The Muse of Synchronicity: Part III

We are all shape–shifters, but through your words we became human.

—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

Mother of Pink Flamingos

It’s hard to be a palomino with a pole stuck in your back.
—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

Judy Wells

Judy Wells made a synchronistic appearance in Part I of this blog, when, lonely for companions in Poetry Land I wandered into a poetry reading where I thought I’d know no one. Judy, the featured reader, reminded me that we had an old connection—we had been in a consciousness–raising group together in the late ‘60s. Since hearing her funny provocative poetry that night—a lapsed Catholic’s thrust and parry at the nuns, the pieties, the absurdities of a Catholic education—I have loved her wit and exuberance. But the wind chimes of synchronicity really began pealing as I immersed myself in her latest book of poems, The Glass Ship.

We poets often feel we travel alone. But in the realm of the old souls, where, to borrow Richard Messer’s eloquence, we are “one in the heart’s core,” we are companions. Judy Wells has been bitten by many of the same obsessions that possess me—the journey to other worlds, the visionary energy of what Robert Bly calls “leaping poetry,” the power of combining personal story and myth. Both of us have been possessed by a medieval tale, me, the tale of negotiating with the devil, Judy the Celtic immrama—tales of voyages to other–world islands. Both of us retell the story with a female protagonist.

Ancient Map with Sea Monsters

Judy uses the prose poem throughout this saga. It is a marvelous vehicle for telling marvels. Robert Bly says it well: “The urgent, alert rhythm of the prose poem prepares us to journey, to cross the border, either of the other world or to that place where the animal lives.” Judy does both at the same time. Here’s how she sets her story up: “A magnificent sailing ship made completely of glass” which reflects “rainbow lights like a crystal” bears down on our hero’s small boat. She sees a young couple dancing on the deck and recognizes her own parents. They don’t recognize her, however. Why?

I had not yet been born. Here were my parents deeply in love before they were married, before the four children began to come, before the toil of creating a home.

Our adventurer has clearly chosen a different life. She’s off to the Island of Pink Flamingos where she meets seventeen beautiful young women in “the shadow of a huge hibiscus tree. They wore glittery silver tops and long black skirts. They were barefoot, but their toenails were painted a glittery silver, as were their fingernails.” Color is essential in this tale, as is the number seventeen. They greet her, “Welcome, Mother.” She protests that she’s not their mother. They insist she is. “But how” she wonders. “I don’t remember ever giving birth."

Once upon a time, the young women tell her, she was the Queen of this island. She transformed them all from other shapes—butterfly, cat, flamingo—by making poems. Poetry made them human. Here we touch the realm of the White Goddess, in which poetry is magic. But our hero does not take herself so seriously. She’s on to other adventures, which is fine with her daughters who “don’t need a Queen to boss” them around, but love her anyway.

Our sailor girl shifts archetypal shapes frequently. Sometimes she is a hero, as when she releases fifty palominos from their bondage to the Purple Carousel. She follows the instructions of her carousel steed, who complains to her: “It’s hard to be a palomino with a pole stuck in your back. Every day, I pray the dwarf will release me…” He instructs her to steal the black key and the gold key from the dwarf’s shoes. The dwarf mutters, “So that’s why my feet hurt all these years.” There’s always an unexpected turn in these prose poems that brings us back from the land of faerie to the comic and human. She is a happy hero as she watches “fifty golden palominos racing down the beach into the waves.”

Sometimes she’s a fool, as when, on the Isle of Black and White Sheep an ancient couple promises to tell her the secret of immortality if she can achieve a simple task—“put one white sheep in the black flock and one black sheep in the white flock.” But this is a slippery realm we are in. The white sheep she lugs over the central wall turns black as it joins the black herd. And vice versa. No secret of immortality is revealed to this fool.

Ancient Hide Boat or Coracle

Our adventurer reveals that she is a compulsive gambler. She finds herself on the Island of Card Players with three poker playing chimps, “one in a black bowler hat, another in a white fedora, the third in a red beret.” She has “never played poker with a worse group of companions.” She thinks she’s winning big time, because these chimps have “no sense of a poker face.” But the chimps are savvy tricksters, and though she wins she loses.

Our voyaging poet’s trickster humor is constantly pulling the rug out from under our expectations, playing jokes on the reader. Playing with our natural associations to Homer’s Odyssey our sea captain embarks on a voyage to tell off Odysseus. She has planned out her speech, which she knows is not very diplomatic, but “some people just need a kick in the pants.”

