The Muse of Deep River

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow

by the Deep River Poets

Esse in anima (Live in the soul)

—C.G. Jung

Cover Art by Kent Butzine

The Muse of Deep River

Our way is the way of the poet, who knows that poems have lives of their own. Poems need us, their poets, to listen to them, see them, feel them, wrestle with them until their hidden natures emerge. In return they reflect us, revise us, refine us, play us like musical instruments; they shape shift our stories and light up dim corners of our souls. The craft of making a poem becomes a craft—a vessel—for knowing ourselves and our world.

from the Introduction

Those of us who are called to write poems often wrestle, especially in terrible times, with the question: What can poetry do? Poetry is a lightweight feather dipped in ink; it cannot put out a wildfire, stop a pandemic, stop police brutality or voter suppression, prevent an authoritarian coup or heal a furious fragmentation of the social contract. But it can, sometimes, shift consciousness, open doors and windows to a wider vision, a deeper wisdom expressed in compelling images which leap out of imagination or come as dream figures to initiate us into the realm of The Mysteries. The question of what poetry can do became a catalyst for change in the Deep River Poetry Circle—a workshop that meets monthly at the Jung Institute of San Francisco—when the 2016 election shocked us out of our comfortable faith in American democracy.

"Red Fishes" by Marianna Ochyra

Deep River has been meeting for over fifteen years. It emerged out of a mountain spring in my soul, when my Muse, better known as The Sister from Below, informed me that writing poetry was my spiritual practice. We write under the influence of great poets and have explored poetries from many cultures all over the world and all over America. But when the Spirit of Our Times took such a frightening turn in 2016 we realized we needed each other and poetry for support and it was essential that we ‘get political.’ We could no longer indulge the luxury of exploring for the sake of broadening cultural horizons. Poetry doesn’t boast a big bully pulpit in America. It speaks from the margins, from the depths of the river, from night terrors, about the state of our world. Making a poem is wrestling with the angel: it is shaping a vessel to hold what we fear. We understood that we need our poetry to address the attacks on our democracy by callous, greedy politicians, out for their own aggrandizement and immune to the suffering of ordinary people in a terrible pandemic. We needed language to tell the dreadful truth revealed by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many other Black and brown people at the hands of police, and by the growing consciousness of systemic and structural racism. We needed images to express the suffering caused by extreme weather events and wildfires in our own landscapes, the destruction of habitat and the decimation of species all over our earth.

So we studied the poetry of witness and of engagement, wrote under the influence of poets whose work flows between the political and the spiritual—James Baldwin, Carolyn Forché, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Judy Grahn, W.S. Merwin, Ada Limón. Our circle became a ritual space, in which great poets guided us into our own poetic expression. They showed us the ways of their soul and gave us permission to try new modes of writing. They helped create that space in which the conscious and the unconscious meet—Winnicott calls it “potential space;” Jung calls it “the transcendent function.” Deep River became a sacred river we wash ourselves in, as the Hindus do in Ganga Ma—Mother Ganges—to cleanse our souls and heal our broken hearts.

“Women Bathing” by Lionel Walden

When Covid hit we retreated to our individual homes, like cloistered contemplatives in the Dark Ages. Deep River met on Zoom. Surprisingly, the ritual of our meetings seemed to deepen, despite its virtual nature. We found ourselves writing “pandemic poems.” Someone suggested we make a collection of them. Someone else said, let’s make it broader, more inclusive of our writings. We wanted to speak to our Jungian community about what we were learning—that in bad times, the inner work of poetry is a way to tend the soul, to bring together the realms of spirit and the world. It is healing for the poet, healing for the reader; a practice which reminds us that there is a greater reality in which soul and polis, soul and nature, soul and word, mingle.

And so it was that we began gathering this harvest of our recent years together, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow. We give it as a gift to the Jung Institute of San Francisco in celebration of its passage from a beloved old home to a transformative new home, and as an expression of deep gratitude to Extended Education, which has given Deep River support, visibility and a place to gather for so many years. We offer it as a manifestation of the Jungian belief in the creative arts as a way of healing psyche and culture. We offer it as a gift to you, dear reader. May it help you remember ‘what happened.’ May it help you find your way through The Valley of the Shadow and The Realm of the Dead, to The Tree of Life, The Living Symbol and The Way of the Soul.

