Dialoging with my unconscious: Part 2

Photograph of my mask creadted 12/09/12

Part II: Dialogue with a master

See previous blog entry for Part I. 

Well, Peter, my mask is drying on a metal rack, preparatory to being fired… I am acutely aware that time is of the essence because my insights formed in the wet, fertile, aliveness of the earthy clay will dry out and become brittle and unyielding, just like my physical mask downstairs.

What follows are my discoveries about my mask and the collective unconscious, such as they are.  I’m afraid that Jung might be disappointed. To my mind, the first archetype, even before those that Jung explored, was our original oneness with the natural world around us. As Joanna Macy put it in her wonderful book, World as Lover, World as Self:

“In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb” – page 13.

To the best of my ability to decipher it what my mask did for me was like a bolt of electricity, jolting me back into a living, throbbing connection with my greater self, the earth. Below is my initial attempt to poetically express in words what happened. 

My mask, Part I: The Blind, Preyless, Predator

One who used to be the predator

Pumped with testosterone

Vietnam vet, avid hunter

Craving raw meat

Now old and neutered

Eating only vegetables

Forced to watch my mother

Limb by limb

Organ by organ

Slowly, agonizingly,

Tortured and killed…

…While my screams like

One hand clapping

Fall on deaf ears.

My mask, Part II: The Conch shell connection

Like a child tunes into the living world

Holding a conch shell to her ear

To hear the roar of the Ocean

So too, the conch shell opening

On the top of my mask:

The seventh Chakra point

  Of pure consciousness

  Without subject or object 

Tunes me in

Like the jolt of electricity

From the executor’s chair:

To the cries of 

Orphaned baby chimps and elephants

Disappearing fish gasping in gill nets

Honey bees suffocating in their hives

Polar bears drowning on disappearing ice

Like the jolt of electricity 

From the executor’s chair,

I feel the Pain we are inflicting

On our Mother, The Earth.

Again, Peter, thank you for your wise inspiration and guidance.

Dialoging with my unconscious: Part I

Photograph of my mask created 12/09/12

This is a report on a  hands-on investigation that I have been working on, prompted by my friend and mentor, Peter Baldwin, Ph.D., masterful teller of teaching tales, gestalt and hypno therapist, and author of Four and Twenty Black Birds about personae theory and understanding our multiple selves. His latest book, Gleanings: A Collection of Teaching Stories and Reflections, is a rich store of timeless wisdom, gleaned from 40 plus years of clinical practice. In the dialogue that follows he makes reference to  Gleanings by page number.

It all started last week when, in an email to Peter, I expressed my desire to better understand Carl Jung, particularly in regard to dream work and developing active imagination. My conventional mind expected him to suggest a book to read. I should have known better since Peter acts in the moment, not dwelling in his head like me. Here is how he responded:

Include in your pilgrimage, the fashioning of paper Mache masks. As you engaged in this, don't think. Let your unconscious mind lead the way. Let what your hands are doing tell you stories: silly stories, weird stories. Give each finger its turn to tell its story. When a mask is dried, follow the same in painting the mask. Age access. Your fingers will finger out what's happening. Refer to the Introduction to the reading of GLEANINGS where I write about the ink drawing and the Rock Garden's three layers of meaning and discovery. What I am saying is that while you are reading Jung, what you are seeking is totally within you. Also, visit with your images. Each one is a Rorschach, a TAT. Let each one of them speak to you. Much instruction will occur on a deep unconscious level. Avoid effort to be in command of understanding what is      happening. Much of the answers to your questions will occur behind the back of your conscious awareness. Carl Jung is alive around and in you. He knows what would be helpful to you. Be sure to place each mask over your face, . . . only one at a time,  . . . and see what the mask is saying to you. If Russet says in words or in her he--art what a mask is saying to her, suppose that she us figuring you out.

I got his email Saturday evening was able to immediately set to work, finishing the mask on Sunday. After which, I sent the following progress report back to Peter.

Well, Peter, you asked for it:

I researched paper mache making last night but it seemed to involve many steps and be one step removed for a clumsy person like me. I decided that clay would be more spontaneous, intuitive, primitive. I borrowed a hunk of clay from Russet this morning before she left for a walk with the dog.  I've never worked with her clay before but did make some wooden masks after returning from the Nam…I started work and lost myself totally in the flow for an hour or so. Here's how my mask came out… [see photograph above & in next blog entry]

When I started kneading the clay, I had  an vague image in my mind of molding something that seemed to resemble a hawk or an owl or some other kind of bird of prey. But soon, I found myself lost in the flow, at one with the moist, yielding, almost-alive-feeling clay. About an hour later, when I emerged from the trance, I was amazed to see what, as a first-time beginner, had manifested itself through my hands from my unconscious.

My unconscious suggested this title to me: 

"The Blind, Preyless, Predator"

And this little poem popped up out of no where:

Global Warming

Lamenting the fate

of all sentient Beings

Suffering like Jesus

on the cross

for the sins

of humankind.

I soon got Peter’s reply, urging me to dig deeper, and also agreeing to my request to let me reveal in my blog, Peter’s seminal role in instigating, inspiring, and guiding  my mask experience:

Persona is a Latin word signifying Mask and the sound that issue from behind. The Carl Jung that is under my skin wonders how you might be inspired to write (1) from the voice of the fashioner of the mask, the participant effected by our conversation, the participant who reflects upon how he is affected by the fashioning, the emergent image, by the photographic images; and (2 from the mask itself. Hold up the mask to your face. Hear the sounds, the shaped sounds, the words inspired by the mere and shaped sounds. The title provided by your deep mind is compelling and   evocative.