Look Odysseus, you’ve spend ten years at war already. Stop procrastinating and go home.Telemachus might be begging for a little brother or sister. [Penelope] might even be in menopause if you spend ten years dilly–dallying around with nymphs, princesses and witches. Or worse, Penelope might just scoop up Telemachus and set sail on her own adventures instead of waiting for you, the bow–legged wonder.

So the adventurer who has rejected the domestic, can speak for the domestic. The liberated poet can liberate Penelope—that queen of domesticity—with a swift leap of her imagination. There’s a kick in the pants for Odysseus. But not so fast. It’s the reader eager for the pleasure of this come–uppance who gets the kick. For the “man with brawny forearms” our voyaging poet spots, “releasing a mound of sails into his boat,” is not Homer’s hero. He is Popeye the sailor man.

There is a delightful iconoclastic bent in such rapid shifts from Homer to twentieth century popular culture to Celtic myth to the poet’s wild imaginings. For a moment we are encouraged to believe we are in the world of epic. But no, we are in a ribald, comic world and our poet has tricked us again.

In another adventure our poet reveals her lust. When she rescues a beautiful young man who is lost at sea, she confesses “an urge to bend down and kiss him…I am a woman after all, at sea for too many months without a man.” In one of the many shape–shifts in this tale, that delight our imagination, the handsome sailor is transformed into a giant bird who announces:

My name is Sweeney…and I am an eagle, a rare, proud species. I have heard of an island in these parts inhabited by seventeen beautiful young women. My destiny is to fly to this island, court one of these women, and marry her. Thank you for saving me from the sea so I could fulfill my destiny.

“Sweet” our sea captain thinks, “I’m going to be the mother–in–law of an eagle. And so it will come to pass.

The Secret of Immortality

My boat awaited me, my pen, my red book.
—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

But not so fast. We are not yet ready for the wedding. First we must visit the land of the dead. Despite herself, our poet has a profound psychological vision for her voyaging craft. Like the poets of the Celtic immrana from whom she is descended, her purpose is to “teach the craft of dying and to pilot the departing spirit on a sea of perils and wonders.”

Sea-faring Map of Old Ireland

We find ourselves on the Island of Joe where our hero meets her old friend Joe “reading a book, with a crimson bird feather cape around his shoulders.” The book is the story of his life, which he has written. He reads to her from his concluding chapter:

I was in the desert, lying on a stone slab, emaciated, ready to die. I felt myself taking my last breath—and then silence, stillness. My spirit arose, a great crimson bid in the sky, and looked down on my withered body, now attracting dark–winged scavengers of the desert. Then my spirit soared to this island, where the crimson bird gave me back my body and sacrificed its own. I plucked its carcass carefully and created my feathered roof and my wonderful red–feathered cape. 
                                                                                           I am at home here.

Is it possible we fools, who are all of course, on a voyage to death, are being initiated into the secret of immortality after all? Joe closes his book, smiles and says, “And now you must write your story?” Are we reading the product of that wisdom from the dear departed? The Glass Ship is the poet’s immortality?

But not so fast. We know by now that our trickster poet will not allow us so sanguine a vision for long. For now we have voyaged to the Island of Ash where we meet Joe again, and our poet’s other recently departed friend Rose. “‘Time’s up for me says Joe,’” and we watch in dismay as his body begins “crumbling into ash…Finally only his head remained, covered/with a battered straw hat.”

Rose still sat on the surface of the mountain of ash. “You meet the most interesting people here,” she said, “but they always tend to disappear.” As she spoke, her body began to fade as if a brilliant red rose gradually turned light pink, then invisible. 

I felt a great emptiness in my soul as my friends disappeared. Retreating to my boat I lay down and drifted out to sea. A mysterious voice whispered…Go carry the living. 

And so she does.

Mother–in–law of an Eagle

One shape shifting must be paid for by another.
—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

The wedding at the end of our tale—as in most good comedies—gathers the dramatis personae, human and animal, dead and living, our adventurer met as she wandered other worlds. And, as it happens in faerie tales, our hero has a difficult task to perform. The Mother of Pink Flamingoes must compose a poem that will break the spell that has turned her beautiful daughter, the bride, into a pink flamingo. This daughter, who was enamored of Sweeney’s beautiful body as she watched him cast off his bird feathers and become a man, when he came to her island to court her, and who was so fascinated by that magical protuberance between his legs, is anxious to get on with the ceremony. She says: “The wedding feast is all prepared, the guests have arrived, and Sweeney, my intended, is growing impatient. O Mother, I beg you to compose the poem that will break the spell of my bird–body.”

