Carpe viam

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Carpe viam

"seize the road"

was Horace's alternative

in space

instead of time

diem and viam

both symbols

of the circle

we live

the simple flight

of stones

seized and thrown

first rising

then falling

to become the road

in the end
(that never ends)

June 2012

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To be, so unlike another

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To be, so unlike another

Discomfited in a room where I
have never been nor will ever be.
No lace. No flowers. Unrecognizable
to myself. Yet bending

to sit in your imagined chair
by your particular window.
Mountain witness, sea air. A series
of paintings in red and blue by Hokusai.

How much useless effort I have spent
climbing into that chair.
Or marching against the wind
of your breath, not floating in it.

I accept at last my discomfiture
with myself, with you; never mind,
and run alone through slats of sun
with cavorting birds who are anything

but silent. Free to say that I want to love
myself the way I want you to love me:
Under song. In and out of tree-stripe
shadows, one limb after another.

As far as the sun’s eye sees along
a flat land where orange hawkweeds
swell in the random mist of spider laces.
In the morning. In the morning.

May 2012

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Bonfirebird

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Bonfirebird

We circle ‘round

a bonfire at midnight.

The fire is warm, and dangerous.

We can’t turn our faces

away from its seductions

yet only get so close.

Next gray morning it feels safe

to poke the nest of ash and char

with a cold black stick,

looking for the truth of fire

in what is left behind.

But, O Soul, don’t hide

your face and wait like that; turn

over the crimson ember-eggs

of desire buried in ash; pile on

dried spikenard and fig,

almond and cherry; smell

as they crackle to life; feel

how voluptuously

your flame-wings rise up!

May 2012

Art notes

Top: Costume Design for The Firebird, by Leon Bakst

Bottom: Cover of the book The Firebird, by Konstantin Somov

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Caravanserai

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Caravanserai

Cords of silken blood flow in the peaks
and passes of my body, a traveling

miracle, while I read the news,
all of which barely reaches me—

economies of elections, wars, and
minerals harvested from asteroids

in the celestial commerce of billionaires.
Numb with armchair trade,

I remember the seduction
of the Silk Road. Quieted, I hear

spirit through the flutes of my bones—
the music of the steppes, the tinkle of pots

on your back. I smell the fust of Turkish
rugs on the floor and know

I would walk a thousand miles
to curl up on felt-covered stone with you

and these other traveling strangers, harbored
inside trusted walls, away from danger.

In the morning we finger sunrise apricots
in a copper breakfast bowl

before recommencing our planetary
journey, a mouthful of sweet chai, and I ask

what you know of the soul’s trade—
its breakdowns, its tinkerings

its thieves and swindlers? And you say,
Tonight we will come again to a caravanserai,

a courtyard of companionship, a warm stop
on the long road. Nothing else matters.


April 2012

Note: One of the thrills of my life was staying with Don, our two children, and my sister in a Caravanserai in Turkey, an outpost along the Silk Road where for centuries caravaners were given three nights free lodging, food and fodder for their animals. It was far from “free” as a hotel when we lodged, but worth every penny to me. These stone fortresses were built in a huge square, with one front portal large enough for camels to pass through. Rooms for sleeping were around the outer edge on the second floor, while service rooms, including a Turkish bath and shops to repair horseshoes, filled the lower floor. In the middle was a courtyard where goods and animals were kept. When we stayed at the Caravanserai in Kuşadası, transformed into a hotel, we dined in the courtyard. The best part of the experience for me was the two-foot thick stone wall that made our room’s window wells large enough for a small child to sleep in. My imagination has never rested since those nights.

Posted for DVerse Open Link Night, hosted this week by Brian Miller. Join the community.

 

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Alone

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When I feel most alone, no matter

if life and love remain all around,

when body and mind are too much,

I need to leave the bread at the table,

go out and walk the orchard or the lake,
find the star, the moon, or the last loaf of sun.