Yes, if you are moved to doing so, weave me into the blogs, including from GLEANINGS. First re-read the piece on Covered and Uncovered, pages 61ff.

For the rest of the story, click on Part II, my next blog entry

Are you here? Who is here? What is here?

A lobster claw shell washed ashore at Odiorne Point State Park: 12/07/12

In my blog entry 11/22/12, In our bones is the rock itself, I quoted Joan Halifax talking about how Buddhism, Shamanism, and Deep Ecology are all centered on radically questioning who we are in the present moment, stripped bare of societal encumbrances and convention.

Jane Hirshfield, Buddhist and award winning poet, in the quote below talks about the same need for radical questioning, whether one is meditating or writing poetry:

“To enter the ground of concentration, one begins with the mind of not-knowing. Bowing to a meditation cushion or encountering the moment just before the words begin, there is a moment of dwelling in the turning, of attention palpably greeting emptiness.

Sitting down to zazen or addressing the white page, we call ourselves to this question: Are you here? Who is here? What is here? And begin to answer.”•

             * Jane Hirshfield, page 150, from  the anthology,
Beneath a Single Moon, edited by
Kent Johnson and Craig Paulenich
with introduction by Gary Snyder

Going Gently into the Night

Garden Survivors          J. Stimmell 12/5/12

Opposed to white birches,

spooked, limbs asunder

in the dark woods beyond,

our Russian Sunflowers

smile and bow,
savoring the last light,

go gently into the night.

An Apt Metaphor for our Future

Jenness Pond ethereal this morning, dissolving in heavy fog

December 2nd: On this bleached-out, foggy Sunday morning, I watch yet another warm front approach, melting the first skim of ice trying to form on Jenness Pond. Forty years ago the pond would have been frozen over by Thanksgiving and we would have been skating already. 

Ghostly tracks spiral 

on the thawing ice.

Unlike DNA, 

they meander,
have no plan, 

going nowhere,

like our response 

to climate change*

Ghostly tracks spiral 

on the thawing ice:

Going nowhere,

meandering, 

fading:

an apt metaphor 

for the future

of the human race.

Postscript: Monday morning, December 3rd

Ducks swim by last remaining remnants of ice from yesterday.
Alas, the tracks have vanished without a trace.

* According to new international calculations on global emissions published today in the journal Nature Climate Change: Last year, all the world's nations combined pumped nearly 38.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air from the burning of fossil fuels; That's about a billion tons more than the previous year.

Because emissions of the key greenhouse gas have been rising steadily and most carbon stays in the air for a century, the study concludes that it is not just unlikely but "rather optimistic" to think that the world can limit future temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the goal set three years ago in a nonbinding agreement by nearly 200 nations.

One leading climate scientist says we must start reducing world emissions now and we need to "throw everything we have at the problem." But, in point of fact, we are doing little to nothing on a scale that would make a real difference.

Soon it will be too late as stated by Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not part of the study: "We are losing control of our ability to get a handle on the global warming problem."

xxx

Is this floating rock real or a waking dream?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: 4:30 PM on11/18/12

Walking the dog at Northwood Meadows,

teetering between being light and heavy,

between happiness and sadness,

meaning and nothingness.

Under an equally ambiguous sky,

teetering between day and night,

sun and clouds,

hot and cold.

Without warning, a floating rock reveals herself,

The Unbearable Lightness of Being*,

perfectly symbolizing my mental state

caught between lightness and weight,

an inscrutable paradox:

Is life a circle of eternal return

or just a disappearing act?

Is this floating rock real

or a waking dream?

* this phrase taken from the title of the renowned novel by Milan Kundera

Our neglected, coming-apart-at-the-seams Home

As Russet and I did errands yesterday afternoon, the temperature plummeted and the wind started to whip, chasing odd-shaped, dark clouds across the sky. Driving home we were intrigued by the haunting play of light and shadow on a falling-apart, abandoned Victorian house at the end of a long gated lane in Northwood Narrows. We couldn’t resist stopping and trespassing past the no trespassing signs to take some photographs.

The above image is my best effort to document what we found. It looks best to me rendered in black and white, so that’s what I did.  To my mind, this once gorgeous home, now so pitifully neglected and coming apart at the seams, is a perfect metaphor for our planetary home, Mother Earth. 

Whenever I think about it, I feel guilty that my profession remains so blind. What Theodore Roszak said about us in the early 1990s, unfortunately, still holds true: Today’s psychology and psychotherapy “stop at the city limits, as if the soul might be saved while the biosphere crumbles.”*

To date, we have no more insight about this than our patients: If we can't imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of our planet?  The answer, I believe, lies beyond the purview of psychology and involves reconnecting to a deeper, more fundamental sense of spirituality and ethics. 

It seems to me that it is not enough to master Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the art of swallowing psychotropic medications: To be fully actualized, healthy human beings, we must develop an ethical responsibility for the Earth not only to save our souls but to prevent our imminent extinction. If we are to be successful in this effort, we must disengage from the marketplace and reconnect instead to our bodies, our sense of place, and Mother Nature.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

*Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology., p. 19.