Afternoon tea

I was thinking about my friends just now, while pouring my afternoon tea. How different things are today, compared with years past. None of my friends lives close enough to gossip across the fence, or drop by for a cup and a chat. My imaginal friends the Ladies experienced that kind of closeness, living in small communities and neighborhoods. I never have.

Something that many of them experienced as well was isolation and loneliness. I have letters from several of them which speak of friends who've moved away, perhaps never to be heard from again. Others, having themselves moved away, wrote to friends and loved ones back home and spoke of how much they missed them.

My great-great-grandmother Mary Ann's homesickness and loneliness on the prairies of Illinois was so great and so lasting that I can feel it to this day, when I drive between the river and the upland fields there, through the stretch of woods that reminded her of her Pennsylvania home. I wonder if she ever quit missing the old place, though she lived for more than fifty years longer, and raised her family, among the cornfields.

What made me think of all this today was, of all things, facebook. I felt lonely this afternoon, working at home by myself. But I can go online and see what my friends are up to, what they're reading, what they're laughing about, what they're working through. Yes, I'm lonely, but I am not isolated in any but a physical sense.

How different this is from anything human beings have experienced ever before, in all the long millennia of our existence as a species. I wonder, as have many others, what this all means in the Grand Scheme of Things....

Meanwhile, join me, friend, for a cup of tea. A place is set just for you.

Waiting

Winter.

Waiting.

Things are beginning to stir, though I still don't know what they are. Waiting in uncertainty is such a difficult skill. I hate not knowing what comes next. I want to rush forward to some kind of resolution. What's my path in life? What's the answer to the puzzle posed by all the bits and pieces of seemingly unrelated events, people, feelings, information?

It's an active waiting, for me, not a passive one. I'm trying to refine my skill at the art of active receptivity, which has been my way of being-in-the-world for some years now. It's a matter of waiting while watching for the next hint to appear, the next door to open, the next part of the path to become visible among the weeds. It's a balance. Too hasty, and I risk getting sidetracked; too slow, and an opportunity may be missed.

And all the time, of course, I don't know exactly what it is that I'm looking for. I hate it, but I have to trust that I'll know the right moment to act when that moment arrives, and the right moment to remain still, watching and waiting.

Why couldn't this be easier? Sigh....

Insight from a little bird

Some friends reported on facebook the other day that their little parrot had escaped and flown away. This bird had been very unhappy since they first adopted her as a youngster last year. She never adjusted to life in her new home, and repeatedly plucked all her breast feathers out despite my friends’ kindness, caring, and all-out attempts to figure out what was bothering her. Without her feathers to insulate her, she undoubtedly perished fairly rapidly in this winter weather.

I woke up in the middle of that night thinking about the bird, and about what I could say to my friends that would be of any comfort at all. In my mind I framed a message to put on facebook the next morning—facebook is where all of us communicate such events these days.

“Some creatures, like some humans,” I would say, “are just so damaged that they can’t recognize love and safety even when they are surrounded by it. They are too damaged by whatever trauma they suffered at an early age, and never recover.” I’m a psychologist, and I know this stuff, right?

As I was dozing back off, I woke up with a flash of rueful insight: I might as well be talking about myself.

Here I am, financially secure, with the most interesting life of anyone I know and the opportunity to do pretty much whatever I want with my life. I am loved, and I am surrounded by abundance, and I am safe in this world. The Universe repeatedly demonstrates this. Yet I fret and worry and berate myself for not doing “enough,” or “the right thing.” I wait for the other shoe to drop, for The Dreadful Thing to happen. I make myself miserable, just like my friends’ little parrot.

I feel so sorry for the little creature, and for my friends grieving her loss. And maybe now I’ll stop pulling my feathers out.