A dream showed me a deeper meaning for this gift of Soul Making: In the dark, by the sea, there is a “Jungian Grave—” a white, glowing monument commemorating our dead. It is the only bright spot in this moonless, starless scene, providing a bit of light by which we see a gathering of living Jungians, sitting on logs on the beach. There is feeling of excitement and of awe. We are doing a ritual to honor our ancestors.

“Mid-Summer Night’s Dream” by William Blake

Soul Making follows the mythopoetic path of the soul’s progress from the realms of shadow and death to rebirth into embodied life through the magic of the symbolic process and the awakening of the Self. When I was editing this book I followed an intuitive structure, dividing the anthology into five sections separated by quotes from Jung’s Red Book. These epigraphs set the themes of the sections. But until the dream, I was in the dark about the collective ritual significance of the book’s arrangement as our community moves from our beautiful old home in the Presidio to a very different beautiful new home in the Mission. We are in the dark about how it will be. For many of us this move signifies an interest in engaging with our new neighborhood, as part of a growing feeling that our psychology needs to be more attuned to the outer world, though we are in the dark about how this might manifest. However, we carry a structure within us that I associate with the work of Joe Henderson—one of our founding analysts—an understanding of the initiatory path in which “to cross a threshold is to unite oneself with a new world” (The Wisdom of the Serpent p. 48)

What follows is a sketch of Soul Making, illuminated by quotes from some of the poems. Forgive me, dear reader and dear contributing poets, if I offer slight fragments from the work. Truth be told, we’re hoping you’ll buy the book, enjoy the poems, and the collection, whole.

* * * * *

Godville Game

The Valley of the Shadow

Section I

And so we had to taste hell… 

– C.G. Jung

Anita Cadena Sánchez opens our anthology with a short essay, “Why Poetry?” (p. 5) in which she writes that the 2016 election “revealed this country’s steady descent into the valley of its historically unrecognized shadow” and hopes her poems will “weave a medicine basket” (p. 5). Now there’s something poetry can do. Her first poem, “Will This Ever End,” (pp. 6–7) does it elegantly, naming our trauma, which is the beginning of healing. Here are the opening and ending lines. 

Without notice the White House grows whiter still
invisible swastikas slide off the frozen walls…

The president conflates
Black Lives Matter with hate

So I draw in breath to settle and center
Yes, I can breathe but I witness who can’t

Another black man dies
again                   and again                   and again


Kent Butzine’s poem, “In the Soup” (p. 8), places us in the messy, befuddled, ‘fine kettle of fish’ we know all too well from our recent past:

I am walking through soup
a thick heavy soup that slows
me down    makes it hard to see…

Don’t know if the soup is hot
or my soul is burning…

In a few short lines the poem takes us to the possibility of new life:

Don’t know if I’m ready to die
Or to live at last in aliveness

He brings together the opposites of death and life as they so often appear at the crossroads of our journeys.

* * * * *

Dante and Virgil in Hell by Crescenzio Onofri

The Realm of the Dead

Section II

Take pains to waken the dead… 

–C.G. Jung

In my short essay, opening this section, I argue that “we owe the dead our poems, and our awe.” This follows Jung’s idea that the dead need our attention so we can help them heal. Raluca Ioanid takes on this task for the living as well as the dead in her “Bucharest 1958 Sestina (p 46).” She gives us a powerful image of intergenerational trauma:

History churns inside the family of ghosts
we cannot forget,
unmoored by our
ancestral loss
unravelling backwards from a nightmare–dream
we search eternally for Anita and Paul, our disappeared parents…


In “Funeral Cot” Daniela Kantorová invites us into a surreal and frightening scene:

I’m rocking a funeral cot
The fire is burning…
I’m singing a lullaby
to the rhythm of bones
cracking in the fire
There is a baby in the funeral cot

What a grim image for our times, for the next generation, for the fate of humans, species and the earth. And yet, Kantorová, through the magic of her poem, finds a way out. The poem’s speaker invites the reader, or perhaps it is the Divine, to “Breath me/Breathe my dust” which would seem to breathe life and hope back into her and the poem.