Our poet, who never signed up for the role of mother, turns into a mother. Concerned at the anguish in her daughter’s voice, she strokes her pink feathers. “I lay awake half the night wracking my brains for a poem and could only come up with two pitiful stanzas.” What poet hasn’t spent a night like that, especially when so much rides on a poem.

Her poem asserts, “human flesh is best,” though “I myself was not sure of this. Perhaps being able to fly with one’s own wings is exchange enough for the wild imagination we humans have been given.” Her words do the trick—the spell is broken. Her daughter is released to be the bride, the sacred triple bride of Celtic lore—maiden, mother, crone—is consecrated. All is well with the world, no? Not so fast. Our mother of the bride notices “tiny feathers poking from my flesh…” and realizes, “one shape–shifting must be paid for by another.”

So Judy Wells, my long ago companion in the wild adventure of Women’s Liberation, who sat with me and others in a consciousness raising group that blew off the top of our heads and transformed us all, has charmed, enchanted, made me laugh out loud with her saga. We, who were palominos with poles stuck in our backs, going up and down on the carousel of the conventional female roles we were born into, have been freed to run into the waves. We, who are on a voyage to our deaths, have been taught in the Celtic tradition, by a wise, and wisecracking bard.

The Muse of Synchronicity: Part I

There is only one way and that is your way, there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

—C.G Jung 

The Light at the Core of Darkness, C.G.Jung

The Sister from Below

is delighted to announce that

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and Lucille Lang Day

are co–winners of the

Blue Light Poetry Chapbook Contest for 2014.

Sisters of the Blue Light

Everything happens at once and forever.

—Lucille Lang Day

Behind this award, dear friends, lies a story of synchronicities. To Jungians, synchronicity is the Muse of Muses, those moments in your ordinary life when you’re touched by forever. You experience a “meaningful coincidence,” something that connects your inner world to the outer world. You’re walking in a meadow, for example, telling your companion about your dream of a coyote, when a coyote appears and engages you in that uncanny gaze across species. Your senses open to the radiant world; you feel touched by the eternal. Whatever has blocked you, whatever you’re stumbling through, opens up and your path is revealed. You can’t explain it rationally, but it is as though you are standing in the center of the kaleidoscope of your life, and suddenly all the fragments rearrange themselves into a new pattern, full of color and light.

That was how I felt when I got a phone call from Diane Frank, Chief Editor of Blue Light Press, informing me that I had won their chapbook contest, along with Lucy Day, who, unbeknownst to Diane, is a dear friend of mine. I had a visionary moment—saw how my path and Lucy’s had been interwoven over many years to culminate in this joint affirmation. I contemplated the chain of synchronicities that had brought us here. Blue Light Press, by the way, publishes visionary poetry. How fitting.

In our causality-oriented culture it is difficult to talk about such experiences without seeming slightly crazy. Jung struggled with this. He was a doctor, loved the sciences, respected causality and the scientific method of “breaking everything down into individual processes.” But, he pointed out, this attitude has the “disadvantage of obscuring the…unity of the world” which Jungians call the “Unus Mundus,” the one world in which everything is interconnected. The Unus Mundus, of course, is an ancient concept. Some call it the Tao, some call it The Tree of Life, some call it Brahman, some call it Grace. Mystics experience it, as do visionary artists. I feel so grateful to have my work published by a press that celebrates such vision.

Only the Blind Can See

Only Blind Willie Johnson
Can sing your way home
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

For years I’ve been sending chapbooks—small poetry collections—to contests. Chapbooks are a way to gather poems, often following a theme, into a coherent shape. My poems often demand to be put together in these small books. They want to make their way into the world in a larger form that an individual poem in a literary magazine. I can’t remember how many times I’ve submitted how many chapbooks to how many presses. Sometimes I get a nice note saying my chapbook “came close.” Mostly I get form rejections. You get used to this in poetry land. Over the years I’ve come to understand that this is a function of how many wonderful poets there are writing now. All you have to do is look at the recent issue #22, of Spillway, a fine poetry magazine, edited by Susan Terris. This issue’s theme is “Muse & Music.”

