Spring                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

The process of reintegration begins now.  These intensive journal workshops mark an end to one period of life and the beginning of another.  That’s by design.  The period I was in when I got to Tucson began when Kate retired, when I left Tucson I had begun a new period, her retirement in the past, and what’s in the present and future is life in the third phase for both of us, together.

BTW:  A big aha on the idea of the third phase which came while listening to a cd by Ira Progoff (Intensive Journal creator) speaking about the process of the journal’s development.  He noted that in society’s not all that long ago, the average lifespan was thirty to forty years.  At some point in that life a death/rebirth ritual would occur and the initiate would emerge an adult member of the society with a particular role to fill.

In contemporary civilization two realities make that clear process difficult, not impossible, but difficult.  The first is the secular nature of society.  We have stripped away the culturally specific religious practices by uprooting ourselves from the context in which those practices had unquestioned authenticity.  So the ritual elements of traditional culture simply has no weight in the modern psyche.

The second reality is the one that directly bears on the third phase.  Progoff notes that with modern life spans an individual might live two or three of the lifetimes available to a member of a traditional society.  Each full lifetime requires a death/rebirth ritual to adjust/reconfigure the image the self carries as its primary identity.  We’ve created two fundamental images for the first two phases:  student and worker/parent.  We have no fundamental image for the third phase, or, in Progoff’s analysis, our third lifetime.

One of the key tasks in the intensive journal workshop itself is to come up with an image for the next phase of your life.  I’m not sure I have it yet, though the Greenman has come to me.

The Celtic triskele (see above) can serve as symbol for this tri-fold life that each of us now is heir to.  The bottom two spirals are the beginning pair:  student and worker/parent. The third life, the third phase, sits atop the first two, growing out of them, but beyond them.