The Lure of the New

Dear Ones,

(This blog has lots of ideas in it - and I haven’t got pictures to illustrate them, so I am just going to intersperse photos I took during our long walk through Killarney Park today. )

So much has happened since I last wrote. Chris gave her talk on the Lure of the New, which I received as partly a caution against that part of our nature that seeks completion and progress (and that so contributes to the story of our destructiveness to ourselves, each other and our world), and partly as celebration of the dangerous beauty of the restless longings that beckon us forward, in hope and in greed. She referred back to a talk she gave more than 30 years ago about the sense of our approaching death as a species and the importance of celebrating and mourning our human existence - for who will be here to do so when we are gone? I remember that talk so vividly from early in our relationship. She also spoke of the war in Ukraine and of my melanoma, of the feeling similar to what she sensed when Hitler began to invade multiple countries at the approach of World War II, the feeling that “the whole world is holding its breath.” How does one balance, she asked of herself and of us, her listeners, the acceptance of “enough” and the urge toward “more”? She offered more questions than answers - a sense of being present to the questions. “Here I am,” she said. “Here we are.”

Lionel Corbett also gave a talk about Jung’s view of the “Self” as an innate part of the human psyche that is an image of wholeness and completion. (This was especially interesting to me following Chris’s ambivalent description of our urge toward completion). He described our internal spontaneous images of wholeness, as they occur in dreams and art, as alternatives to the images of God or the divine offered to us by organized religions. I found myself reviewing images from my most memorable dreams and from certain early memories and reconsidering them as images for the Self in this sense - for as we Quakers would say “that of God” which resides in each person. One of my earliest childhood memories is of the monarch caterpillars we brought home and kept in a shoebox covered with gauze on top of the piano, with stalks of milkweed. There each caterpillar would transform into a chrysalis, a pale spring green at first that gradually deepened and darkened to purple, out of which the monarch butterfly would emerge, leaving behind the fragile transparent shell of the chrysalis. In my memory I held my child finger beside the butterfly and it stepped onto my finger. I carried it carefully through the house to the backyard and held it very still until it took flight and disappeared into the surrounding sky. What if I thought of that butterfly as an image of the Self, that of God within me, and if what I am called to do is witness it’s transformations, the beauty of its being, and to let it go?

The fun of the ongoing conversations as the thoughts raised by different lectures continue the conversation inside my head, at workshops and at meals is something I hope is communicated a tiny bit by this photo of Chris and Lionel meeting on the stairs and pausing for a moment of conversation. 

Sylvia Brinton Perrera also spoke, bringing stories and clinical experience with patients in analysis - bringing concrete detail to the sense of brokenness and fragmentation in the experience of self, especially after trauma, and the need to create the sense of a self, an ego, an “I” who can hold all that brokenness. That spoke to my longing to be strong enough to hold myself - especially when emotions like fear or anger want to grab the microphone and I know we would all be better off if I could hold them in loving stillness and silence. 

Perrera’s first book Descent of the Goddess was published in 1981, the same year Chris published her first book the Goddess. Perrera’s book based on an ancient medieval myth about the relationship between an upper world sky goddess and an underworld goddess of death often seemed to me a metaphor for me relationship with Chris because I thought she was more in touch with the upper world and I with the darkness and underworld. This was the first time Chris and Sylvia met. We had dinner twice with my friend Joannie (who I met in San Diego in 1986 when we were interns together) and Sylvia (who are friends), and Chris and Sylvia discovered that not only are they close in age, and published their books the same year, but also both are one quarter Jewish and also Quaker. We had wonderful conversations. Here is a photo of Chris and Sylvia and Joanie in the pub at our hotel. This morning Chris and I played hooky from organized events and went for a long walk exploring Killarney Park. I have scattered the photos throughout. The weather was amazing, bright sunlight and blue sky, cloud and cold winds and rain or hail, alternating, just moments apart. I noticed that the waiters and staff at the hotel seemed more relaxed (maybe because I was more relaxed after my 10+ mile walk and projected that on them, or invited that response?). We shared a lot of hearty laughter with them and I was struck that for me there is a distinctly Irish quality of laughter, embodied, that somehow acknowledges all the darkness of life and the briefness of the sunshine, and luxuriates in it. This seems to fit with the reading I’ve been doing by Irish writers. I’m sure like all generalizations (including this one!) it fails to do Justice to complexity and subtlety and yet it makes me happy to imagine I am sending a quality of being that is distinctly Irish. 

So - thank you for joining us - as always - and we look forward to sharing the coming days in Ireland with you. Tomorrow (Friday) we will make an excursion to Dingle. Saturday more of “Jung in Ireland” then our celebratory dinner Sunday and Monday we will head for Dublin where we will spend a few days.