Nothing there, nothing
between me and the Scotch pine,

nothing between me and loss,
no bridge across the distance,

only the dissolving heart, alive, the way

the sun sinks slowly, without a body, everywhere,

and try not to be afraid.

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Poem: Out or In

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Out or In

Here is a young tree
stretching its bark
in a new spring. Its
ghostly blossoms erupt
like longing, so small in the air
that you must hover close
to ascertain fragrance.

I have broken beyond
fences, with spirits
benevolent and not. Who can say
for certain which breed
kicks down the gate, and whether
I am going out, or in?


March 2012

the wedding plum

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When you feel imprisoned

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graveyard in Kinsale, Ireland

The Prisoner

I
My hand has one gesture left:
to push things away.
From the rock dampness drips
on old stones.

This dripping is all I can hear.
My heart keeps pace
with the drops falling
and sinks away with them.

If the drops fall faster
an animal might come to drink.
Somewhere it is brighter than this—
but what do we know.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Part II of "The Prisoner" is here
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

For some time now the word I focus on in meditation is free. I don't meditate daily; maybe a couple times a week. I close my eyes for a few minutes, focus on my breath, and while I exhale, I hear, see and feel the word free. Sometimes I'm up in the sky, with birds, coasting on air currents. Sometimes free appears as a prayer for someone. But it had not occurred to me until now that it was an unconscious "choice," this meditation word, in a time when I am bumping up against the stone walls of physical limitations for the first time in my life.

I've been slowed by hand-wrist-arm-shoulder-neck pain since December. These are repetitive strain injuries, the result of twenty years at a computer at work. I am getting manipulations by an osteopath, and learning the Alexander technique, in hopes of relieving it. Dictation software has been a mixed blessing; often I get more tension using it than not when I have to repeat a sentence many times. Last month I was also diagnosed with hypothyroidism, which accounts for some of my fatigue, and soon I'll go on the lowest dosage of medication for it, taking a prescription drug long term for the first time. I'm 55. (The natural remedies for hypothyroidism include avoiding cruciferous vegetables—broccoli, cauliflower, kale, spinach—because they block the thyroid hormone. I would rather not give these up, so I'm hoping the low dose of levothyroxine is enough to restore my metabolism and does not result in the dizzy or "drunk" feeling some people encounter. My bad cholesterol has shot up from 193 to 243, which is another reason it seems important to go on this med.)

Learning the Alexander technique from my teacher Elinore is about unlearning bad habits of hunching my shoulders, holding tension, rushing into space, pulling my head back onto my spine, affecting every movement of my body in painful ways. (This 10 minute video explains quite well how the Alexander technique helps pupils regain balance and lightness.) For years I've thrust forward into the next thing, as if life was an emergency.

More than the pain, what bothers me most is having to slow down. "Somewhere it is brighter than this," says the prisoner in Rilke's poem. Truly, somewhere it is much darker than this where I am. But this has taken some adjustment. I am no longer quick, and youthful. Suddenly I act like an old woman, not the plan I had when I became a grandma in January.

We just finished watching "Little Dorrit" the BBC series on Netflix DVDs. It's the Dickens story of a young woman who lives in a debtors' prison in London with her father. She was born there and knows nothing different. She even loves her life caring for her father and prefers it to the new life of wealth that comes to them suddenly. Her father Mr. Dorrit suffers daily from his imprisonment and degradation, however, believing he is worthy of something far better. But once he arrives at the something far better, he finds no peace there either.

I take inspiration from Little Amy Dorrit. Inside the stone walls of Marshallsea Prison for Debt she angelically loves and cares for her father in spite of his irksome resistance and condescension. Like Dickens' characters often are, she is probably a caricature of what a human can really be, in this case softer and more philanthropically positive than seems possible in her situation. But even she could not adjust to the seismic changes that came with enormous wealth. We humans are creatures of habit, even when our habits keep us confined.