* * * * *

"Tree of Zhiva" by Marianna Ochyra

The Tree of Life

Section III

I became a greening tree… 

–C.G. Jung

In her opening essay to this section Clare Marcus compares two Saturdays, one at an academic, highly rational workshop, the other, Deep River, where “the psyche was allowed its freedom to soar, explore, pour out its fantasies into the warm receptive ears of fellow poets (p. 59).”

In the drought ridden Sierra foothills Sheila deShields’ poem paints the miracle of an unexpected storm and how it transforms the lives of the “Nine crows in my backyard (pp. 66-67)” who “sway high on the row of towering trees” until the skies clear and they descend to enjoy:

The bounty
worms rise
above the soaked sable soil
while the crows
eat
and eat.


Earth is alive again, wet, full of worms, and the creatures feast on the pleasure of plenty.

* * * * *

“World Creation Music” by Marianna Ochyra

The Living Symbol

Section IV

The Symbol is the word…that rises out of the depths of the self… 

– C.G. Jung

In her essay, “A Way to Love” (p. 77), which opens this section, Connie Hills remarks that it is often an encounter which moves her deeply that sparks a poem’s beginning. She writes: “Poetry is a way back to love.” In her poem, “God of Garbage, (pp. 78-9)” a “tall muscular Jamaican” garbage man fills the poem with life and joy. His magic:


Remover of filth, ferment
Everything that is dying…

His smile, like heliotrope
in warm bloom…
I could have loved him.


Through this beautifully drawn character, we experience again, how death is transfigured by the living symbol of the man’s smile.

In my poem, “Ghazal of the Boy in My Dream,” the encounter is with a dream figure, a black boy, symbolic of the magic of poetry and dream:

After gumbo and jazz after rain on my head you befell me in a dream
Strange boy your spiraling hands your eyes ablaze cast a spell in my dream…

How long have you lived in my heart child    alphabet balm    for sorrow and ache?
You open the door to The Mysteries compel me to enter by way of the dream

The boy shows up in the context of New Orleans, a decade after Katrina. He turns out to be a psychopomp, who initiates the speaker into the mysteries—the magic of language. There are many dream poems in this collection, appropriate to our Jungian context. In “Healing the Wound” (pp. 89-90), Clare Marcus remembers a dream in which a black bird with white beak comes to heal the wound “brought by the surgeon’s knife”:

It is a coot
exploring the unconscious
to retrieve sustenance for life
diving the waters
of the Nile
algae and mollusks morphing
to messages of resurrection

What a succinct description of how dreams feed and nurture the damaged psyche and body with the riches of the collective unconscious.

* * * * *

"Pilgrimage to Shiva" by Janaka Stagnaro

The Way of the Soul

Section 5

I am weary my soul, my wandering has lasted too long… 

 –C.G. Jung

In his essay introducing this section, “How Poems Come and What They Bring” (pp. 97-99), Kent Butzine writes of the Muse, that she is “both a part of oneself and a part of the natural world, a part that is ‘wild’ and cannot be controlled.” He gives us a wonderful quote from Galway Kinnell: “There is no work on the poem that is not work on the poet.”

Virginia Chen’s poem, “Old Song” (p. 102), is a lyrical evocation of the experience of Self. The poem’s first line and refrain—borrowed from a poem by W.S. Merwin—shows the power of poetic influence on our work.

When I was me I remembered
The songs of the stars
Before I was born…

When I was me I remembered
I once was me

It is the work of poetry, as well as the work of Jungian analysis, to find our way back to the one we’ve forgotten we are. And as my dream shows—in the dark by the sea in a gathering of Jungians doing a ritual for our ancestors—we are not just individuals, we are a group with a lineage, finding our way back to our ancestral roots. And though the work of writing poetry is mostly solitary, a writing circle in which we read poets who help shape our work and become our common poetic lineage, a circle in which we share our poems and get feedback on them, can become a vessel for collective creativity even, or maybe especially, in dark times. Can an anthology created by such a group, become a crucible which can carry the spirit and soul of Deep River’s years in the Gough Street Institute library, to our new home in the Mission?

