danae sinclair

“… man is an enigma to himself.”

(Jung, The Undiscovered Self)

Recent media attention on a certain so-called ‘vile’ radio personality brings to mind Jung’s idea that what we repress, whether individually or collectively, will eventually out.  There is always someone who stands for what we ourselves cannot stand.  There will always be one who’ll say the things we cannot say (for us).  In the absence of an actual person to project our collective shadow onto, we’ll find something – an ‘other’ of some kind.  We have to have a bad guy, or we cannot have heroes.

We humans are so blind to ourselves.  We try so hard to be good – to be acceptable to others.  We deny our darkness and the harder we try to do so, the more fearful and fearsome it becomes.

The irony is that unless we stand in complete darkness, we will always have a shadow – and the brighter the light we attempt to bask in the longer and deeper our shadow will be. No matter how we try to pretend it isn’t there – that it belongs to someone else – it will be there.

We will always have known and unknown parts of ourselves unless we remain in complete ignorance.

Why are we so afraid?  Why do we fear darkness, death and other things that go bump? (The mortality rate here on Earth is 100% – yet our own mortality is taboo; hidden, sanitised and abnormal.)

What if we were to accept the mystery of our darkest selves instead of blinkering and blaming?

We might be less ‘good’ – but we may also be more compassionate and understanding toward others.  We might be less guilt-laden… we might not hate and fear one another as much…we might not worry about there not being enough to go around.

We might be happier.

“..because eternity is changeless, that which is governed only the puer does not age.  So, too, it has no maturing organic face that shows the bite of time.”

(James Hillman,  Senex and Puer 23-26)

Day after day spent doing paid work followed by evenings of unpaid work are not conducive to feelings of freedom and creativity. Always doing what we ‘should’ do when we don’t want to will eventually lead to some kind of break-down.

The latest studies on aging and nutrition (‘primal’ eating, calorie restriction, interval training and intermittent fasting)  reinforce that humans have a universal need for freedom, play and deviation.  The human body was not meant to eat the same thing every day, or at the frequency of ‘three square meals a day’ of processed, high carbohydrate ‘food’ – our bodies do not do well on strict or unnatural regimes of any kind.

We are at our best with natural, whole foods and fun.  But we all know that in order to have these things, discipline is needed – discipline to overcome cravings and addictions to manufactured, damaging foods; discipline to move one’s body off the sofa and burn calories.  Discipline enough to not give up and return to things the way they’ve ‘always’ been done.

Doing the same things day after day in every area of our lives is destructive – we need variety and freedom for health and wellbeing.  We need to have breaks from work, breaks from exercise, breaks from the foods we like best and breaks from eating altogether.  We need breaks from thinking and analysing and decision-making and getting around on ‘auto pilot’.

Routines, do serve us but they mean we are ‘set in our ways’ – we’ve over-activated the senex within ourselves.

Senex is time, death, reason – aging and restricting -  the voice in our heads which tells right from wrong and pushes us out the door to the day job; risk averse, governing, law making; senex keeps us on the path.  The opposite of senex is the puer archetype; the divine, ever-playful youth.  Puer is the spirit of adventure and destiny that set us on the path to begin with; curious and impetuous; containing all the possibilities.  This is that part of ourselves that we need to tap into in order to feel alive and vibrant and young.

Puer can be so engrossed in an adventure that the needs – the appetites -  of the body become secondary; can be so involved in play that fear and time are forgotten.  Puer can cause so much mischief that laughter can erase stresses and weariness.  Puer can make us turn left instead of right so that we end up in an entirely new place with an entirely fresh – and refreshed – outlook.  Puer can constellate heroic acts that invigorate the soul.  Puer is freedom from life and death.

Maintaining the tension – the syzygy or union of opposites – can be a challenge: without discipline we are chaotic, dangerous beings – unacceptable in one way of another; without freedom and destiny and play we are not whole, not happy – not alive.

Turning the senex to good use appears to be the answer – rather than allowing this part of ourselves make us rigid with age too soon – consciously sacrificing existing patterns of behaviour in favour of new ones – disciplining our selves toward exploration; flexing ours mind-muscle with previously unheard-of ideas – holding back impulses and cravings that will lead us back to the safety of known things; pushing ourselves past the barrier of fear.

We need not be decrepit while we still have spirit, what ever age we might be.

Trickster (all rights reserved)

“…much of the play of tricksters amounts to a reshaping (disjointing, rejointing) of the world around them… trickster shifts patterns in relation to one another, and by that redefines the patterns themselves…”  (Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World)

Mercury, Trickster, Raven.. messenger of the Gods, God Himself of Chance – a divine child; curious and creative.  Connections are in Mercury’s carpet-bag, as are choices; forks in the road have been marked by herms (from Hermes) for eons.  Doors, windows, ways through – ports, pores and opportunities – these all belong to the trickster archetype.

Magic and synchronicity – serendipity and coincidence are all Mercury’s.  Foolish new beginnings and leaps of faith too.

Every one of these things brings with it the gift of re-creation; at each cross-roads lies the possibility of making something different of one’s self – one’s life.

But some kind of movement must be made to get there – something solid may need to be broken ; a porthole or portal may need to be made so that an escape can be had.  Opportunity does not come knocking – one must elbow one’s way to the front of the queue with one’s wits focused on the signs that something is about to happen…and then one must grab on to that ‘something’ and run with it like a thief.

waiting for the next train….