Of course my muse insisted I submit poems and was delighted when my poem, “Only the Blind,” was chosen. It is one of over a hundred poems that make uncanny connections and transport the reader into enchanted realms. Many of them reach that deep place, where ordinary life touches the Unus Mundus. Being a poet in America today is, for me, an exercise in humility. Perhaps there are so many amazing visionary poets writing because in our materialistic, fame-worshiping culture there is a great collective hunger for what only the inner eye can see.

Synchronicities are often inner experiences for me, and catalysts for poems. “Only the Blind” began when I heard a piece on the radio about the early gospel blues singer Blind Willie Johnson, and later that day read about Isaac the Blind, the 12th Century Rabbi who, it is said, first wrote down the oral tradition of Jewish mysticism we call the Kabbala. “Only the Blind can see” was the phrase that beat in me, joined by “You have always belonged to the moon.” Music was my muse in working on this poem as it frequently is. Here’s the poem:

ONLY THE BLIND

You have always belonged to the moon
Though sometimes it leads you astray

Past willows across the swinging bridge
To somebody’s grave by the river

Stuck in the cave of your skull
You grope for the disappeared moon

Down where it’s blue so blue
Only Blind Willie Johnson

Can sing your way home
Only Isaac the Blind can see

The banshee has got your bones
She’s beating her drum with your bones

And you’re stuck in the cave of your skull
No willows no swinging bridge

Who will plant you deep in the earth?
Who will water your toes?

When the banshee has got your bones
When she’s beating her drum with your bones

You have always belonged to the moon

Only Isaac the Blind can show you
That glow beyond the bridge

Only Blind Willie Johnson
Can sing your way home

Blind Willie Johnson

The Muse of Muses

I dreamed I flourished back in drenching turmoils from the land
into ocean of you and my spirit drifted into skies of you
—John Gardner

In my life the Muse of Muses, synchronicity, often graces me with Her presence when I feel stuck, lost, unsure of my path. The story of how I met Lucy Day is a good example of this. It happened 15 years ago. I had returned to poetry after a long absence. I’d been writing seriously, sending poetry out, learning to tolerate rejections, getting the occasional acceptance. My poems are both imagistic and musical and I knew I needed to be reading them aloud to poetry audiences. I also wanted to put together a book. I longed to be part of a community of poets but it felt scary to walk into some unfamiliar place and read my weird visionary poems to strangers. Maybe they’d think I was nuts.

One evening I screwed up my courage, walked into a coffee shop which hosted a regular reading, and signed up for the open mike. It was a scene. The espresso machine hissed and gurgled. All kinds of people read poems at the open mike, some very accomplished, some who seemed to have scribbled some raw deep feeling in a notebook that day. I was moved by the democracy of it all. Anyone who signed up for the open mike could read. The featured reader was a woman with a blaze of red hair named Judy Wells. She had just published a book of poems called Everything Irish, about growing up Catholic. Many of her poems were laugh out loud funny, about nuns, pagan babies, and her second grade class being the cause of their teacher’s nervous breakdown.

At the end of the reading Judy approached me, saying “Don’t you remember me? You and I were in a consciousness raising group together in the early ‘70s.” She introduced me to her publisher, Lucy Day. Lucy liked the poems I’d read. She said she’d decided to start her own publishing house, Scarlet Tanager Books, because so many good poets were not finding publishers. I asked if she’d consider publishing me. She invited me to send her a group of poems.

Suddenly I was in a community of poets with whom I had a history. Judy and I had become feminists together, and Lucy, it turned out, had found her voice in the Berkeley Poets Cooperative in the 1970s, as had I. I left the Co–op just before Lucy joined, but I knew Ted Fleishman, Lucy’s ex. It seems there are nodes in our lives, vibrant centers of connection and energy that resound into our future without our conscious knowledge. I was blind, groping my way in poetry land, convinced I was all alone, and then one night in a coffee shop poetry reading I realized I had a community, I had connections!

Lucy published my first book of poems, red clay is talking, in 2000 and my second, crimes of the dreamer, in 2005. Lucy amazed me, in fact she still does. She is so well organized, so capable. She taught herself the ropes of publishing. She seems not to be overwhelmed by the sorts of practical details that overwhelm me, and I assume, most poets. She is a scientist, a biologist, who for years was the director of the Hall of Health, a Science Museum for children. I know I’m not the only one who is forever grateful to her— she is so generous in her support of other poets.