"We need to stop trying so hard and allow our lives to unfold naturally," says Richard Brennan in my Alexander book. For some years now I've been doing spiritual work to learn to love what is and what comes, which is helping me with this physical learning.  To not "push it away" as the prisoner in Rilke's poem, now that's the real work.

For another take on changing habits, see a new post at sparks & mirrors, "To deliver oneself up to silence."

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Poem: Hitting the Mark

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Hitting the Mark

"My barn having

burned to the ground, I can see the moon."

      ~ old Chinese proverb

In the whole big

field of blue

the sun hits

the bull’s-eye moon.

Down here

my face’s albedo

mimics something

like it in return.

Night by night

turn after turn

the arrow light

finds its mark

and like a climbing,

stumbling goat

I aim my horn

this way and that

to snag that light

in flight. Maybe

one long and

maundering day

from here, when

they open the gate

for home, the sun

will put up his

arrows, the moon

her shield, I my bow-

shaped horn, and we'll

dissolve in sleep.

Until then I'll jump

the fence and like that old

cow make a scene

over the moon.

March 2012

Painting: "Not far from the sun, moon and the stars" by Jean Arp

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Poem: The housefly and me

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The housefly and me

We bask together in the sun. Against this southeast window
  he is finding spring strength in tireless morning exercise.
    Starting from the lower frame he walks up the pane

a few inches. Reaching an invisible barrier, he flutters
  and slides back down to the casing, and immediately
    starts again, straight up the window escarpment.

His zenith rises higher each trip. It has been some
  five minutes, and he can now get to six inches
    before falling back to the maple ledge. I sit and wait

for water to boil in the kitchen behind me.
  Whisker-legs rappel back down the glass. The glass-top
     burner sputters with moisture on the bottom of the pot.

In the time it takes to whistle, he has reached nine inches.
  The smell of spiced chai steeps in creamy sweetness.
    Sunday morning warms in a March sun.

Alongside a red pen, bright spines of books face me
  with titles of the inner journey—what is real, mystery, being.
    My fly climbs and falls, climbs and falls, climbs and falls,

separated from the sun by glass. When the window opens
  in another month, he’ll fly. I will have studied another few
    chapters, including this one about the author’s trek to a far-off

Indian temple with a Maharajji, the author's sudden tears
  fluttering down his cheeks, and down the cliffs of the mountain
    he'd conquered, when he realizes his home was right here inside all along.


March 2012

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Poem: 29 Ways of the Soul on February 29

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29 Ways of the Soul on February 29

