Relationships, freedom and berries

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My friend told me a story the other day.  She said, what if you’re hungry and you know that red berries are easy to find, they will always be there? Blue berries are much rarer and more elusive. Maybe because of that, when you do find them, you get that extra burst of flavour and delight.  Which do you prize more, the red or the blue?

How do we value what we receive?  We may value the red berries for their reliability and steadfastness, the blue berries for their unpredictability.  Perhaps we take the red berries for granted, we can take or leave them, they may lose interest for us just because they are there. We eat them to survive. The blue berries may inspire greater attachment and sometimes even addiction. Both bring joy to life and, of course like anything else, it is possible to become addicted to joy.

Where is that fine line between caring for and about, and attachment, that may even border on addiction?  These are some of the questions that came up when reflecting on berries!

I’m torn between blue and red berries myself, when it comes to life. I like them both – not equally but differently.  Life would be depleted without either, and unsurvivable without both. 

We cannot be totally without preferences, without responses, without ego, nor would we want to be all the time; this is what makes us who we are, this is what gives us life - and yet how do we make sure our responses are healthy and life-sustaining?

Even birds have favoured seeds and berries – hence the current research project to discover the seeds that turtle doves prefer in order to preserve and grow their dwindling population.

So, turn the berry into a person, and that defines relationship. Some people are there for you, you feel they will always be there even as you learn that everything can change; yet you prize and value them for that Thereness which they offer you right now. You may be attached to them, but in a kind of loose, undemanding way. Is that because you believe there’s no risk to their Thereness?

Other people are here and there now and then, sometimes with you sometimes not. They are delightful and energising when they’re there. The question is – how does their intermittent Thereness affect their pull for and on you?  Do you get hooked on the uncertainty or do you get fed up?  Does absence make the heart grow fonder?  Can the uncertainty be used consciously as a tool to identify, expose and even intensify attachment?

Through practice and self-study, it is possible to observe the patterns in yourself, in others, between you, and move closer to a dispassionate state, a more flexible state of greater freedom from being affected by external circumstances. It is possible to survive on any berries or without berries – for a time, anyway. You can fast, or you can feast. 

Can you be tenderly amused by it – the response it prompts in you? And can you take it seriously, without getting too heavy about it?  Do you care, with a light touch?

Or do you go off in search of honey berries instead? (These are berries that gradually ripen to blueness, from Siberia, rarer still, and meant to be this year’s most desirable crop.)

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I’m not pixels on a web-page

Nor a ghost in your machine

I don’t sit inside your mind-cage

Nor keep your conscience clean

I am a real live person

You could call me on the phone

I stand beneath the same sun

And I call my life my own.

- Vivienne Tuffnell, shared on Facebook

Life on the internet is strange.  However, I have come to realise Facebook is my friend. All the names and faces, the little avatars, are just different manifestations of informing spirit. Facebook isn’t just the delivery channel, Facebook is an informing spirit. Who else could bring Thoreau and Jung together, cheek to jowl, on my News Feed?

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”

― C.G. Jung

“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”

–Thoreau

These two Facebook voices were unconsciously dialoguing with each other, or so it felt to me, and I derived meaning from their exchange. 

I love the juxtapositions, the unexpected and bizarre conjunctions, amidst the rest.  As in real life, so it is on Facebook. There are the red berries and the blue berries. You know what you can expect, and do you devalue it because it’s certain to be there? Is it the blue berries who get the special attention, the leap of the heart, the burst of mental energy?  Can you really tell the difference between what you might take to be a red berry and a blue?  Maybe we need to be reminded sometimes.

How do you feel when the red berries don’t show up?  If you get wind of that, do you try and stockpile fuel like when the tanker drivers threaten a strike?  Maybe the red berries need a break sometimes, maybe they’re busy, or they feel like going on strike.  Maybe they experiment with being a blue berry sometimes, to see and show you what it’s like.

Can a leopard change its spots?

