Tuesday, May 15, 2012

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 hereI 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.



Monday, April 23, 2012

News from the Muse: The Muse of Los Angeles


Gratitude
There are moments, if one is lucky, when the whole circuitous, confusing, maze of a life’s meander reveals its essential shape—Indra’s net is illuminated—everything is connected.  I had such a moment on a recent Sunday in April, at the beautiful book launching for Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, sponsored by the Los Angeles Jung Institute.  My co-editor Patricia Damery and I were overwhelmed and deeply moved by the party Chie Lee, the President of the L.A Institute, had thrown for our group the night before, by the presence of almost all the books’ contributors (two by Skype) at the reading, by the generosity of the L.A, Institute which had gotten us a large hall and put out the word and ordered books and provided food. Patricia has written a beautiful blog about all this.  Check it out.
 

I stood at the podium, introducing each contributor, and felt the strands of kinship libido—the memories and associations that connect me to all those who had written essays out of the vital stuff of their lives—their soul stories, their inner landscapes—the fiery process of becoming themselves. Listening to the voices of these friends and colleagues, my heart resonated with their eloquent expression of so many themes that move me: the power of dreams and synchronicities, the dark confused and painful times out of which new life emerges, the twists and turns of fate, luck, grace and individuation that brought us all here together on this bright Sunday afternoon in the Social Hall of Temple Isaiah across the street from the Jung Institute.
 
[from the left: Chie Lee, Sharon Heath, Jackie Gerson, Naomi Lowinsky,
Karlyn Ward, Patricia Damery, Dennis Slattery, Jean Kirsch,
Robert Romanyshyn, Claire Douglas, Gilda Franz]

The City of Angels
In the midst of all this I found myself musing about my relationship to L.A. There is something about L.A. I had been trying to find words to explain it to my friends from the North. Is it the light? The colors? Is it the beach runners, walkers, skaters, cyclists, the casual but trendy dress—sensual and a touch wild?

Suddenly it hit me. Los Angeles is the City of Angels. A procession of angels have visited me in this town. Almost twenty years ago, back in the day when Northern and Southern California analysts worked together in the initiatory process to become an analyst, I was certified at the L.A. Institute. It is such a vulnerable thing to bring one’s inner life and one’s sacred work with an analysand to the eyes of the members of a committee. To be seen and understood is a blessing—a visitation by an angel. 

 Around that time Charlene Sieg, the managing editor of Psychological Perspectives—a fine journal published by the Los Angeles Institute, which describes itself as a “journal of global consciousness integrating psyche, soul and nature”— called me up and wondered if I wanted to be poetry editor. I thought: this woman whom I don’t know has just handed me my place in the community! I have lived there gratefully ever since, at the intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis. Charlene is one of my angels.

Dan and I have traveled to Los Angeles twice a year for the board meetings of Psychological Perspectives. We had family in the area for much of that time, and enjoyed our time with them. We made deep friendships and began the threads of connection which eventually led to Marked by Fire and to this event. Psychological Perspectives has itself has been an angel to me, nurturing and supporting my writing over many years, connecting me with a community of writers interested in expressing the direct experience of the unconscious. Robin Robertson, the General Editor, a wonderful writer on science, psyche and the arts, whose most recent book on alchemy and chaos theory is called Indra’s Net, mentored me through many years of wandering in the wilderness, seeking a publisher. He always said it would happen. He, too, is an angel. So is Gilda Frantz, co-editor of the journal and contributor of a marvelous essay in Marked by Fire, who has always given me the courage of my own idiosyncratic vision.

On the Nature of Angels
Speaking of idiosyncratic vision, you may wonder about all this talk of angels when I’m blogging on the muse. Are angels muses? Angels, according to someone named Walter Rigg, writing in Harper’s Bazaar in 1962, “are powers which transcend the logic of our existence.” I found this quote in Gustav Davidson’s Dictionary of Angels, an essential reference for anyone into angelology. Yes, indeed, you are walking along the known path of your life and suddenly an angel enters the scene and shifts everything. You’re invited to be Poetry Editor and it changes your life, transcending the old logic of your existence.

