Not just the glory but also the agony. The grief. The disbelief.

Sourcekeeping is a promise to God, and God’s promise to us, that our time here is not yet complete.

God embodying itself as Soul at home in its human uniqueness that is but one puzzle piece in the mosaic of boundless, timeless art which is made beautiful through the very boundaries of right timing, right relationship and right action.

It’s a dance of musical notes finding their symphonic resonance in scales of harmony that accordion the spectrum of simplicity and complexity in a flow that has nowhere else to go, so it let’s go into a river of trust that re-members itself whole, holy and home.

Sourcekeeping is a soul initiation process which paradoxically requires being initiated into Soul. In this way, it’s only ever an act of grace. Grace most often occurs when our prayers are heard through the embodied actions of soul-full care.

Sourcekeeping Soul is both already always happening and a way of being that we can step into and live from, not as an identity to be fixated by but a grace to be initiated into.

The first step is the only step: follow the eros. It lives in you, as you, and comes alive as your aliveness pouring out into reality, creating the dream that reminds us its real.

Sourcekeeping is bearing and birthing response-ability for that which Soul impregnates in us, which is unique to each of us yet universal in its service to Life.

What you get in return is the privilege, responsibility and glory of giving birth to a child.

This child is you, in that it’s constantly co-creating you.

It’s not you, in that it seemingly has desires and directionality of its own.

And it’s a part of you, in that it only knows itself through the uniqueness of your being, which is its very essence - inseparable even while simultaneously autonomous.

This means that Soul is as entangled in you as you are in it. You are at home in Soul. Soul is at home with you.

Sourcekeeping is about relating to death as always-already present, infused in the very fabric of life. This seeing humbles us into faith that all is guided by Soul.

To learn more about the upcoming Gathering of the Sourcekeepers this September, please email tuckerlighthouse@gmail.com.