Sunday, January 29, 2012

Norse Myths, Rilke, and Jung's Individuation Process

I was at the gym yesterday morning and I brought along The Norse Myths to keep me company. One of the myths I read was "Lord of the Gallows,"which Odin's telling of what transpired when he hung upside down on the great tree, Yggdrasill, for nine nights. He tells the reader is that the experience brought him 18 different insights. It is the 18th one that captured my attention.


Odin says, "What you and you alone know is always the most potent." I know that this is true. One of the things I routinely tell myself and my clients is that we are always aware of our inner truths. Our bodies are aligned with these truths and we can touch them in an instant if we choose. However, it takes great courage to examine these inner truths and to become familiar with them. And, it takes a stronger, even more courageous heart to live out these truths in the wider world. 


It isn't easy. Yet, it has been my experience that whenever we step out on a journey, allies do appear, even if just in your dreams at first. In life, I believe the unconscious is our greatest ally. It is consistently speaking to us, guiding us, helping us removing the brambles and other obstructions from our ability to flow in life...WITH life. And this is what Jung encouraged -- engagement with life. 


We all want insight into our lives. We want our time here to mean something...to count. We ask, "What is the point of my life? Why am I here?" Sometimes the answers tumble into our minds and bodies in a flash. Other times, we sit and wait through long nights waiting for a dawn we may doubt will ever rise. This is a hard place to be. And if you, dear reader, are there, you are not alone. All of humanity has sat there and will sit there hence forth.


I think Rilke had it right when he said,


"...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."


And this is true engagement with life -- to live everything. If we can sit in that tension between having a question and seeking its answer, we will become aware of everything at once. We will know ourselves and have no more need to ask questions.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Synchronicity with Marion Woodman

I like to read Jung (and the Jungians) in the winter because the material is a natural complement to the stillness and bare boned truth reflected the trees. You're already primed to see the truth because the environment is helping you do so. What I know for sure is that the exterior world matches and mirrors the interior world and vice versa. When one side of the mirrored image shifts, so does the other. 


The past few weeks, my chosen Beatrice has been Marion Woodman. As someone in my dream group said today, "Jung brought the metaphysical to psychology," and I think she is right. The Jungians touch the soul's pulse. One of the benefits of tracking and working with one's dreams is that you quickly become aware of the patterns, the puzzle pieces seeking completion and fit, and the larger lessons clamoring for consciousness. Reading the below so closely after reading Eliot and marrying it with my own recent dreamscapes gave me chills. So, I share it tonight:

"No longer a slave girl giving away her pearls, selling out her femininity to greed and lust, Kate was now in a relationship that demanded real love, real suffering -- the rose in the fire....no longer "what can we do for each other," but "what can we be for each other." They are attempting to open their hearts, daring to leap, albeit tremulously, into the cleansing fire..."The living mystery of life is always hidden between Two, and it is the true mystery which cannot be betrayed by words and depleted by arguments."


"In such a relationship, both partners are attempting to become more conscious of their complexes and their masculine and feminine sides, both are willing to reflect on their interaction, and both have the courage to honor the uniqueness of what they share. Neither is attempting to possess the other, neither wishes to be possessed. The relationship itself is unburdened by the pressure of inchoate needs and expectations. The partners do not demand a "whole" relationship, nor do they seek to be made whole by it; rather they value the relationship as a container in which is reflected the wholeness they seek in themselves. Each is free to be authentic. Living in the now, unfettered by collective ideas of how either should act or be, they have no way of knowing how such a relationship will develop." ~ Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin, pp. 152-53

Thursday, January 26, 2012

T.S. Eliot and Ouroboros

I have long admired the richness of Eliot's poetry, especially "Little Gidding." When I read it, the Ouroboros floods my mind, and I am reminded how we constantly shed skin and birth ourselves. Here's the last stanza of the poem, which so neatly and beautifully captures this.

