Category Archives: Uncategorized

Three cops at my house in the last three days.

I will say that I have been very impressed with the responsiveness and professionalism of the local police department.

I’ve been quiet, though life has gotten a little louder. Great deep shifts that will not be written about on the open Web. At least not any time soon.

I have been being reminded over and over that a key part of what I have to do is reconcile the part of me that loves systematizing, researching, logically analyzing, and explaining with the part of me that experiences unexplainable things and is comfortable shifting in and out of altered (integrative?) states of consciousness.

I would have to look it up in Angeles Arrien’s book on tarot again, but I’m pretty sure my life card is the Chariot…

The chariot is one of the most complex cards to define. On its most basic level, it’s about getting what you want. It implies war, a struggle, and an eventual, hard-won victory over enemies, obstacles, nature, the uncertainties inside you. But there is a great deal more to it. The charioteer wears emblems of the sun, yet the sign behind this card is Cancer, the moon. The chariot is all about motion, and yet it is often shown as stationary.

What does this all mean? It means a union of opposites, like the black and white steeds. They pull in different directions, but must be (and can be!) made to go together in one direction. That is perhaps the most important message of the Chariot. Separate the driver form the chariot, the chariot from the horses, the horses from each other and from the driver, and nothing gets done. They all do their own thing. Put them all together, with the same goal in mind, and there will be no stopping them.

—source

And so the Great Work continues.

Soul enlarging things of late:

• Ecstatic dance, practiced somewhere other than my house
• Finding myself invited to join a community garden, and spending hours with my hands in the dirt
• I’m getting used to riding my bike and sometimes it is actually fun instead of torture
• Making important decisions about my time and effort and where it should be directed
• Returning to LJ, a relief from Facebook’s vapid-fire updating. 

And so it goes.

I did not plan to read this section of Jung’s Red Book this morning, but it just worked out that way…

And suddenly to your shivering horror it becomes clear to you that you have fallen into the boundless, the abyss, the inanity of eternal chaos. It rushes toward you as if carried by the roaring wings of a storm, the hurtling waves of the sea.

Every man has a quiet place in his soul, where everything is self-evident and easily explainable, a place to which he likes to retire from the confusing possibilities of life, because there everything is simple and clear, with a manifest and limited purpose. About nothing else in the world can a man say with the same conviction as he does of this place: “You are nothing but… ” and indeed he has said it.

And even this place is a smooth surface, an everyday wall, nothing more than a snugly sheltered and frequently polished crust over the mystery of chaos. If you break through this most everyday of walls, the overwhelming stream of chaos will flood in. Chaos is not single, but an unending multiplicity. It is not formless, otherwise it would be single, but it is filled with figures that have a confusing and overwhelming effect due to their fullness.

These figures are the dead, not just your dead, that is, all the images of the shapes you took in the past, which your ongoing life has left behind, but also the thronging dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past, which is an ocean compared to the drops of your own life span. I see behind you, behind the mirror of your eyes, the crush of dangerous shadows, the dead, who look greedily through the empty sockets of your eyes, who moan and hope to gather up through you all the loose ends of the ages, which sigh in them. Your cluelessness does not prove anything. Put your ear to that wall and you will hear the rustling of their procession.

Now you know why you lodged the simplest and most easily explained matters in just that spot, why you praised that peaceful seat as the most secure: so that no one, least of all yourself would unearth the mystery there. For this is the place where day and night agonizingly merge. What you excluded from your life, what you renounced and damned, everything that was and could have gone wrong, awaits you behind that wall before which you sit quietly…

…The animal does not rebel against its own kind. Consider animals: how just they are, how well-behaved, how they keep to the time-honored, how loyal they are to the land that bears them, how they hold to their accustomed routes, how they care for their young, how they go together to pasture, and how they draw one another to the spring. There is not one that conceals its overabundance of prey and lets its brother starve as a result. There is not one that tries to enforce its will on those of its own kind. Not a one mistakenly imagines that it is an elephant when it is a mosquito. The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it.

He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power.

When the time has come and you open the door to the dead, your horrors will also afflict your brother, for your countenance proclaims the disaster. Hence withdraw and enter solitude, since no one can give you counsel if you wrestle with the dead. Do not cry for help if the dead surround you, otherwise the living will take flight, and they are your only bridge to the day. Live the life of the day and do not speak of mysteries, but dedicate the night to bringing about the salvation of the dead…

…Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love. Be not their blind spokesman, there are prophets who in the end have stoned themselves. But we seek salvation and hence we need to revere what has become and to accept the dead, who have fluttered through the air and lived like bats under our roofs since time immemorial. The new will be built on the old and the meaning of what has become will become manifold. Your poverty in what has become you will thus deliver into the wealth of the future…

— C.G. Jung, selected from Nox Secunda, in The Red Book (pgs. 295-7)

Quoted by James Hollis in his lecture tonight:

…Fear is a challenge and a task because only boldness can deliver us from fear, and if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness, to a drab grey lit only by will-o’ the-wisps.
— C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, par. 551

He says if you write this on your wall and read it every day, it will change your life.

So, in preparation for tomorrow’s workshop, thinking about what matters most. Things that come to mind that Hollis didn’t already cover (at least not explicitly) are:

– To live, as best I can, in balance with and respect for the world.
– To root ever more deeply in The Place of Real ((From a painting by my friends Clarity:

Where is the place you can laugh the loudest? Where is the place you can give Love the most? Where is the place you can feel your Greatness? Have you found it? This is the Place of Real.

Never lose sight of this Place, and always leave crumbs to find your way back.

))
– To be a witness—to observe and speak the truth of what I see and experience, and to attest to the experience of others through presence and attention
– To continuously cultivate wonder

The Dream Encyclopedia I mentioned in the previous post does not contain an entry for “woodpecker-monkey-man.” That was the most interesting recurring dream character I’ve run into recently.

Weirdly enough, until very recently, you could buy this on Etsy. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw it.

woodpecker monkey

My friends Maria and Paul left me a little Yule tree this morning.

I was very very very happy. I decorated it this evening with a cup of tea, The Pogues If I Should Fall From Grace with God (because it has the best Christmas song ever), and cats scattered around the room watching.

A lesser long nosed bat eating from a hummingbird feeder.

Look at his belly! And his feet all up in the air! Cute!

(via)

I start laughing whenever I think about The Marmoset Song:

And baby ocelots may be the absolute cutest thing ever in the world:

It is usually like this:

…because lately it is much too hot for this:

…plus I shed everywhere incessantly. I don’t know how one loses as much hair as I do without going bald.