The Tree of Scarlet Berries

The rain gullies the garden paths

And tinkles on the broad sides of grass blades.

A tree, at the end of my arm, is hazy with mist.

Even so, I can see that it has red berries,

A scarlet fruit,

Filmed over with moisture.

It seems as though the rain,

Dripping from it,

Should be tinged with colour.

I desire the berries,

But, in the mist, I only scratch my hand on the thorns.

Probably, too, they are bitter.

- Amy Lowell

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The games people play….Eric Berne’s famous work needs an update and expansion to include internet games. Beyond the meaningful randomness, that’s another reason why the Facebook Newsfeed is such a rich tapestry of life.  You have everything on it from factual updates about the world picture and the minutiae of someone’s life, to someone else’s humour that might also be your own, to sincere wishes for life improvement, to attention-seeking strategies, to pleas for help from victims to rescuers,  even persecuting comments such as threats to ‘defriend’ …. to genuine exchanges, sharing of items of mutual interest,  thoughtful reflections, quotations, art, music, poetry, offered without the interference of ego.

Eric Berne’s games are serious, and people can get hurt.  I have friends who won’t use Facebook not because they think it’s superficial but because they find the anxiety of whether someone in particular, or anyone, will respond to their post or their comment too intense; their ego feels battered and rejected if no one does.   These feelings come and go, they are rich material for self-study and practice, and you can get past them.

Whether the ego feels a little overlooked or undervalued in a moment doesn’t matter in the greater scheme of things, and staying with those feelings is powerful.  What does matter are the underpinning relationships, and they are as real as you let them be.  Conducting them with care, respect and reciprocity is a responsibility and a gift.

Interestingly, as I’ve written this post, I’ve seen someone enquire over the disappearance of a Facebook friend saying they were ‘Facebook-worried’ about this person – as if it wasn’t real concern, or somehow they felt sheepish or embarrassed about it, because it’s only online.

That makes me think of Viv’s poem.

‘I’m not pixels on a web-page

Nor a ghost in your machine

I don’t sit inside your mind-cage

Nor keep your conscience clean

I am a real live person…’

Maybe sometimes we forget this, the reality of our online connections, just as we may take for granted our three-dimensional relationships in life.  We tread on them, making crushed berries. We scrape our hands on the branches in our desire to get the fruit.

Yet the berries are there, and they are as sweet as we let them be.

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Wallace Stevens, from ‘Sunday Morning’

In a right place

I experienced my first Facebook bereavement the other week.  It was quite shocking.  A man who had written some interesting comments on posts – not just mine – had been quiet for a few weeks, and I suddenly felt prompted to look at his page.  I felt a little foolish wondering, even worrying about his absence.  Probably he was on holiday.  He lived in Belgium and I knew he had family in the US.  It was a very strange experience making my way backwards on his Timeline.  First there were comments from friends and family which sounded like he might be away or travelling.  Then there were just some ‘x’s and ‘o’s.  And then there were some poignant comments, from memory they went like this – ‘I went into your flat and I saw your shoes waiting for you by the door’.  ‘I went through your papers today, I know you wouldn’t have liked that intrusion into your privacy but I had to and it made me feel closer to you.’  ‘I miss you….’

I experienced a dawning feeling of horror as I scrolled down the page through comments of shock and sadness from others, and then finally reaching confirmation of the by now obvious news.  I felt peculiarly unsettled by this experience, and almost like an intruder, as I had never met this man.  I hardly knew him.  And yet his death was also a loss to me – admittedly not a huge loss but one just the same.  When I pause to think about it, why shouldn’t there be deaths and losses on Facebook as in any walk of life?  And why should they be less important or impactful, or even less real?   We trivialise our internet connections as part of the whole social pressure to ‘not take things too seriously’. 