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Dissertation Abstract. Working With the Imaginal: Art-Making With Figures of Soul

Women’s voices have long been silenced and our work demeaned by our patriarchal culture, leading to profound and internalized devaluation of our worth as human beings and the loss of a sense of ourselves as persons with stories worth telling. Through art-making, dreamwork, imaginal dialogues, and waking-world experiences, I explore the resonance between my own archetypal complexes and my experiences of the Ladies, a group of imaginal women. This dissertation tells the story of its own process, and in the telling, recovers the importance of “women’s work” that in each moment creates soul and embodies our connection with the Divine.

The art pieces created during this process express a temporal and psychic shift, emerging from early Victorian repression through mid-nineteenth-century control and sexualization to the embodiment of a psychic space in which sexuality, sensuality, and activity can be freely expressed. This process reflects a similar transformation in my own psyche, as I moved from a deep sense of isolation, repression, and fear of speaking out, into a more open and confident expression of my self, my voice, and my art.

A major challenge facing depth psychology is to understand the nature of the imaginal world and the ways that we can and do interact with it. This imaginal dissertation addresses the challenge by documenting what the dissertation process and product look like when the work is done in the imaginal way, from within a collaborative field co-emerging between the waking world and the imaginal world. Within this field we have access to a wisdom that surpasses the rational by taking advantage of the quantum nature of reality—the psychoid archetype.

The study uses a radical approach that steps out from alchemical hermeneutics and refigures the traditional distinction between inner work and outer work, between thought and action, between research as scholarly reflection and the act of being in the world. It recaptures an essentially feminine way of knowing, and demonstrates that the boundaries between the “real” world and the imaginal are not as rigid as we have been taught. The imaginal is always in between and always co-arising.


[If you would like to learn more about the creation of Ellen's dress, you can read about it here.]

Thoughts on the movie "Avatar"

For me, this movie was very difficult to watch. Beautiful, brilliant, wrenching, and deeply disturbing. I'm still processing it, and will be for some time, I suspect.

The Quaker in me insists that there must be a better way—a way that doesn’t involve death and destruction on all sides. The Quaker insists it is not necessary to hate, but only to stay true to what one believes.

The Warrior wants to fight to the death; the Warrior wants to rip the guts out of the destroyers. The Warrior revels in the destruction of the Evil Sky People, and glories in the tales of valor that will be re-told for generations to come.

The Voice of Reason found the story trite and predictable; the Voice of Reason knows there is no magic in the world, despite all those electromagnetic and chemical connections among the roots of the world.

Keiki o ka ‘aina grieves for all those who died; Keiki o ka ‘aina grieves for the loss of the World Tree and for the destruction of the beauty and richness of that world and this one. Keiki o ka ‘aina feels the magic in the world and its pain; she wonders what might be her small part in this great shift that is occurring, in the breaking of these patterns of destruction and blindness. Keiki o ka ‘aina will continue to pray for guidance and search for the next step on her path.

The Critic wonders why I bother with all this nonsense; the Critic is certain that there is nothing I could possibly do that would be of any significance whatsoever.

Whose voice will speak with the most effect? How much courage do I really possess?

The depths of winter....

I should know enough by now to expect this: I'm in the depths of winter at the moment, feeling cold and still and sad without reason. The only thing that forces me to acknowledge that I'm still alive is the ache in my soul. This happens in the darkest part of the year, reliably, every year, and yet every year the depression is as fresh and painful as the very first time. Maybe it's like the pain of icy fingertips, reminding me that it's time to go warm up my hands before frostbite sets in.

There are bright moments, of course. Being around my horses brings me back to life; so does dancing. In those moments, joy returns. But as soon as I stop, the icy blanket descends again, so chilling that hope itself seems like the enemy.

My dreams, by contrast, are full of life and death and transformative imagery. I just don't seem to have the energy to work with them. But surely spring will come, as it always does. Outside, just as it did last year, just as it does each year as surely as depression, the witch hazel is blooming in the garden, opening its scented blossoms like the breath of hope itself.

I am grateful.