V
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
     Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Celtic Wisdom from Zimmer Bradley, Robert Graves, and Amergin

It's been a week spent nestled in my Celtic roots, reading new treasures and writing new ones. For those of you who have not yet read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, do seek it out. While long (clocking in just shy of 900 pages), it is marvelous take on the Arthurian myth cycle but told from the viewpoint of the women nearest Arthur. I followed it up with The White Goddess by Robert Graves to read more about the goddess in Celtic myth cycles. In the latter, I discovered the Song of Amergin, which I've heard told differently and was happy to learn this version. It pulses so vividly to me that I know it sings to my ancestors embedded in my own DNA.


The Song of Amergin


I am a stag of seven tines,
I am a wide flood on a plain, 
I am a wind on the deep waters, 
I am a shining tear of the sun, 
I am a hawk on a cliff, 
I am fair among flowers, 
I am a god who sets the head afire with smoke. 
I am a battle waging spear, 
I am a salmon in the pool, 
I am a hill of poetry, 
I am a ruthless boar, 
I am a threatening noise of the sea, 
I am a wave of the sea, 
Who but I knows the secrets of the unhewn dolmen ?

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Gorgeous Message with Messenger Owls



I came across this on YouTube last night and fell in love with its animation and accompanying song "White Owl" by Josh Garrels. Enjoy! Lyrics are below.

When the night comes,
and you don't know which way to go
Through the shadowlands,
and forgotten paths,
you will find a road

Like an owl you must fly by moonlight with an open eye,
And use your instinct as your guide, to navigate the ways that lays before you,
You were born to take the greatest flight

Like a serpent and a dove, you will have wisdom born of love
and carry visions from above into the places no man dares to follow
Every hollow in the dark of night
Waiting for the light
Take the flame tonight

Child the time has come for you to go
You will never be alone
Every dream that you have been shown
Will be like living stone
Building you into a home
A shelter from the storm

Like a messenger of peace, the beauty waits be released
Upon the sacred path you keep, leading deeper into the unveiling
As your sailing, across the great divide

Like a wolf at midnight howls, you use your voice in darkest hours
To break the silence and the power, holding back the others from their glory
Every story will be written soon
The blood is on the moon
Morning will come soon

Child the time has come for you to go
You will never be alone
Every dream that you have been shown
Will be like living stone
Building you into a home
A shelter from the storm

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Tarot Card Pull for 2012

Near the beginning of each new year, I've been in the habit of pulling a tarot card to serve as a guide for the coming days and months. (For curious souls out there, here is what I pulled in 2011, 2010, and 2009.


This year I pulled the Ace of Pentacles from my trusty Mythic Tarot deck.



What we see:
In this card, we see a merman (presumably Poseidon) who is half in the water. There is a summered scene behind him, complete with green mountains and fertile fields. The water is clear and there are four bunches of ripe grapes creeping across the rocks. Poseidon holds a large gold coin with a pentacle in it above his crown. 

Interpretation:
According to the Mythic Tarot book, this card "augurs the possibility of material achievement, because the raw energy of this kind of work is now available to the individual. Often money is made available through a legacy or some other source, couple with the ingenuity and persistence to utilize these resources effectively."

Poseidon, according to some mythologies, is a fertility god, husband of Mother Earth and lord of the physical universe. He is a raw force of nature; this card seems to suggest that the energy that was brought forth creatively will turn "its immense creative potency downward into the world, and it is this fresh emerging need to concretize and create in the manifest world that stands behind all our material ambitions. The individual who can manifest money and make things happen on a worldly level experiences something of the power of this ancient earthy god, and the Ace of Pentacles heralds the eruption of fresh ambition toward material creation and success."

Additionally, I think this card might be saying that it is time to bring treasure up and out of creative, life giving waters. Perhaps even from the realm of the unconscious. Poseidon, being half man and half fish, certainly can live in two worlds. There is bounty to be had here. A very hopeful card, indeed, and rather synchronicitous since I dreamed this morning that I pulled a gorgeous dragon sea creature from salt water and brought it ashore.

My hope here is that this card is signaling success with my creative work in the dream community, poetry contests, and with this book I'm writing for young adults. My intention is that at end's year, I'll will have publications to share with all of you. May it be so!