Although I had never met this man face to face, I respected his comments.  He felt that people used Facebook in the most banal ways.  He introduced a different type of comment onto his page which was thoughtful and well-received.  He prized courtesy and good manners – not as unthinking rituals  but as signs of care and respect – and he re-posted an article another friend of mine had shared about how the ‘niceties’, saying ‘thank you’ and ‘you’re welcome’, were falling into disuse.  (The article wasn’t all gloom and doom though as it talked about how new conventions for showing gratitude and making connections, were emerging.) He was a role model who did his best in small but important ways to make a positive contribution.  He had a faith in being human.

So I missed him.  I got over it – faster than if he’d been someone I knew in a more complete sense.  But I do think about him and the little glimpse I had of his character and life.  And somehow it made me feel all over again that whatever and however the connections we make – whether face-to-face or on Facebook -, they are meaningful and an important part of the fabrics of our lives, even if they are slight or passing.

A curious relationship

I had another more direct  encounter with death a few days later.  I went on a a familiar walk which requires me to cross a field that is sometimes occupied by grazing cattle or sheep.  On this particular day when I got to the entrance, a large group of cattle, maybe 30, were huddled near the gate.  I had a bad feeling, but they all legged it to the other end of the path so I thought I’d go in as turning around would have added a half hour I didn’t have to my already moderately long walk.  They were down near the cattle grid that I needed to cross so I decided to give them a wide berth to give them time to move on.  The opposite happened, and the next thing I knew all 30 were racing towards me.  I shouted and clapped but this only seemed to excite them further, so I sized up the situation and realised if I didn’t turn and run to leap over a fence, I might regret it.  They chased me and I just managed to hurl myself over the fence before they were there.  They raced past me to another far end of the field.

Having a fear of heights, I couldn’t get back over the fence without the adrenalin rush.  And I needed to re-enter it to get back on track.  So I rolled under the fence with the cows a good distance away and – I couldn’t believe it – they raced at me again!  I ran over the cattle grid as they pounded past me on the other side, and made my way home.

I felt shocked but strangely triumphant, which seems a strange response.  I still can’t help but focus on the achievement of hurling myself over a fence that I can’t climb, rather than the fact that I came this close to being seriously injured if not trampled.

At another time I might have focused on the darker potential outcome.  But right now, I am feeling in a right place.  It is a feeling I can summon just by thinking about it at this moment.  The incredible lightness of being – you really feel it as you throw yourself over a fence!  I guess it’s a feeling that is always there, but for some reason it is more available at this time.  I don’t know why.

 

I sat in a spring garden just coming to life last weekend, in between two wonderful performances of 18th century dance tunes by Boldwood, and thought:

Three times in three weeks I have been at talks and conferences and I have felt in the wrong place.  That has felt really good!  Feeling in the wrong place has been accompanied by a feeling that I am really in a right place even as I am indifferent to what is taking place around me.   A lot of things have just fallen away, and it is confirming to hear these people talking around me, and think no, this doesn’t mean anything to me right now, it is a space- and time- and life-filler. 

This feeling of satisfaction or contentment, holding the germ of excitement (nothing like complacency), is unlikely to last.  Maybe it’s spring, or a new financial year, or the fact that at last there is rain, or a line that has been drawn, or the fruit of a practice - I can’t say.  Just a feeling of balanced clarity and a happiness at having shed some of the load. 

Bird on a wave

I often go for a walk with my cat.  Well, she isn’t really there, but I can see her in my mind’s eye vividly on my right – she’s always on my right – and she moves with her usual lithe agility, leaping from time to time, and keeping up admirably despite her little legs.  I think of her as my daemon in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.  A daemon is the manifestation of a person’s soul.  Our daemons are our inner friends, our companions.  Perhaps they capture or encapsulate the core of who we are.  If we lose our daemons, we lose the core of ourselves, we become hollow men and women – this was the risk to the children in Pullman’s tale. 

My cat is playful, she is also a little vicious, she is quite the huntress, she kills without scruples as cats do.  She is light on her feet and always ready to perk up.  She is independent and wary but also very affectionate.  She enjoys deep relaxation.  Not all qualities I wish to own.