1
The soul is free
of pain, nothing
quick or slow,
hot or cold,
heavy or airborne.

2
Color—
the copper mum almost silent
until the polishing light
of a stormy sky.
This July memory.

3
Rosemary mid-winter.
Silver threads,
smoke and camphor.

4
Drops of rain
hanging on
to the tips
of pine needles.
Not the rain,
the needles.

5
Five shades of green
in one square inch of grass.
One bent yellow blade.

6
A head inside
a tight hood; sounds muffled:
feet falling; rain falling;
heart falling.

7
Muddy deer hooves
in the woods fidgeting
while my eyes
seek the bottom
of two-pronged well-tracks
filling with water.

8
The wind
when it stops.

9
Patches of snow
on the ground
look like clouds.
This source.

10
The wet log.
That darkness.
That shine.

11
The hiding place
inside the log.

12
The log hibernating
inside the arcing
bare forsythia.

13
The desire to move.

14
The longing to be still.

15
The sky sitting
on the earth
like Buddha.

16
My arms swinging
when my legs walk.
My heart floating
like my head.
I’m not sure what,
or who, does the carrying.

17
Glasses pearled
with rain. Seeing anyway
with everything else
a little.

18
No birds
to be seen. But
they’re here.

19
The cry of a bird
in the sumac when I walk past.
Intuition. His and mine.

20
Beneath the rust
of the sumac,
the curve of the blossom.

21
This white page
before I typed
the words
that were already here.

22
The countries
on my shoulders
that hurt, where wings
could be.
Flying above
that failing.

23
The space that desire
plows ahead of itself.

24
The courage
of one foot. One leaf.
One inch. The courage
not to measure.

25
Arousal’s eddies
at the edges of the ocean,
which is far from here.
But I feel the pull
in this spray.

26
Mountains with snow.
Or these no-mountain
fields. I am at the top.
Is there a difference?

27
The fur around my face,
synthetic, that tells me
there is another
that is animal and alive.
We are real.

28
The number 29
in February—nowhere—
until it pierces time
out of nonexistence.

29
Out of emptiness
she comes talking
just like dawn
opening the fog.
But not every day
that I can tell.

February 29, 2012

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Poem: The intelligence of snow

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The intelligence of snow

To float

from the massive

cloud of unknowing

down

without hurry

or tension

into the amplitude open

above fields humped and blurry

and the gentle

geometry of roofs

falling

with no clear

apprehension

loose—adrift, or cast—

resting and feathering

across downy light,

or, becoming light

without edge

descending

and hovering

where buzzards meditate

a white spider

hanging and swinging

(without gossamer thread)

into the quietude

of outstretching spruces

tossed and bob-slipping

past treetops

beside

blue jays jerking

and nuthatches skipping

at last touching

into place

with soft pliancy

weightless wafer

on the bird feeder’s lip

onto one black seed

instantly scooped

The solitary

snow flake

dissolving

in the mitered beak

of the cardinal

in its ultimate

and particular

gesture of praise

December 2011

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Hot and Cold ruminations

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You’re getting warmer. Warmer. WARMER. You’re HOT! Oh you’re so HOT!

This was not the game of dating come-ons. It was the game of HOT and COLD, a hide-and-seek pastime. The person who is “it” goes out of the room while the others remain, and one person hides an object. When the It girl returns, she is coaxed along by clues of warm and cool, hot and cold, depending on her proximity to the hidden object. When she is across the room from it, she is cold. When she is close, she is warm. At times her fingers hover above the object, unbeknownst to her, and the others are screaming HOT HOT HOT—SO HOT YOU’RE BURNING UP HOT, incredulous that she could be missing the object, laughing in glee that she is!

Now I’m playing another game of hot and cold in my menopausal radiance. So hot in a flash that all the A/C in the car at fan speed FOUR does not cool enough. So hot that a walk in winter is the freshest and easiest to take: remove the moisture, let me swallow clear oxygen. I sit in the hot tub, half submerged in hot water (103°F, 39.5°C), half above water, exposed to the cold morning breeze. This is heavenly balance.

In legend, myth and poetry, winter is something to survive, with a sprinkling of Christmas in the middle to lighten its heavy load. I read Rumi and Rilke, and winter is the opposite of love; it is the time when the lover is absent; winter is longing without reward. Or in the Persephone myth, winter is Demeter’s time of grief, when she absents herself to seek her lost daughter in the Underworld.

I’ve always preferred cold to heat, putting a sweater on more than a bikini at the beach. I’d rather seek than find; stand in the corner removed, not in the center of the hot crowd. So what’s the matter with me, who loved winter long before I needed to plunge into ice to escape hot flashes? Maybe the matter is a binary, “fundamentalist” view. After writing these thoughts, I read this from Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul:

Often, when spirituality loses its soul it takes on the shadow-form of fundamentalism. I am not referring to any particular group or sects, but to a point of view that can seize any of us about anything. One way to describe the nature of fundamentalism is through a musical analogy. If you go to a piano and strike a low C rather hard, you will hear, whether you know it or not, a whole series of tones. You hear the “fundamental” note clearly, but it would sound very strange if it didn’t also include its overtones—C’s and G’s and E’s and even B-flat. I would define fundamentalism as a defense against the overtones of life, the richness and polytheism of imagination.

. . . The intellect wants a summary meaning . . . but the soul craves depth of reflection, many layers of meaning, nuances without end, references and allusions and prefigurations.