Lunar dreams

Last night was the Full Moon. Some believe that a full moon represents the completion of a cycle in our life, the fruition of something begun during the dark of the moon two weeks earlier. I often ponder these cycles in my own life, over weeks and months, to see if there are meaningful connections to be made.

So what was “seeded” at the New Moon on the 16th? What intention did I set at that time, consciously or unconsciously? Checking my November journal, I noticed that on the night of the New Moon I had the following dream:

I’m running around happily in “my back yard,” which in the dream is up on a hill. There’s a steep drop-off or even a cliff at the back end, with a creek way below. I hear someone talking loudly—it’s a Vietnamese woman talking to one of her kids, maybe explaining where she’s going or what she wants them to do. I can’t understand her, of course. I run back to watch her, and suddenly find myself standing on the very edge of this cliff, a little below the top. I watch the woman, who is wearing tabis, those Japanese (and Vietnamese?) foot coverings with a separate big toe, as she ducks under a barbed wire fence and wades into the stream. I am a little envious of her apparent freedom.

Then I realize that this cliff is made of soil and very soft sandstone, and that there is nothing beneath me except a 40-foot drop. I’m startled and concerned, so I very carefully clamber back to the top.

I recognized that last image as a reference to The Fool from the tarot: the fellow who, carrying his knapsack and accompanied by his little dog, strides in blissful ignorance right off a cliff. The Fool, among its many meanings in the tarot, has a kind of “beginner’s mind” feel to it—a trusting innocence that just takes what comes in life without judgement or forethought. It’s one of the Major Arcana, the “trump” cards that indicate something of particular and archetypal importance in a reading.

But who is the Vietnamese woman? What message does she have for me?

In reverie I re-enter the dream: The Vietnamese woman is intent on her business; aware of me but not friendly. She wades upstream; she seems to be gathering things—crayfish, it looks like—from under the rocks. I kick off my shoes, put on my muck boots, and wade in after her. The water is cold and deep and goes right over the top of my boots—I take them off, too, and wade barefoot, which is difficult and painful. The woman glances at me disdainfully, as if to say, “Well. You certainly didn’t prepare yourself, did you?” Her slippered feet have no problem with sharp rocks or algae.

The woman is collecting crayfish. I suddenly remember that crayfish appear in one of the tarot cards: The Moon, another of the Major Arcana. Reading Rachel Pollack’s books on the interpretation of The Moon in the tarot, I notice all kinds of references to wildness, to our sensitivity to life that is so often covered over by ego consciousness. In the context of this card, Pollack suggests, the crayfish may be a symbol of our deepest, most unconscious terrors.

Another connection appears in my mind at that point: at a discussion with a group of depth psychologists the Sunday before the dream, our topic was the movie “Where the Wild Things Are,” which deals in an imaginal way with our deep need to allow our inner wildness to be expressed. The crayfish may symbolize terror of and from the unconscious; but the Vietnamese woman is hunting them for food. The crayfish is food for the body; the terrors of the deep unconscious, perhaps, are food for my soul, and I must search for them without the imagined protection of the rubber boots of ego consciousness.

It is difficult to explain the relationship of all this with my private life at the moment, simply because much of what I am struggling with is so very private. I have lately been feeling a strong tug toward involvement with the world—with my business endeavors, with my book, with friends new and old, with things that feel strange and uncomfortable. I have been resisting that pull, hiding out in the barn with the horses. This dream suggests that isolation is no longer the best idea. Like The Fool, I need to summon my basic innocence and trust in the Universe. I have to get into the water—I can no longer stay dry and safe and uninvolved. But at the same time I need to take precautions, to prepare myself so that I can be effective and not get hurt.

One final, provocative connection, in the words of a song that I heard that same night: “It’s never too late to reach out your hand in love.”

[Note: the image of the moon is by Ghirlandajo, obtained from Wikimedia Commons; the image of The Fool is my photo of the card from the Ryder-Waite tarot deck.]