More recently, on my left side, I have started to sense another presence from time to time.  Is this another daemon?  Are you allowed more than one?  I think that may be outside the rules.   I have felt this presence as vividly as my cat.  Both are known but enigmatic to me.

We think we know others, do we ever?  This is a common refrain.  I have been thinking of how we have stories of others, as we do of ourselves.  And, specifically, how there are the darker tales and the lighter tales – the cat that kills and the cat that purrs on my lap.  I note how when I am feeling light-hearted, the lighter tales are the ones I tell, and I don’t care if they’re true or not!  I feel these stories are better for me, so I tell them and I believe them.  I feel light. 

But are they true?

When things are out of sorts for whatever reasons, the darker tales dominate, and I feel uneasy and perturbed.  In those moments I can tell myself to shift to the lighter tales, but it’s not that easy to just do what I say.  It’s not an on or off switch.  I have to be in a better place for the shift to happen.  I have to practise to be in that place.

And when I am in the right place, I don’t tell any tales.  I have no need for tales, and there are no tales to tell.

I imagine we all have a friend about whom we have dark and light tales – or if you don’t, then think about it.  Sometimes it is someone who you feel you don’t really know, though if we pause it could be anyone. And sometimes it is someone you may feel you know very well, or even best.

It could be yourself – the one we know most and also perhaps least. 

Many of us live our own light tales, sometimes dogmatically and unflinchingly, in the public world – this is our persona.  And sometimes we have brainwashed ourselves to believe these light tales are the whole truth.  Some of us are stuck in the dark tales.  Somehow we need to live and walk with both – and perhaps get to a place where there are no tales.

‘Simple things are always the most difficult.  In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life.  That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy…all these are undoubtedly great virtues…But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea, the very fiend himself – that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved – what then?’ – Carl Jung, ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy’ – Collected Works, volume 11

I could choose any friend to have on my left.  But I don’t choose.  This friend is simply there, all of a sudden I feel their presence.  

Suddenly on my walk, flanked by friend and cat, I understand why they are there with me – my inner teacher, my wiser self.  I trudge along, accompanied on both sides, without and within. 

Now, in the absence of stories, there is a felt sense. 

 Artwork courtesy of Penelope Hill

‘The solemn Alps – the siren Alps’

Last week I went to see ’Dancing in the Flames’, the film about the Jungian analyst Marion Woodman where she is interviewed by Andrew Harvey.  A compelling story.  She talked about how when she was a child, she was a gypsy six days a week (her protective heroine was Joan of Arc) and then she smartened up on a Sunday (her father was a minister). Her life challenge was about getting in touch with the gypsy within, and Emily Dickinson was one of her key touchstones in this process.  She read this poem incredibly evocatively with a verbal use of pause that brings Dickinson’s punctuation to life:

‘Our lives are Swiss -

So still — so Cool –
Till some odd afternoon
The Alps neglect their Curtains
And we look farther on!

Italy stands the other side!
While like a guard between –
The solemn Alps –
The siren Alps
Forever intervene!’

I think we all have an Italy and Switzerland within us, a gypsy and a Sunday School child.  And we all have our Alps.

I have also recently been reading a fascinating biography of Tenzin Palmo, the first Western Buddhist nun, Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie.  She talks about the tension inside of her between being a passionate worldly woman vs being a nun, and how at various times in her youth she thought she might be a woman for as long as a relationship lasted and then revert to being a nun.  But the nun wins out, reconciling and integrating her human passion, and it was when she spent 12 years living in a tiny cave high up in the Himalayas, up a treacherous path through the Tibetan Alps, that she knew she was happy with that outcome.

It strikes me that, on the surface, Marion Woodman and Tenzin Palmo made opposite choices, but did they really?  Interestingly, both embraced the feminine, if apparently, superficially anyway, in very different ways.