"Ancestors" by Marietjie Henning

The Muse of Losing Mother

Mother in the surf with two of her sisters. She is in the middle

I lost my mother, Gretel Lowinsky, on January 11th 2018. She was 97 years old. Actually, I’ve been losing her for many years, to Alzheimer’s Disease, in an agonizing decline, which I have rendered into a series of poems. I visited her in her Chicago retirement home, and later in my brother and sister–in–law’s home in Indianapolis. They, bless them, provided her with sanctuary in her last years. Mother would sit in the living room, watching the parade of life around her, visited by the family dogs, by her grandchildren and their friends, tended by loving caregivers and by her son and daughter–in–law when they came back from their long days at work. She would forget where the bathroom was. She would tell me, often, that she didn’t know who she was, or where. The spacious home in Indianapolis would morph into her childhood home.

Mother in Indianapolis in 2012 with me,
her grandchildren Ari and Shoshana, and the dogs

My mother was a German Jew who fled Europe as a young woman with her family and found sanctuary in America. She was sturdy, hard working, good hearted, emotionally intelligent, and much beloved by those who knew her. She lived in Chicago for much of her life. She loved young children. For almost twenty years she worked for the Chicago Childcare Society, supporting bonding between preschoolers and their young, mostly African American mothers, teaching them about child development. She did home visits and, because she was so unassuming, humorous and kind, I imagine her visits were a welcome break for the families. She was also a fine violinist and violist. She took great pride in bringing “The Messiah” to black churches all over Chicago.

Mother with her grandson Daniel

Mother playing the viola

Elegy is a powerful muse, and one that helped me work with the excruciating experiences of losing mother, bit by bit. In the end, there was nothing left of her radiant spirit, her contagious laughter, her love of life. She was a huddled mass in a wheelchair. Where was my mother? Her mind was long gone, but her body plodded on. I prayed she would let go, and finally, she did.

Mother woke me in the wee hours of Jan. 11th, ripping her roots out of my heart. I can still feel the pain of that rip. And then she transformed herself into a cascade of memories, as though her spirit, freed of the tangled knots in her brain, took flight over her long, complex life and poured the riches of her being into my soul.

One memory is pivotal. Twenty years ago, Dan and I were in Florence, at an International Jungian conference. Dan had found a charming apartment for us to rent, overlooking the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio. Mother came to stay with us there. In those years she travelled the world with enthusiasm and energy.

Our family had lived in Florence when I was a child of five. My father had a Guggenheim fellowship to do musicological research in the Bibliotheca. It was 1948, just after the war. Italy, like much of Europe, was devastated and impoverished. I remember that our apartment was always cold. I would sit on my hands to keep them warm. I remember eating dried bananas, because there was no fresh fruit. Mother had not been back in Florence for fifty years. This was a very different Florence, full of fresh fruits and vegetables, radiant with artwork and sacred spaces. Mother was delighted, full of stories. She showed us where the family had lived on the outskirts of the city. She spoke of Lydia, a friend or a nanny, who had grown attached to me and I to her. Lydia took me to church and had me baptized, because she didn’t want me to go to hell. When I proudly told my father about this, he hit the ceiling. But I have always felt deeply at home in Italian churches, especially in the Duomo of Florence.

Simon, Benjamin and Naomi in Florence, 1948

We traced the long walk she took to the hospital, alone, in labor with her third child. My father was too busy with his Medici Codex to accompany her. My brother Ben was born there. Mother told us she had slept on straw with the Romany women. She told us she feared for her newborn’s life. He had a hernia that needed repair. I wrote a poem about this:

Reverie in View of the Ponte Vecchio

Lavender chiffon lifts off my shoulders
light wind from the Arno cools
hot flashes

Mother in the front room
came in yesterday by train from Switzerland
summer rain

Such comfort in familiar voices
Mother and Dan discussing pregnancies
Cousins soon to be born
How beautiful the Jungfrau