(pp 235-6; my bold)

Maybe winter is not simply: cold. It is cold with overtones of cool, warm, and much that is not about temperature. I am a polytheistic lover of winter! And stay warm, because I'm going to keep writing about it.

Painting: Pablo Picasso's The Red Armchair
Photo: Bishop and me stepping through a winter nuance

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Poem: What I don't know is

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“The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised.”

~ Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 233

What I don’t know is

if a tiny black druid
croons like a grasshopper
in the wood stove
of my soul, singing
summer’s tune, rubbing
witch-hazel and rosemary,
divining love's heat
from fear's icy skin. A leap
from the lines of earth,
or the lines of Keats,
their busy, bending legs
that never tire, forever.

"The poetry of earth is never dead."

~ John Keats, from “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”

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Poem: The Soul in November

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The Soul in November

How she looks I cannot say,
although the petal-less heads
of goldenrod, not flaming

yellow any longer,
are something like her
stillness

and so they must be the reason
I go out, after reading
the morning’s poems

written by others
at their desks, on typewriters,
or by hand in fine black ink,

and be with the blank
desaturated truth of them
standing alone

without any topaz,
though their sun-flares
are a visible memory.

Birds circle us
from tree to tree
in their orbit of the dun meadow.

Then I walk back to the house,
to my red chair,
the laptop, the empty

white sky of the page
and remember from scratch
my own small explosion.

Poetry should be heard.

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Bedlam: A fresh look at an old horror

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I am interested in how openly we share intimate stories of cancer, lupus, stroke, heart attack, and other physical maladies, but we are still fenced in about mental illness. Even Alzheimer’s is all right to discuss: it is a physical disease. But when it comes to mental disease, we hesitate to talk about disorders within our families, let alone personal struggles, feeling stigmatized by the mere association.

The days are still too close when people paid money to see the freak show: not bearded ladies, giants, Siamese twins or Elephant Men, but the insane. The wards of the infamous Bedlam asylum were salons for gawking, where fine ladies came to be entertained by raving lunatics.

Tom Rakewell ends up in Bedlam after a profligate life;

one painting in a series of paintings and engravings 
by William Hogarth called "The Rake's Progress"

Bedlam, now Bethlem Royal Hospital, is known as the oldest institution for mental patients (1247) and is notorious for its tortuous and dastardly treatment of patients. Remarkably, now it is a major center for research that promotes the best and most humane psychiatric practice and care. (See the history of Bedlam here.) But the word bedlam will always mean the uproar and chaos exemplified in that madhouse.

Eerily and perfectly timed for the end of Halloween week, two friends of mine have just opened an art exhibit of their Bedlam project. Robert Turney is an art photographer in the media of gelatin silver prints and wet-plate tintypes. (He happens also to be married to my professor, mentor and friend, Diane Wakoski.) Stephen Rachman is an American Studies scholar and chair of graduate studies in my department.

I really love Robert's photographs. Here is a sampling of his previous work, in gelatin silver prints.

Robert's gelatin silver prints

Rio Chama, New Mexico

Shack and Seatless Chair

Goldfield, Nevada

 New York #5

New York #9

New York #10

Robert's wet plate tintypes

And here is a sampling of Robert's more recent work, wet plate tintypes. To watch a stop motion video of Robert developing wet-plate collodian tintypes, twenty minutes shortened to two minutes, go here.

 

You know I love these two still lifes:

Moonflowers

Previously Robert and Steve collaborated on a subject happier than Bedlam: moonflowers. Robert created 10 x 10 inch gelatin silver photographs, shooting the moonflowers he grew potted in his wonderful town garden, at night. (Robert's garden is famous for certain rows of basil that went into Diane's legendary pesto with twenty-five, yes 25, cloves of garlic, that I ate with abandon, and after which Don would not sleep in the same room with me.)  Of course Robert photographed them at night, when they open. Robert's evening dance in his driveway with lights, medium format camera and moonflowers is enough to send a poet off for a week's contemplation, but combine it with Steve's gorgeous essay "Evening Glories," published with images of Robert's gelatin silver prints in the Red Cedar Review, and I am truly inspired. Below are a couple of Robert's gelatin silver moonflowers and excerpts from Steve's essay; see the twelve piece portfolio here. Read Steve's essay about Robert's moonflowers called "Evening Glories: Robert Turney's Moonflower Photographs" here:

"From 1999-2001, in this seasonal way, Turney pursued the flowers, under clouds, under stars, under the glowing coal of his cigarette. . . . It would be easy to misconstrue Turney’s moonflowers as conventionally romantic. . . . If they are romantic at all then they refer to the romance of ordinary beauty, sensuality, and sex. . . . "

~ excerpt from Steve Rachman's essay "Evening Glories"

Two of Robert Turney's gelatin silver prints of moonflowers:

"One secret of the moonflower photos lies in that Turney has photographed flowers as if they were movie stars from the 1930s and 40s. Think of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Martha Graham rendered by Edward Steichen . . ."    ~ Stephen Rachman, from "Evening Glories"

Bedlam

So what led these two to another textual and photographic partnership, this time about the insane asylum? Robert got to talking about the tintype self portraits he was developing, and Steve began to imagine a fiction about a psychiatrist and a patient, with tintype photography as therapy! The gallery show has single rows of tintype portraits of the patient (Robert himself, acting as G.G.), separated by text written by Steve: imagined journal entries by the psychiatric doctor about his patient G.G. He brings the patient into his studio, observes him under the lens, and sees an improvement in his demeanor. As you progress around the room, the patient in the portraits evolves from a state of violent agitation to calm melancholy.

A sampling of Robert's self portraits, as asylum patient G.G., with some of Steve's journal text,
progressing from extreme agitation to almost beatific calm:

"G.G. converses rationally on most subjects often with amiable feeling and charming manners; and yet he is incapable of going among people without severe mental agitation and reflection. G. G. exhibits great terror and excitement at the prospect of crowds."

". . . And this, it occurred to me, might in the end be what the camera reveals: I have always been struck by this phenomenon in cases of insanity. The insane pose for the sane in postures of madness—or feigned sanity—much as we pose for the camera."

(This one, above, is my favorite of Robert's tintypes;

it moves me in ways I cannot describe.)

Here are two fascinating pages of Stephen's text, which are especially interesting to me, in light of our discussions about translation and poetry at the Rilke blog. I hope you can read my images of them:

I asked Robert if he found himself in any emotional distress while photographing himself as Bedlam patient G.G. "No," he said. "I just made faces." And he asked if I knew the work of Sally Mann, who photographed her children, at home, in intimate poses, sometimes naked. Yes, I did. He said, "She is the only one who could take those photographs, they are her children, in her rural home." He said that these self portraits are like that. He was not exploiting a patient in a mental hospital. He was imagining himself as one, yet thankfully (?) with emotional distance.

For me, through Robert's faces I felt the pain of mental disease, and the terrible history of ostracism and stigma surrounding it. Yet I did not feel disturbed the way I anticipated feeling at Robert and Stephen's exhibit, linking to the ghosts in my own family's history, like that shadowy hand mysteriously moving between candlesticks in Robert's tintype, above. These were after all imagined portraits and journal entries. (Before attending the show, I thought Stephen had discovered real Bedlam documents.) There was jaunty jazz playing in the background. Stephen's fictional journal entries reflected sometimes humorous aspects of the patient's world, stepping over the sacred line of treating mental illness in only morose and somber terms. This kind of open exploration and artistic imagining can help us bust down fences about the ways we may feel threatened by the topic of mental disabilities.

But no matter how painful the topic—and reality—remains, we will still have the tender melancholy of moonflowers for comfort. In the end, perhaps it is only a full frontal look at ourselves, that includes our dark shadow side, that will heal us and make us whole.