Another synchronicity—a book came out last year, called The Berkeley Poets Cooperative: A History of the Times, edited by Charles Entrekin. It is a collection of essays by some of us who were part of the Co–op. As Entrekin says, the book is a testimonial “to a way of life that emphasizes beauty and human enlightenment instead of quarterly profits and unequal distribution of wealth. A cooperative way of life. It still seems possible.”

Lucy and I both have essays in this collection. Lucy writes about how she came to realize she is “more a writer than a scientist” at the Co–op. I wrote a memorial to my friend John Gardner, a Co–op regular who, I wrote, “was the first serious poet who took my poetry seriously.” He was an ecstatic, a mystic, a visionary who gave me the courage I needed to follow my own ecstasies. He died far too young.

Song of My Life

Some say a god made us humans out of red clay.
Some say we humans make our gods out of red clay.
Others say, it doesn’t matter who makes whom.
What matters is the play between the human and
divine realms, and the joy of creation.
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Synchronicity is the Muse of Muses for visionary poetry. Both happen in the play between the human and divine realms. Elevated moods, intense feeling states are the context for the experience of synchronicity as well as for the writing of poetry. I remember how such a mood came upon me and led to my writing the poem, “before,” which opens my first collection, red clay is talking. During the intermission at a concert I ran into a colleague. She talked ecstatically about the joys of singing in a chorus, performing the great choral works in her own voice among many. I remember those joys. In college I got to add my voice to the glories of the Brahms Requiem and Bach’s Saint Mathew’s passion. But when my colleague insisted that I needed to join a chorus now, I was surprised at the bolt of fury that leapt through me. I saw myself in my childhood basement piano practice room, toiling over a Bach fugue, afraid my father would come thundering down the stairs to tell me that I was playing it all wrong. I heard myself say to my colleague in an intemperate tone of voice: “I was raised to sing other people’s songs. Now it’s my time to sing my own.” Out of that anger came this poem —my declaration of being a visionary poet— published by Lucy Day’s press, Scarlet Tanager Books:

before

life after life
I stand by the road
and look for a home
—Mirabai

she had been raised to sing
other people’s songs
but in the third morning of the new time
with the wisteria blooming outside her
kitchen window
and the shadow of the earth
about to fall upon the moon
she looked at the sky
the comet had inhabited
saw four geese fly east
toward devil mountain

heard the telephone ringing
the man in her house running
up circular stairs
calling her name

and suddenly remembered
the lips of the one who had sworn her
to silence
in dark waters
                            whispering—
                                                    wait for me—
                                                    one morning when the children are gone
                                                    I’ll call—

                                                    put on your brown sandals
                                                    wrap yourself up
                                                    in your tree of life shawl
                                                    come walk with me
                                                                                  to devil mountain

                                                                                                      singing the song
                                                                                                      we were singing
                                                                                                      before

                                                                                                           you
                                                                                                           were born

P.S. My chapbook, The Little House on Stilts Remembers, and Lucy’s Chapbook, Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems will be published in the spring of 2015. We’ll let you know when they come out.

To Be Continued . . .

News From the Muse: The Serpent Muse

Patricia Damery and I are friends and colleagues who have known each other for over twenty years, and have read and supported one another‘s writings. I read her book Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation in manuscript, and connected Patricia with my publisher, Mel Mathews at my own book launching party for The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way. I knew they’d love each other, both being wild shamanic types, grounded in the life of farming. Patricia had read The Sister in manuscript and kept urging me on for years while I was looking for the right publisher.

Patricia Damery

When Patricia and I were in Los Angeles in April, celebrating the launching of Marked by Fire, which Patricia and I co-edited, Nancy Mozur, who runs the Los Angeles C.G. Jung Institute’s wonderful bookstore, handed me a copy of the latest Psychological Perspectives. Synchronistically, as these things seem to happen, the review I  had written of Farming Soul was in that issue: Volume 55, Issue 1.

So let's be clear here—I am no dispassionate critic with an objective eye. I am a friend, a fan, a believer in Patricia’s courageous process, an admirer of her life and writing, and most recently, her co-editor. We both write in the genre we think of as Jungian memoir, personal stories that illuminate the inner life.

Here are some sections from the just published review:

Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation by Patricia Damery
(Fisher King Press,) 2010.