Mother’s voice meanders down
a labyrinth—fifty years
since she was last here—
I was a child   She pregnant
with her third

It was just after   the war
the Germans had bombed all
the bridges   except
the Ponte Vecchio     Hitler was
fond of it

Mother walked on stones in labor
long way to the Ospedale
Santa Maria di Nuova–Careggi
slept in the straw with the Romany women
separated from her baby
by a sudden flock of white coats
his emergency surgery    She remembers
They kept him in a room with sick twins
First they turned green    then gray   then died
I thought my baby   was next

What is the kernel of this moment?
I want to crack it open    eat it
make it a part of my body forever

My brother   in his brick row house
in Toronto      surrounded
by history books    The old bridge
                                    dreaming of itself
                                    in green waters

Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy

I have another memory of my mother in Florence. We were in a jewelry store. Everything was aglow. She bought me an amethyst necklace. I bought her amethyst earrings. My mother seldom indulged in such “girlie” pleasures. Finery was not her thing. “Too fancy” she would say. I treasure that necklace still. Earlier in the day we stood before the Lippi Madonna in Santo Spirito. Mother kept gazing at the beautiful young mother with the inward eyes, her haloed son leaning out of her lap to play with his cousin. She kept putting more money into the light machine.

At dinner in a rare confessional moment, she spoke of approaching her eightieth year. “I am mostly in harmony with myself,” she told us. “Not always. That would be boring.” I remember how beautiful she looked in her many colored Indonesian shawl, her amethysts glowing in the candlelight. Later we went to hear a concert of Gregorian chant. Our shadows loomed large on the wall of what had once been a church, was now a military recruiting center. I hold onto that jewel of a memory. She would have a few more good years, and then the terrible decline. Here are three poems inspired by the muse of losing mother.

Posthumous portrait of JFK

Root Canal

1. Security Line

We are pilgrims on our way to see Mother   among travelers
in flip flops    with bluetooths     carrying babies      We walk
in our radiant bodies    One of us is about to crack

a tooth     Only the babies can see    old light
from past lives     Only the babies can hear
the song lines     We are pilgrims passing through

the metal detector     We remove our shoes     remove
our coats and shawls     Some of us will be hand wanded
silver bracelets    seven quarters     three dimes provoke

the security gods     The Kennedy who just died
is speaking thirty years ago on TV     His assassinated
brothers still bleed into our lives

2. Retirement Living

In Mother’s eighty-eighth year she got scammed     Sweet talkers
from the islands poured delirium into her ears      drained her purse
A Great Lake swimmer lost face      A late Beethoven violin

bowed to the gods of security      We’ve come
to see her new place among the formerly eminent
Hyde Park intellectuals      We walk the round of her days      She

gets lost      forgets her song lines      wants to sort through
scores of Mozart Bartok Bach.   What goes where?    The Kennedy who died
is talking on TV     It’s his funeral     His widow pushes back her dark

hair     She’s known him on her belly     in her thighs     She knows
his secret smell     When is it my tooth cracks?
When does that big bully nerve take over?

3. Roots

Oma’s paintings dominate this place     She painted
herself painting all her ages      painted herself losing
her grip     She looked straight into her own mirrored eyes

and painted the edge of her nerve     We make a pilgrimage
to see her painting of German snow on roofs in 1931
The naked larches scrape the sky     Her sons are dead

Her sons are dead     Her sons are dead     Trees
save her     Trees leave     Trees bud     Trees flower
Trees know her secret smell     They cleanse her dreams

Trees grow by rivers     by canals    by lakes     They reflect
on themselves in oils     in watercolors     They burn orange
in the deep wood     They burn gold under water     Mother loses track

of the song lines of her Mother     Her brothers bleed
into brothers not yet born     Mother says we live
too far away     that we’ve been swallowed by the State of California

4. Going Home

I am losing my own grip     My finger prints fade     I forget
your name     All I know is the scream of a nerve     I’ve no idea
how the widow got into Mother’s TV     no idea

how an endodontist removes a dying nerve     no idea
how a plane leaves this earth     no idea
how I’ll live in the State of California
                                                               while Mother loses track of herself
         

                                                               (first published in Sierra Nevada Review)

When Trees Go Wild -painting by Emma Hoffman

Mother Approaches the Border

Mother is leaving us
slow step by slow
                          lingering step

She’s ascending the winter trees
                          without bud
                          without leaf

She looks back
                          a runaway child
                          without overcoat

Time is a broken necklace
She’s given up gathering
                          spilt beads

Yesterday
is a clanging
in the basement pipes

Tomorrow chugs down the track
blowing its horn      Where
                        are her sisters?

