Twining all-embracing faith

Twining all-embracing faith
Honeysuckle along the Merrimack
CC Jean Stimmell: 11/12/14

“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand… the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.”

This profound quote comes from The Accidental Universe written by the physicist, Alan Lightman.  His definition of faith is truly ecumenical: as applicable to religious folks as it is to scientists. He does, however, go on to make a critical distinction between the nature of science and the nature of humanity:

By the experimental nature of what they do, scientists must pose their questions very carefully: in order to prove or disprove a hypothesis, they must frame their questions in such a manner that they will have a definite answer.

“But artists and humanists often don’t care what the answer is because definite answers don’t exist to all interesting and important questions. Ideas in a novel or emotion in a symphony are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. … For many artists and humanists, the question is more important than the answer*”

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* Physicist Alan Lightman from his acclaimed book The Accidental Universe, as quoted in http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/15/alan-lightman-accidental-universe-science-spirituality/

Waking to first snow of winter outside my door

Waking to first snow of winter outside my door
CC JeanStimmell: November 14, 2014

Psyche yearning to be free from oppressive confines of modernity

Psyche yearning to be free from oppressive confines of modernity
Graffiti at Sewells Falls 11/8/14
CC Jean Stimmell

Psyche making her escape!
Graffiti at Sewells Falls 11/8/14
CC Jean Stimmell

Day of Reckoning After the November 4th Election

Day of Reckoning After the Election
CC Jean Stimmell 11/10/14

I took this photograph yesterday of the remains 

of Madame Sherri's Castle in Chesterfield, NH,

a dissolution, not only of a dream and a way of life. 

A coyote sprang to mind I had once photographed, 

lean and hungry, ready to devour any weakened prey. 

To me the composite represents the result of the election.

Our survival depends on reconnecting to mythos and the rhythms of the universe

A foolishly sweet elf disguised as milkweed on Harmony Hill
CC Jean Stimmell: 11/03/14

In today's world ruled by the cold logic of technology and science, nature is defined as dead matter, separate from ourselves,  something we can manipulate, abuse, use up, or eradicate as we please.^⁠1 However, as Carl Jung first observed, a tragic consequence of reducing our world to  numbers and empirical facts is that we become estranged from who we really are: 

“Man feels isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree makes a man's life…Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals.^⁠2

Our salvation – literally our continued existence – depends on reconnecting to myths^⁠3 which, by definition, ask deeper questions about reality, welcoming all beings, all voices, seen or unseen. 

Real myths, while they may not always pass the literal fact checks of abstracted empiricists lost in the labyrinths of their minds, are psychologically and symbolically true – and absolutely necessary to complete us as fully functioning human beings.   Myths are essential, as Joseph Campbell tells us, to pull us “into accord with the rhythm of the universe.”^⁠4 

Put another way, myth is the software that grounds our abstract minds in the real, putting our ego in harmony with our body, our sense of place, and mother nature.

Great danger looms – unending war, pestilence, and catastrophic climate change come to mind – if we stay on our present path,  disconnected from the real because we have repressed the contents of our unconscious, disregarding the magic and mystery that resides there. Apprehending the growing chasm between our conscious everyday life and the vast depth of the psyche, Jung long ago laid out the task required of us if we are to survive:

“We do not understand yet that the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.”^⁠5

In a bit of synchronicity: An Ode to Elves by Carl Jung:

In Jung’s Red Book, an exquisite red leather‐bound folio manuscript,which recounts and comments on his imaginative experiences between 1913-16, he had this to say about elves:

“These…elemental spirits, dressed in wrinkled garb,…with delightful misshapen forms, young and yet old, dwarfish, shriveled, unspectacular bearers of secrets arts, possessors of ridiculous wisdom… What should your appearance be to us? What new arts do you bear up from the inaccessible treasure chamber..? You still have roots in the soil like plants and you are animal faces of the human body; you are foolishly sweet, uncanny, primordial, and earthly.”^⁠6

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¹ http://www.depthinsights.com/pdfs/On_Depth_Psychology.pdf

² Sabini, M. (Ed.). (2005). The earth has a soul: The nature writings of C.G. Jung, pp. 79-80)

³ and developing new myths for our time and place

⁴ Campbell, J., & Moyers, w. B. (1991). The Power of Myth.

⁵ Sabini, M. (Ed.). (2005). The earth has a soul: The nature writings of C.G. Jung, p. 145

⁶ http://www.reddit.com/r/tryptonaut/comments/186c6b/

The greatest puppeteers since god was worshipped

Lion at Seapoint Beach: 10/14/14
CC Jean Stimmell

A great lion came from the distances.

It was huge as silence is,

He was thirsty, after the blood

And behind its posturing

It had fire…

[But] it found only solitude,

it roared, out of uncertainty and hunger -

the only thing to eat was air,

the wild foam of the coast…*

When I spotted this apparition at Seapoint Beach , the above lines from The Lion by the great poet, Pablo Nerudo, resurrected themselves in my being like a long forgotten truth from a recovered dream.

Indeed! 

This magnificient animal, washed up like useless flotsam on this deserted beach, is a survivor of our evolutionary past, the primal beast who lives in us all. Tragically, no longer able to hunt down a nourishing, flesh and blood meal, Lion is starving, wasting away in our abstracted modern world of empty words and images, a world of illusion directed by the greatest puppeteers to come along since god was worshipped: technology and the invisible hand of the marketplace.

* Excerpt from The Lion by Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, p. 412

Human Debris At The Pale, Stale End of Time

Human Debris at the End of Time
CC Jean Stimmell: Seapoint Beach 10/25/14

An explanation for society's current fascination with zombies:

“If the modern vampire may have functioned as an apt metaphor for the predatory practices of capital in colonial and post-colonial societies, today’s zombie hordes may best express our anxieties about capitalism’s apparently inevitable byproducts: the legions of mindless, soulless consumers who sustain its endless production, and the masses of “human debris” who are left to survive the ravages of its poisoned waste." *
* The above is a quote from Dreamboat Vampires and Zombie Capitalists by David Castillo and William Egginton in today's New York Times 

For more on human debris and detris, click my older post below:

Politicians spewing detris* pollute the clarity of our inner wisdom