“.. the notion of ‘importance’… is equated with notitia, or taking notice of things. It is like the Japanese exclamation of ‘ah-a-ah!’ when suddenly touched by beauty. The word aisthesis… refers to the gasp, the ‘ah-ha’, the ‘uh’ of the breath of wonder. It is recognition of the ‘eachness’ of things…”
(David Ray Griffin, Archetypal Process: self and divine in Whitehead, Jung and Hillman)
“… 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.
“We do know… that repression is the soul of wit, and that sudden laughter represents the breakthrough of the deeply repressed”
(James Hillman, Cookbook, 78)
We love to laugh, we humans. The best kinds of laughs are also the worst – coming at inappropriate times, in inappropriate places; making us behave inappropriately. There are all kinds of laughter – chuckles, giggles, sniggers, guffaws (can’t say I hear those often), belly-laughs; falling down, rolling-around hysterics.
Tonight I laughed – I made myself laugh – long and loud in the face of abuse (down the telephone line as he ranted and cursed me in ways that would turn a sailor’s toes). It was my only defense, and it worked brilliantly; the abuser lost track of himself and gave up.
I remember doing this as a child – when my rough-and-tumble siblings overpowered me (as they could) I would push past the pain of their blows and laugh at their efforts. Inevitably I would come out on top. If only because laughing felt so darn good.
Laughter has its own magic. It can do so many things; it can disarm the most difficult opponent, empower the dis-empowered, make weak the strong and make strong the weak. Laughter can stop us in our tracks and make us take a good look – what is so funny?
Nothing is more beautiful to me than the sound of children laughing. Nothing feels better than laughing so deliriously I cannot scrape myself off the ground, limbs all floppy, eyes streaming with tears. Nothing is more powerful than keeping hold of humour – and letting it all go with a howl.
Laughter shows us something (unrealised) of who we are when we least expect it. Tonight it showed me that I am well and truly past allowing anyone to treat me poorly. All of a sudden everything is much clearer.
“The aim of reduction is not to stay stuck to the nigredo, nose in the dirt but..to come to ‘the essential, the quintessence of one’s nature’..” (James Hillman, Silver)
In alchemy the nigredo or first stage of the opus involves blackening, putrifaction and the breaking down of matter to its most basic parts. Things get pretty ugly, smelly and messy. The second stage – the albedo or whitening – consists of the work of ‘washing and grinding’ matter to elevate or sublimate it to its next state.
The metaphor is fairly clear – when things get crappy, there is always actual work we can to move toward a better state.
Julia Cameron writes, in The Artist’s Way, that she turns to mending and other small tasks when her life becomes un-stitched. She recommends we find our own ways of putting things back together and re-ordering our thoughts: sorting, shelving, laundry, gardening, taking out the garbage. All of these small, otherwise-mundane tasks done purposefully can become the work of our own alchemical opus magnus.
It is a very human need to take our salt or felt-experience (whether good or bad or somewhere in between) and redeem it somehow – process it, turn it over, fold it up and put it away.
Repetitious manual labour removes conscious attention from problems and allows the unconscious mind to do the solving. In order to do tasks like sewing or gardening we must be focused and present – again, the conscious mind is in one place and the unconscious mind does stitching and weeding of its own.
So, pick up a trowel, dig up some answers…get into the kitchen and chop, grind, mix and mash… pull out everything from under your bed and sweep out the dust-kittens. Put extra purpose into it all – let your house work become the work of your soul.
“The work on dreams follows the work of dreams. We work on the dream, not to unravel it as Freud said, to undo the dream work’s undoing, but to respond to its work with the likeness of our work, all the while aiming to speak like the dream, imagine like the dream.” (James Hillman, Dream and the Underworld, 102)
Some people say they don’t dream; what they don’t realise is that they don’t recall their dreams. Dreams are universal – not just the dreaming of them but their images.
Others say their dreams are ‘crazy’ or ‘rubbish’; what this means is that they are unskilled in understanding them. We all dream and all our dreams are intelligent statements of the psyche – soul’s messages.
You can buy books full of dream symbols and their ‘meanings’; these are useful for propping up a corner of an uneven table. The only book anyone needs is a journal or notebook. Anyone can gain insight into their own dreams just from writing them down – no analysis required.
Writing is largely unconscious (and thus a tool of the soul) – our style, our choice of words, emphasis and use of grammar were all learned in childhood and are as embedded in our way of being as our spoken language and ethnicity.
Writing down a dream is an exercise in translation in itself; the waking self draws on the unconscious self for help with what the sleeping self has to say.
So, try it. Write down your dreams and, rather than referring to someone elses ideas of what they ‘mean’, trust in your own ability to understand and communicate.
“..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….
Body (Eros) D Sinclair (all rights reserved)
There is nothing so deformed in the whole living world that it has no soul, no gift of soul contained within it.
Marcilio Ficino, Liber de Vita
My creative soul has taken a leave of absence in protest to the long hours I spend every day in a job I find hard to love. I go looking for my creativity when I can - I take long walks in my favourite National Park; I empty my mind with mantras and meditation; and I take care to notice life around me – dreams and animal-totems and cledons. I do all the things I used to do to find solace, space and inspiration, but I am not creative any more. No more drawing, no more poetry, no more long essays. Instead I write corporate documents; standard operating procedures, policies. I compose emails in my most responsible voice. It is all work – the things I do to make money, the things I do to de-stress, the things I do for my family.
This month I’m making some changes, starting with the day job – which I’ve cut back to part time from next week.
So this is a drab little blog post from one burnt-out Mama in need of a good long rest & some tender loving care. I’ll be occupied, and less pre-occupied, for a while – reclaiming my life, my time, my space, my body & my writing.
And then I plan to have fun…