Who has the passports?
Must she cross
                         the border alone?

The lake’s in a bad
                         weather mood
Snowflakes lick her cheeks

Mother laughs at the ducks
how they dive into what
                         we can’t see

She has nowhere to go
                         but up
tending the business of sky

She has nowhere to go
                          but down
having settled
the questions
                          of dust
                          of ashes

She doesn’t belong to us anymore
She belongs to the naked trees
to the lake and its bad weather mood

to the ducks diving into what
                              we can’t see

                              (first published in Blue Lake Review)

Brown on Brown, painting by Emma Hoffman

Mother      Between Now and the Dark

Those Sisters with Scissors poke holes in you
Cut out tomorrow     Dismember yesterday
Entangle your yarn ‘til you don’t know who
                                          you are or where

You lose the bathroom or it loses you
as if you hadn’t just been there
I show you down my brother’s
                                          long corridor

past your mother’s final
self portrait     You wheel
your walker back to me   your daughter
                                          from California

            I see me on the potty chair
            you perched on the bathtub chanting
                                             “sass  sass  sass   spss”

You sit at table     Refuse your juice     Refuse
your tuna salad     I hear your voice in my childhood
“Eat a little drink a little”     “My voice?”  you marvel
                                       A sudden shift of light

Your gaze meets mine
“I wonder what you’ll write about me now?”
For this moment you know me    even here in Indiana

till the Shadow Sisters steal
your face from me     O I regret
the half a continent between us     I regret

I must leave you again     You point
out the window into late autumn
Red leaves flame on the backyard maple
                                        “Look how beautiful”

As if you hadn’t said that minutes ago
A sudden shift of light   and I too
can see the tree     As if

the Mother Daughter circle   still spins
As if those Scissor Sisters   aren’t forever
                                                               lurking

                                                               (first published in Stickman Review)

The Moirrae, from the Aeneid, Part I by Virgil

The Muse of Inwardness

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

The Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung: Getting the Word from Within

by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

We’ve volunteered, ecstatically volunteered, to place these illuminated rectangles between ourselves and the world. How eagerly and expensively we buckled, surrendered the immediacy of experience, the tactile facts of our being, to a battery–operated autocrat. I ponder the spiritual helplessness, the puncture at the hub of us, that facilitated such a happy vassalage…The way…literary art responds is not by attempting to compete with it…Literary art responds by remaining steadfastly itself…, by honoring its responsibility to inwardness…—William Giraldi in Poets and Writers  Sept/Oct. 2016

The Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung, a book of essays written in tribute to the depths and the riches of Jungian Psychology—how it helps us get the “word from within”— enters the world at a time when most of us get the word from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, when the suck of all those e–mails demands our response before we write down that dream or take time to listen for the still small voice of the soul. As William Giraldi says, we are in thrall to our “illuminated rectangles.” I was moved to read his passionate defense of inwardness. I think it is not only literary art that needs to remain “steadfastly itself,” but Jungian Psychology, which does the subversive work of countering the dominant culture, honoring the “word from within” and the practice of tracking the dream. As Jung tells it in The Red Book, being a slave to “the spirit of the times” can annihilate the soul. A descent to the “the spirit of the depths” can release the spiral serpent of wisdom and creativity.

A powerful example of creativity in the service of inwardness can be seen in the paintings of Jane Zich. Her magical painting “Visionary 3” graces the cover of The Rabbi, and she tells me, just won First Place in an exhibit titled “Introspection” put on by the Marin Society of Artists. Apparently there are others who value such soul work.