The way we reconcile these impulses or aspects of ourselves is a lifelong dilemma.  Perhaps many people reconcile them through suppression or denial - but suppression isn’t reconciliation.  There needs to be some kind of working through to achieve a real integration.  And perhaps this is the process of individuation.

Maybe this process is a little like having Switzerland and Italy - as a choice.  On one level, the choice is binary.  Where shall I go to study or for my holiday – or to live?  Through the glossy holiday brochures, they both make a pitch for or at you.  They are both appealing, but you know deep down that the one is the place you are meant to be.  Maybe you know that straightaway, maybe it takes time to realise.

What happens if Switzerland tells tales about Italy and Italy badmouths the Swiss? 

‘The Swiss are so straightlaced, they will restrict you, everything will be organised, controlled and counted.  Life will be so predictable and so dull.’

‘Ah, but the Italians are emotion run wild.  They are too extreme, there is no order, you will go mad!’

And more likely than not, many of us are on the Swiss side and always the solemn Alps - the siren Alps, stand in between.  When will they neglect their curtains?

Standing on the Alps (or was it Stanage Edge in Derbyshire? – the equivalent of the Alps for someone with a fear of heights!), I hear two voices clamouring to tell truth and deriding the truth of the other.  But the only voice worth listening to is the one that is inside.  A third voice.

 

What is this third voice?  The voice that leaps off shore or rises from the water, that sees beyond the Alps and beyond the countries on either side.  It is not a voice that evaluates or interprets.

‘I think I have two sides to my nature – one is this basic need to be alone, the love of isolation, the other is a sociability and friendliness,’ says Tenzin Palmo.  Coming down from the cave in the mountains after all those years, she speaks of her experience:

‘There is a kind of inner freedom which I don’t think I had when I started – an inner peace and clarity…there is an inner distance towards whatever occurs, whether what’s occurring is outwards or inwards.’  [Cave in the Snow, pages 143-144]

The clamour of life subsides, perhaps Italy and Switzerland’s voices fade whether they be outside or within, as this quieter voice speaks from beyond the illusion of their invitations and demands.

“‘Sometimes, it feels like being in an empty house with all the doors and windows wide open and the wind just blowing through without anything obstructing it.  Not always.  Sometimes one gets caught up again, but now one knows that one is caught up again….It’s not a cold emptiness,’ she stated emphatically, ‘it’s a warm spaciousness.’”

A contemporary mandala

I woke up the other morning with a single image emblazoned in my mind.  It was a kind of contemporary mandala.  Mandala means ‘circle’ in Sanskrit.  It is:

A geometric figure representing the universe in Hindu and Buddhist symbolism. Such a symbol in a dream, representing the dreamer’s search for completeness (Wikipedia)

My dream mandala is a white circle, it looks like a plate, with purple interconnected animals on it, in even symmetrical lines running across the plate.  Purple on white.  I think they are horses, possibly lions.  It is such a clear image in my mind, I can still see it.  This lovely artwork by Mark Hearld gives some sense of the style of the animals, though there is way too much going on in it and the colour is wrong. 

I never dream of mandalas, and I can’t remember ever waking up with such a clear lone image in my mind, apparently unrelated to any dream that came before.  It felt important, it came up on the screen of my blank-slate mind like a flash photograph, commanding me to wake and attend.

Jung saw the mandala as “a representation of the unconscious self”, and he believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to work towards wholeness.  

“My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day…I guarded them like precious pearls….It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation. ” – Memories, Dreams and Reflections

Dreaming of a mandala or seeing a mandala in your dreams, is often seen as a spiritual yearning. 

What could a plate with lots of interconnected purple horses mean, I wondered?  I was  surprised, intrigued and a little unsettled to receive this feedback from a friend:

‘Purple is generally seen as the color of change, because blue is the colour of light going away from you and red is the color of light coming toward you…  Horses are generally seen as representing connections in life.  Perhaps you are having some choice in this area, and you have a longing for something more.’