Individuation is not for sissies. If the Great Serpent of your unfolding demands you develop aspects of yourself that are frowned upon by the spirit of the times, disapproved of by your analyst, and considered weird by most everyone you know, you’ll need to cultivate your own truth. If, on the way to becoming a Jungian analyst, the Golden Snake of your flowering requires you to study shamanism, work with a psychic, commune with invisible Presences, wander off the beaten Jungian path to explore the path of Rudolf Steiner—a cousin of Jung’s in the lineage of Goethe—you may find yourself in various kinds of trouble. If you’re a farmer’s daughter who left the farm as a young woman but the Jeweled Snake of your essential nature transports you back to farming, and you find yourself growing lavender and grapes on a ranch with your second husband, following the magical practices of bio-dynamic farming—an alchemical process developed by Steiner—you’ll need strong muscles of body and of spirit…. If, on top of all of this, your Snake insists you are a writer, and that you must tell your story, you’ll likely learn how lonely it can be to follow your own path.

Farming Soul is the stirring story of a remarkable woman. Patricia Damery has developed all the aspects of herself required by her Snake. Clearly conceived, yet intricately layered, this memoir is a weaving of narrative strands that tell stories in time. They are weft to the timeless warp of the farming cycle, described in short chapters, mostly named for the months of the year. Those sections are more teachings than stories. We learn the mysterious practices of shamanic farming, the stirring of sun soaked waters with a tincture, for example, of valerian, to bring warmth to the grapes when it’s cold in early March. This requires stirring first clockwise then in reverse direction, which “throws the water into chaos, that state that Rudolf Steiner says is most receptive to the divine."

The biodynamic farmer listens to the land, sings to the vines. She does not impose her will upon it, as do industrial farmers. Like a Jungian analyst, she waits for what’s underground to reveal itself. Damery returns us to the roots of Jungian psychology, to Jung’s rhizome—the unseen “true life.” She takes us back to the alchemists, who stirred tinctures of flower essences, and invited the divine. She takes us back to Goethe, who was an alchemist. His great drama, Faust, influenced Jung’s psychology and his scientific studies of plant life influenced Steiner’s ideas about farming.…


A compelling strand of Damery’s story is about the group that followed the late Don Sandner into the Southwest to study shamanism. Sandner was a revered elder of our tribe. He had studied the Navajo and worked in the shamanic tradition. He did drumming rituals for candidates in the early years of my candidacy.…Those trips to the Southwest stirred Damery’s psyche, opened her up to the divine. The Great Serpent showed up during the drumming, in visions, in dreams and in active imagination. It shape-shifted into a Golden Snake, a Jeweled Snake, the Kundalini Snake uncoiling its sacred energies, which, in Damery’s case, erupted with such intensity that she set off car alarms.

Learning to contain and channel this energy required yet another initiatory path for Damery. She did not find her temenos for this work in her Jungian tribe. She had to go off and study with a wise psychic, Norma T, who helped validate Damery’s experience of the “spirit world."

Farming Soul is, as the subtitle indicates, a “tale of initiation,” actually several initiations. As I reflect on the long walkabout Damery had to make, the hermetic practices her Golden Snake required before she could return to her Jungian path and be certified as an analyst, I remember what Joe Henderson told me about initiation. Joe was a founder of the San Francisco Jung Institute and my control analyst. He explained that the initiate needs to leave the tribe, go off and have her personal vision, meet her totem, learn what her myth is before she can return to the tribe, bringing the gifts of her own nature.

Some years ago I was in charge of providing food for a Sunday afternoon event at the San Francisco Institute. Patricia Damery, now an analyst, was going to speak about the Horned Goat. Our community is housed in a gracious old home in an elegant part of town. Suddenly, entering the French doors from the garden, I saw three goats sauntering in. Goats in the Institute? My first thought was, “Oh my God, the food!” But I could see that each goat was firmly attached to a lead and a handler. My second thought was, “How perfect! This hallowed place is in sore need of goatsmell, goatsong, goat energy. And here is our own Patricia Damery, bringing in the vitality of the natural world, the ‘lumen naturae.’ What a blessing to us all.”

Farming Soul is a blessing for Jungians, a reminder of our roots in the Reality of the Psyche, and a challenge to expand our consciousness. Damery helps us remember Psyche as one aspect of the long story Mother Nature has been weaving, of plants and animals, humans and gods—like the Great Serpent who appeared to Damery during a drumming and informed her she needed to develop a practice. She has, and she is showing us the way.