My take on angels draws from the Jewish tradition, which, like Islam and Christianity is chock full of angels—perhaps compensatory for all that monotheistic singularity. Just look up angels in the index of Tree of Souls, a marvelous reference on the mythology of Judaism, and you’ll see what I mean. For me, personal angels are powers connected with our souls from before we were born.  They remember who we really are when we have forgotten. They tell us, as Robin Robertson often told me, that it’s not my way to write the conventional Jungian teaching book—I needed to write as a poet.  The Sister from Below is the result of that wise counsel.


In my life angels often take human form. They are ordinary people who connect with something of your eternal nature, which seen, fills you with the light of your own essence. Sometimes they are beings of the imaginal world who show up in vision, dream or active imagination. They have our backs, stand behind us, pointing the way. Sometimes they show up with flaming torches and burn down the world as we know it. Sometimes they see where we’re going years before we do. And yes, sometimes an angel can be a muse.  

The Angel/Muse of Watts Towers 
Such an angel came to me in L.A. years before I’d even thought of being a Jungian—this was the angel and muse of Watts Towers. That angel/muse flew me to L.A. for the first time in my life, and into a larger vision of who I could be. I was a young mother, hemmed in by family demands, shaped by babies and kitchen and laundry. This angel whispered in my ear: “You’ve got to get out of here. Leave the kids with your husband and get away for a weekend. Remember who you are.”  “And go where?” I wondered. “Visit your friends in L.A.” the angel advised. And so it was I found myself in the home of dear friends whom I’d known when we were all in India together, associated with Peace Corps.

I had never been away from husband and kids for an entire weekend. It felt wicked. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. My hip felt empty without my baby girl. I don’t remember how that angel/muse spirited me to Watts Towers but there I was—a memory imprinted in my soul for life—contemplating the sacred space Simon Rodia, a poor immigrant from Italy, had created out of steel rods, cement and junk. I imagined him, wandering around in his life, picking up small pieces of broken glass and crockery, using them to create a mosaic in cement—his Sanctuario. Had he known about the Taj Mahal? I had been to the Taj; those small bits of glowing color creating intricate and glorious designs seemed to me to be part of the same artistic lineage.
 
I remember reflecting that if I could just be like Simon Rodia, picking up small pieces of glittering, broken fragments from my every day wanderings and gathering them into sacred shapes, I would be happy. It would be years before I could dedicate myself to that practice as a poet, years before I would write a poem about that visitation, but the angel/muse of Watts Towers had shown me my path.


how Simon Rodia showed me my craft


before I’d launched a single soul
or heard the cat call in my voice
some sanity insisted that I see
the joy leaps of your towers
                Simon Rodia

in flat exhausted Watts
where no tree grew
                I  
                twenty-six
                afraid of my life
                looked up at your craft

                a maze of spires
                cathedral of steel rods
                a  window washer’s labyrinth of tile

what wind had ripped you loose
of the gray grind?
motorcycles growled revenge
Spanish mothers prayed
their baby Jesus would survive
sixteen

cement  and broken dishes
your creation:  the ark
still pushes at the backyard fence
baptismal font awaits
the new born
and here a bench for sitting

in your Italian Sanctuario
inlaid with jewels from the garbage
are all the treasures of a boy:  blue of broken tile                  
green fire of soda pop
seashells from the bottom of your pocket                             
                ruby
                of broken wine decanter  

                
and in my northern neighborhood
when no wind blew
and nothing happened in the house
              
I would imagine I had a craft
like yours              
                Simon Rodia

and every broken bit of color
that life washed up
would have a place in my design

the city fathers
tried to pull
your towers from their roots
                Simon Rodia
not even swinging cement balls
could shake your work
                I saw you
                riding your joy leaps over their upturned faces
                         
                your laughter
                ripped me loose!