The mandala is a symbol from within, it is unsolicited feedback to myself from deep inside myself.  Maybe it is an echo of memories or experiences sometime in my life or beyond the boundaries of my personal life, maybe it is connected with the past that stretches beyond myself, whether personal, generational or that of humanity.  It is an enigmatic message which I can attribute rational meaning to, but I will never know.

Another friend felt that the mandala holds ‘the idea of the “return” – always coming back to the same place (to know it for the first time?)’  This takes me back to TS Eliot and my past and my deeper Self. 

The mandala is an image I can meditate on, if I can stop myself from getting caught up in trying to decipher it.  It feels like a mysterious message that has the power to unsettle a comfortable life.   It’s something I can’t ignore and yet something I can never resolve.

‘Most mandalas have an intuitive, irrational character and, through their symbolical content, exert a retroactive influence on the  unconscious. They therefore possess a “magical” significance, like icons, whose possible efficacy was never consciously felt…’ – Carl Jung, Concerning Mandala Symbolism

I feel hopeful and uplifted by this image.  Then I note it is in space, it is one-dimensional and it has no depth to it, no shadow.

Even mandalas have shadows.  And mine does too.  It augurs some promise that I can’t quite fathom, and in that promise is also a fear.  All change holds promise and fear.  Against my will I hear words read aloud, words that I did not exactly solicit but neither did I refuse them.

This is the shadow side of my mandala.  It is far more literal, definite and directive, yet I can’t read it with confidence either.

How to reconcile both sides of a mandala?

It is not possible to believe something and disbelieve it in the same moment.  Thoughts oscillate and trying to hold belief and disbelief at once is a mind-bending experience.  It creates a bodily sensation that can only be likened to feeling that one’s brain and heart are being wrenched apart – rather like a nut you are trying to prise open with a nutcracker.

We are all more than one self, and finding what Jung called our Authentic Self and liberating that Self from memories, tendencies, habits, is a lifelong goal.  It is never easy and it can be helped but also hindered by someone else’s messages from outside.  So I turn to the inside image as a compass.

I feel that my mandala has appeared to speak to me from a deeper place.   Its message may become clearer over time if I can strip my mind of its resistances and barriers, to receive it.

What if Rapunzel had been a man?

I thought of Rapunzel the other day.  We all carry certain images from childhood.  While Rapunzel wasn’t one of my favourite fairy tale characters, I have quite a clear visual image of a blank conical tower made of smooth grey bricks with no entrance, no stairs and just a lone high window.  The single window is factually accurate I find, rereading the fairy tale.  Inside is a burnished golden-haired girl weaving or spinning.   And of course who can forget the call to the girl to let her hair down so that the prince can climb up?  I seem to have temporarily forgotten the witch in my abbreviated remembered version of this story.

There is a tradition in literature, as perhaps in life, of women being locked in towers or rooms.  I remember the Lady of Shalott but also The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a short story composed in the late 19th century of first-person journal entries written by a woman suffering from nervous depression who is locked by her husband into the upstairs bedroom of a house.  She becomes obsessed by the yellow wallpaper and the world closes in on her.  In the end she feels safe only in this room.

I also think of Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre, and Penelope weaving in her tower.  Each of these stories has a different aspect to it, yet they all share an element of enclosure, withdrawal from the world, and in the more extreme cases fear, madness and repression.   These women are closed in from the world by others (often but not always by men, though the stories themselves are often written by women), and sometimes by their own choice; and in some cases the world closes in on them.  What are they closing out?

The maiden Rapunzel can become a full-blooded woman only when she literally lets down her hair to let in the world in the form of the prince, and then weaves a ladder to let herself out.  In the fairy tale, the witch entraps her and her prince, and she is sent to the desert and he is blinded for a time.  So Rapunzel is punished for making worldly contact beyond that of her captor.

In all of these stories women are placed in containers as if they are a dangerous element and need to be controlled – or is it protected?  They do not build their own towers as men do.