The Muse of the Jungian Way

Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way

(Available April 2012)

The Muse of the Jungian Way

What possesses people to leave collective consciousness—the comfort and security of the mainstream—and follow an arcane path in which they cultivate their dreams and visions, follow synchronicities, talk to inner figures, use ancient divining tools such as the I Ching, study myth and fairy tales, wrestle with their shadows and generally wander far away from the familiar worlds of family and friends?

There are as many stories of how this happens, as there are Jungians. In Marked by Fire you can read 13 soulful and gripping versions of the story. Here is a part of my version, which I didn’t have space to tell in Marked by Fire.

My story begins many years ago when my children were little. I was a lost young woman, severed from my deep Self. I had a frightening dream:

My baby daughter’s head was severed from her body. My mother’s voice said: “You’ll never get her together again.”

The dream spooked me. I thought something bad was about to happen to my child.

In a synchronistic event that changed my life my girl friend’s mother—who was seeing a Jungian in therapy—invited her daughter and me to a Jungian Conference called The Forgotten Feminine. I knew nothing of Jung and had no idea what the conference title meant, except that it tugged at me. I wanted to go.

The Handless Maiden (by Lucy Campbell)

At the conference I heard mature, wise, potent women—Jungian analysts—unlike any women I knew in my life—describe their work with their patients. This was the late 1960s. They told stories of women who were lost in their lives, who had forgotten their creative gifts, forgotten their souls, who had given themselves away to their men and their children, buried their deep natures and their wildness, severed their heads from their bodies. I learned that in the sanctuary of their Jungian analyses they found their souls, reclaimed their writing or painting or dancing, connected their heads and their bodies, found their deep selves. It was suddenly clear to me that my frightening dream was not about my daughter, it was about me. I was in trouble. I turned to my friend’s mother and asked her about that Jungian she was seeing.

That is how I tumbled into a Jungian analysis. It saved my life. I wrote a poem about it:

letter to a first analyst

I caught the dream
and rose dreaming
H.D.

you sat with me in the early years when it was all
coming apart my too young marriage that business of the donkey
in the basement the father whose eyes entered
me took what they would

you sat with me and I opened like a window
in a suffocating room whose drapes have been drawn for too long
now blinds snapped up smell of hot tomatoes
strawberries in the sun

i had been living in my body
as though it were an unmade bed for years the smell of decomposing
dreams under the bedside table crumpled kleenex bad blood spotting
the sheets the children were so little they wandered in
wanting their breakfast and me just waking from a dream of spitting out my teeth on the road or dream of using a contact lens for contraception it splintered
inside me what spirit led me to you after the terrible dream—my daughter’s head was severed from her body— my mother’s voice said: “you’ll never get her together again”

i write to tell you that i danced at that daughter’s wedding on a hillside in berkeley
not far from your house she was beautiful and i was glad
for all the years of catching the morning dream the hours you sat
with me through sandstone storms and backdoor me even death’s most yellow incarnation made a pass at my bed but you
who opened windows closed that door i remember

once you told me the story of a prince and a hairy wild man fresh out of the forest
they wrestled for a long time fought until each knew
the other’s body and mind until they were inseparable friends

(published in crimes of the dreamer)

Gilgamesh and Enkidu

Years later one of the women who stood on the stage of that conference on The Forgotten Feminine—Elizabeth Osterman—would greet me when I was a new candidate at the Jung Institute. She’d been watching me, she said. “You are a poet. You must follow your nature.” Though she was never my analyst or consultant, she was a powerful figure for me; I felt her support for my deep nature. When she died I wrote a poem called “Dirge” in which I looped back to my first experience of her. Here is that section of the poem:

You stood
on a university platform
in Wheeler Auditorium
where I had heard
many famous professors
but no one had ever told me

that a woman
writing down her dreams
can spiral inward
to her dark center
and come back out with flaming colors
and her own wild tongue!

(published in red clay is talking)

My story is not unusual in the Jungian world. In Marked by Fire, the collection of memoirs edited by Patricia Damery and me, there are many such stories. Sometimes it is a dream that opens up a person’s psyche, sometimes a longing, a difficult conflict, a terrible event like the death of a mother or a serious illness. The Jungian way involves noticing the small voice within you—your muse, your soul—that speaks from another realm; it requires attention to the world of dreams and synchronicities, an openness to the irrational and the awesome, an ability to see life’s pain and suffering as a meaningful aspect of one’s path.

These personal stories by Jungian analysts are about the direct experience of the unconscious—the fiery process of becoming ourselves. They are food for the soul.

Marked by Fire, available from Fisher King Press.