(This poem is published in Adagio & Lamentation)
  

Friday, March 30, 2012

The Muse of the Jungian Way



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.


Friday, March 9, 2012

News from the Muse

The Spirit of the Depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being.

C.G. Jung in The Red Book

The Sister to Read at Books Inc


* * * * *
I will be reading from The Sister from Below as well as from my book of poems, Adagio & Lamentation at Books Inc. in San Francisco’s Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave, on Thursday March 29th at 7 pm.

I am grateful to Phyllis Stowell who will be reading with me, for organizing this event. Phyllis is a fine poet, and Professor Emerita of St. Mary’s College.
* * * * *

It has been almost twenty years since The Sister From Below first had her way with me. She came to me as I was sitting down to write a paper on a Jungian theme. Suddenly I heard an inner voice saying: “It’s time for me. I’ve been waiting long enough. You need to go back to the poetry you used to write.”

Now, understand, I had recently been certified as a Jungian analyst. I wanted to give a profound paper at a Jungian conference and impress my colleagues. The Sister informed me that she was the source of true profundity, for she is my muse, my soul. She and I had it out until we found a middle way: her voice would be heard in my work, so would the poems she gives me, but I could present our conflict in a paper for the Jungians.

In my Jungian training I had read about Jung’s technique of active imagination, in which one speaks to dream figures or to inner figures that just show up, like the Sister did. But until she insisted her way into my consciousness, I did not really understand that an inner figure is autonomous—a “living and self-existing being” as Jung puts it. Letting her into my life created a rift in consciousness—opened an inner space called the underworld by the ancient Greeks, the imaginal by archetypal Jungians, meditatio by the alchemists, transitional space by psychologists, make-believe by children. This is a magical transformative realm, the wellspring of my poetry and a place to heal and recuperate from life’s storms. When the Sister appeared she ushered me into this place, and forever changed my life.

When the Spirit of the Depths came to Jung, he discovered a whole world within himself, and recorded his experiences in The Red Book. Later in his life he studied the work of the alchemists, and found that they knew all about this magical place. They wrote of meditatio and imaginatio. In Psychology and Alchemy Jung quotes Ruland’s Lexicon Alchemiae which defines meditatio as follows: “The word meditatio is used when [one] has an inner dialogue with [oneself], or with [one’s] good angel.” He writes:
The imaginatio, as the alchemists understand it, is in truth a key that opens the door to the secret of the opus…It was a question of representing and realizing those ‘greater” things which the soul…imagines…
Here’s a poem from Adagio & Lamentation about Iris, the goddess of the rainbow and of writing.





regarding Iris

blue eyes are hers dark almost violet like the fierce
painter’s eyes of my mother’s mother and she slips off
her rainbow bridge making sense of the vision I had
as a girl of a being of light crossing over the water

she says she was there at my birth she
and her sea sister Thetis it was dawn
on a summer Wednesday far from the transit camp
Lag Westerbork where my father’s mother gave up

the ghost and Iris a small recently discovered
planet rose on the eastern horizon she the forgotten
goddess who carries a box of writing implements draws color
out of the glistening air is good at delicate negotiations between

those who belong to forever and those who are just
passing through gathered blessings for me from the sea
full of secrets full of wandering fish from the dead
who gave me sea horses to ride goat song

and shimmer my baby body was touched by the purple
of ghosts their blues their deep maroons and I was gifted
with every pleasure of voice of tongue of kicking feet full
of my mother’s sweet milk all joy to her who had longed for a child

and my mother’s mother painted my sea shell sleep and the red begonia
which glowed on the dining room table it was California and the yellow
hills stirred their big lion bodies and my hands reached out to touch
the light ah! I can see her face who is lilac and rose whose nipples

are apple blossoms who flings her green breasts at the dreaming sky
even now sixty years later as I sit on a wooden porch I can see
how she draws violet and orange out of trees words with their long
roots out of the seas and at the horizon she gathers me gold and silver
out of the summer air