The story of Rapunzel would have been so different if Rapunzel had been a man.  A man in a tower is a warrior, a captive, a hostage of war, a child being bred to lead the world; or a wizard in the making.  The image of an enclosed man is very different from an enclosed woman, is it not? A man would not wait patiently in captivity, he would have been dragged there against his will or he would persistently strive to find a way out.

A man’s tower is altogether different.

A man might build his own tower and this could be a deeply creative act.  When Jung built his tower in Bollingen, he said:

‘I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired.  Or, to put it another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the “Tower”’ (p. 223, Memories, Dreams and Reflections).

The tower may be the creation of a place to embody the Self – a place in the world, but not of the world, set apart.  It may also be a place of protection, to keep oneself safe, a place of recovery and restoration yet also of isolation.  It may be a place of power, of surveillance, a spot from which to view and review the world, take its measure, take its pulse.

Men or women, we are all Rapunzels in our towers.  We see the world through our single little window.  Do we have a door for entry and exit, or are we trapped in our towers?  Must we let our hair down to let others in and out? This came to me quite powerfully as I was picking my way with care down the uneven steps of a tower I was visiting.

The views from out the tower are always the ones we are drawn to, but what about the views within?

I felt someone watching me as I made my way down carefully, conscious of the risks of losing my footing, a lesson in self-consciousness.

Visiting someone else’s tower can only be approached with care and trepidation, and also with hope. How will they greet us?  Will we be welcome?  Will the window be open or barred?  Will they let their hair down to guide us in?

Being in a tower, even one of our own making, is from one perspective choosing to barricade or protect ourselves from the world.  This may be a wise choice.  Yet it may not be a choice at all.  I see people in towers that are a mere few steps above ground level, as for an elderly person who cannot navigate steps easily and so feels cut off from the world both physically and psychologically.  This sense of imposed detachment is captured tangibly and poignantly in the arduousness of those few steps.

If someone lives in a tower, whether physically or metaphorically, they can see visitors or intruders coming a long time before they actually arrive.  There is good time to prepare.  Yet how does it feel when the visitors go, once more alone in the tower with oneself?

Artwork courtesy of Penelope Hill.

The call of the grail

We all have a grail – something deep inside of us which is mysterious and elusive, and which calls us to follow it to find its meaning.  Yet we spend much, sometimes all, of our lives seeking that grail outside of ourselves, as if the meaning lies somewhere else.  We believe the universe holds its answers to our questions somewhere.   Somehow the thought that there may be no complete or clear answers outside, that fragments of meaning are all we’re likely to find, and that living with each fragment is a way forward, a clue, is a thought to which the human mind so often responds with aversion.

There is something so reassuring in believing there are answers outside us, which we might discover.  Is this the reassurance some people feel in being told what to do?  It’s an easier and lazier option, and it gives you something to blame or react against.  And yet believing there are answers outside us is such a precarious and dangerous belief to hold.  What if we don’t find them?  What if they’re wrong? What if someone else thinks they know better when they don’t?

In contrast, we can never lose what is inside us, much as we might want to sometimes.  The challenge is to find it.  Yet also we need to be able to acknowledge it, to retrieve it, making sense of the past yet not being controlled by it, finding liberation within it if not from it.  We need to make a disciplined yet not unyielding effort, and to believe in this process of retrieval and discovery.  We need to live with it even when it may feel or sometimes be, unbearable or unlivable.  Grails have shadows too.

The word ‘grail’ comes from the same root as ‘gradual’, a feast presented in stages.  The grail is often symbolised as a cup, a platter or a stone, and it draws on myths about cauldrons.  The Celtic cauldron of plenty was a sacred vessel and it is said that you need to be in a spiritual state to partake of it, you need to have truth in your heart and purity of intention.  These qualities are essential when on the trail of the inner grail.