"There is one that Turney doesn’t particularly care for (because the blossom appears more like a pansy than a moonflower) but might just as easily serve as an emblem of the study. It consists of a full frontal blossom. It is the moon almost full but for a petal edge bending into a deep shadow, the moon become a flower, a flower become the moon."    ~ Stephen Rachman, from "Morning Glories"

Robert Turney and Stephen Rachman,

Bedlam art exhibit at Scene Metrospace in East Lansing, Michigan

The show opened Friday and will run until December 11.

I hope you'll forgive me for going on a little longer in an already too-long post for a blog. While I stood before one journal entry at the exhibit, in dialog with my friend Reade about my findings in the bits of research I'd done on Bedlam and how people paid money to see patients writhe in torment, I told her about William Hogarth's painting "A Rake's Progress" at the top of the post. She then told me about the opera by Igor Stravinsky (libretto by lifelong friends and collaborators, the poets W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman) of the same name, based loosely on Hogarth's paintings and engravings of Tom Rakewell whose dissolute life led to the poorhouse, and then to Bedlam. Here is another imagined Bedlam story, in which Tom cavorts in London with a bad sort of fellow, Nick Shadow, who turns out to be the Devil. It is a moralistic tale, and Rakewell ends up in Bedlam, affirming the belief held by some that "For idle hearts and hands and minds the Devil finds a work to do." Dawn Upshaw sings a lullaby, "Gently, Little Boat" as Anne Trulove, Tom's betrothed, in this touching scene toward the end of the opera.

I'm grateful that psychiatrists like James Hillman, who continued the work of Carl Jung, have encouraged us to stop moralizing about our dark side, denying or rejecting our shadow selves. I want to keep that open and eager spirit alive and working, to gently love the shadows in myself and in others, or as Hillman puts it, to see generously:

Shadow is the very stuff of the soul, the interior darkness that pulls downward out of life and keeps one in relentless connection with the underworld. . . . the shadow may be reconceived. (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld)


. . . you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code)

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What I have learned about love

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When I love myself least, I am least able to love someone else.

When I am least in love with myself, I am the most self-centered.

I think Narcissists do not love themselves well enough.

When I most love my own soul, I am most capable of loving the souls and selves of others.

When I most love my soul, I am most able to love my self
—my personality, my aging body and face, my limited mind—
my every failing.

If I love myself, perfectly, I do not need anyone else to love me.

It is no one’s job to love me but my own.

If I do not rely on someone else to love me, I am more capable of being happy.

If I love myself as I am, in spite of my failings, I can love someone else in spite of theirs.
(I am in the process of even learning to love my failings; the correlative impact this will have
on how I view the failings of others is interesting to think about.)

James Hillman, who died Thursday, said,
Why try to eradicate your demons?
Better to learn to live with them.

I think a demon is one part of a whole. Think positive archetype and negative archetype.
Example: mother/victim. If I fall into the victim role (a lifetime habit), perhaps it’s time
to mother myself. There there, Ruth, that doesn’t feel good does it, tell me about it,
says my mother self sitting on the edge of the bed of my pouting, victim self.
No one else should have to do this for me.

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Reigniting the spirit

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Inge and I are away at the lake with our books and writing tablets, tucked in under the rickrack of oak leaves outside. Indoors, surrounded by knotty pine, we're reading, writing and talking by the fire. Each fall and spring we escape after work for a weekend at my family’s cottage where it seems that within minutes of arriving our spirits are relit.

We quietly watch logs in the fireplace, like our souls: steady, certain, whole. Strike a match, light kindling, and flames cup and curl around them, like our spirits, which must be fed by some fuel. Without time in solitude, away from pressing routines, even for a few minutes a day in my red chair at home, my spirit lags. I must locate my soul, hidden in the thick maze of this chaotic life. I must hold her face in my hands. I remember, then, what it is I want. This is not narcissistic hedonism, but a force divine and true that guides me in calibrating my steps through this hectic and crazy-making world.

I will catch up with you in a couple of days.

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