The essays in The Rabbi seek to create a sanctuary for the soul, to demonstrate the ways in which cultivation of one's inner life creates sacred space. Admitting that this is not an easy practice in our hectic, fearful times, I seek to show how the word from within orients—whether it comes as gift or disturbance, guest or ghost, riddle or revelation. It may force a confrontation with one’s worst fears. It may visit in nightmare images, such as the enormous spider with hairy legs and eight baleful eyes that appeared in a dream, come to warn, it would seem, of the perils facing human nature and Mother Nature.

It is essential, especially in difficult times, to make space for what the Kabbalah calls “the beyond that lies within—” the still small voice of the Self, the long view of the wisdom traditions. In this collection of poetic, visionary essays, I tell stories of the Lady Tree who showed up when I was six, and has wandered in and out of my life, revealing her Goddess nature. Active imagination enables me to work out unfinished business with ancestors including my father and Jung. Dreams introduce me to my spirit guides, and to a dancing rabbi who insists I study Kabbalah. And that scary spider turns out to be Grandmother Spider, a creator goddess who has the power, if we recognize Her, to help us reweave our relationship with earth.

Here’s a foretaste of the book:

Introduction

Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you 
without your understanding their language.[1]

A long time ago, when I was a candidate at the San Francisco Jung Institute, I dreamt a large lion prowled the Jung Institute Library. He told me he loved me. He told me he would eat me. That’s a good summary of my story. For I have, indeed, been devoured by the fierce, wild energy of the living psyche as Jung understood it. Leo is my sun sign and my rising sign, astrologically. That lion is part of my nature.

It sounds painful to be eaten by a lion, to be torn apart by great teeth, to do time inside the dark gut of a predator. But what better description for how it feels when life forces you to surrender your conscious intent, throws you into the chaos of not knowing who you are or where you are going? Jungians—borrowing from alchemy—call this “the nigredo,”—the dark night of the soul. It happens in most people’s lives and in most long Jungian analyses. It has happened, many times over, in mine.

I have learned, as in the famous story Martin Buber tells about himself, that I didn’t have to account to God or my analyst for why I wasn’t Moses, or for that matter, Jung. I had to account for why I wasn’t Naomi. On the way to becoming myself, I came to see that though the library was my true habitat, I wasn’t a big idea person, a great thinker and theorist. It was my calling as a writer and as an analyst to bring ideas into the living flesh of personal experience in a poetic way.

It’s not enough to figure out your calling, your true nature. You have to know what time it is in your life. I was certified as a Jungian Analyst in my 50th year. An intense period of study and psychological work—of being digested by the lion of my own nature—had come to fruition. It was time to reclaim my writing life, which had been put aside while raising my family, developing a practice, and becoming a Jungian Analyst. So proclaimed my Muse, The Sister from Below.

Now, in my 70s, I am informed by the chorus of inner figures who bring me word from within, that it’s another kind of time in my life. Time to lie down with the lion and reflect on the journey; time to express my gratitude for the gifts of the Jungian Way—access to dreams and inner figures, access to the source of the word from within—my own wild and fierce creative spirit. It is harvest time—time to gather the fruits of my work and offer them as soul food to my community.

To that end, I have organized nine of my uncollected essays in this volume. As I’ve worked with these pieces—written over a period of fifteen years—I’ve been amused to see how the living symbols in my psyche have engaged and possessed me over the years. The Rabbi shows up early and shifts forms dramatically. So do the Goddess, the Lady Tree, and Jung. Words are magic, and getting the word from within is a spiritual practice, as are wild leaps into poetry.

Most of these essays were first published in Psychological Perspectives and the Jung Journal. One is a chapter in a book I co–edited with Patricia Damery, Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. These are stories of my Jungian way, as an analysand, as an “apprentice to the alchemist”—Jung’s term for the process of terminating an analysis—as a dreamer, a tree and goddess worshipper, a conflicted Jew, a conflicted Jungian, a mystic and a poet. I offer them to you, dear reader, in the hope they will support your own practice of getting the word from within.

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[1] C.G. Jung, The Red Book, p. 233.