For Carl Jung, the grail was a powerful symbol of transformation, linked with individuation – becoming the person you are meant to be.  One answer to the question, ‘what do we find from the grail?’, may be insight into our Self.  Insight not knowledge, which often comes to us in oblique and unsought ways.  ‘To be effective a symbol must be an unsurpassed container of meaning’ – it is powerful because we can’t quite understand it using our rational intellectual mind, its meaning only dawns through intuition, and time is another necessary ingredient.  In this age of microwave meals, the process of preparation and then the cooking itself is often rushed.

Dreams can be containers of the meaning of our grail.  In 1937 Jung had a dream when he was in India, soon after he came out of hospital where he had been ill with dysentery.  Jung’s dream had the impact of leading him deeper into his important work on alchemy, the psychological process of inner transformation, as he followed the grail of his dream into reality.  In his dream Jung ‘found himself with friends on an island off the coast of Southern England.  Before them was a castle dimly lit with candles, which he recognised as the home of the Holy Grail.  But the Grail wasn’t there yet.  Jung knew it was their task to bring the Grail to the castle from the small, uninhabited, and solitary house on the island where it was hidden.  Next he found himself on the shoreline of a deserted, desolate area.  With neither bridge nor boat to be seen he realised he would have to swim across alone to fetch the Grail.’ (Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul)

‘…there are two gates through which dreams reach us.  Those that come through the Ivory Gate cheat us with empty promises that never see fulfilment.  Those that come through the Gate of Horn inform the dreamer of the truth.’  Homer, The Odyssey Book XIX – thanks to Viv for drawing my attention to this quote

I was listening to someone talk about the grail and Jung’s dream recently, and I was unexpectedly drawn to remember a dream I had quite awhile ago that has come back to me from time to time.  Now I realise that I’ve been trying to work out which gate this dream came through, and also which gate it unlocks – questions that can’t be answered by rational processes, though sensory data is an essential element in the intuitive process.

My dream also took me near the coast of Southwest England, to a place I had been before in life.  Somehow I got past a padlocked gate to discover soothing sweeping vistas.  The place was empty and the owner of the property wasn’t there, I felt like a trespasser or an intruder.  I wanted to leave before people started arriving.  I was suddenly in a rush, I left too fast.  I realised I would never make it back in time and was upset with myself for even making this journey.  In my haste to depart I had to back out of a cul de sac and I scraped my car.

[An aside: the car is a vital extension of the Self in dreams and in real life.  Someone once told the story of driving his car into a bus twice, totalling it, before he realised this was a metaphor for where his life was going, a wake-up call.   Our cars tend to break down when something else is malfunctioning in our lives and, more often, in our selves.]

I felt drawn to unlock the meaning of my dream to discover whether it came through the Ivory or Horn gate; and to discover also whether the gate within it was made of ivory or horn.

I revisited the real location of my dream, in a quest to make sense of it. Bringing with me the two essential qualities – truth in my heart and purity of intention – I was ruefully amused to discover that there were no external sweeping vistas, no nice places to relax inside, only a solid wood fence, and that the gate was always unlocked.  So was this a dream that came through the Gate of Ivory?  Did it offer the empty-handed promise of the trickster? Was it truth or illusion?  And would I be damaged on the journey?

Going back to the place, however, I felt more sure that my dream offered a truth, though a truth that was as yet indeterminate and shadowy.   Chiaroscuro is a good word for it (one of those words I’ve always loved and rarely been able to use!)

On the way back there, I had been led to doubt.   Once introduced doubt, like bindweed, is hard to eradicate.  It chokes faith, the two vying for the deeper roots.  As a result, I had locked the gate, locking myself out.  And doubt had led me to back out of the cul de sac and damage my car, my self.

However, a scrape is but a minor incident, a war wound that soon heals and can be repaired,  just a ‘message on the skin’.

Letting myself back in (instead of driving straight in to the cul de sac), giving and taking the right time, not intruding, seeing what is really there, not taking opinion for fact - I turn my attention to unpacking the living meaning of my dream, exploring its potential, following the call of my grail, a gradual feast.

Thanks to Penelope Hill for sharing all the wonderful artwork from a variety of sources.