Lughnasa                                                                Lughnasa Moon

Two widely divergent thoughts today. The first about family. Families have themes, melodies that play themselves out in different keys and different arrangements, using the instruments available.

Take mine for instance. Both mom and dad had a desire to travel, to see the world. Mom realized hers, making it to Italy and northern Africa as a WAC during WWII. Dad had a dream, a boat, some time in the Gulf of Mexico, then a book about it. Yet he never left the U.S. with the exception of Canada until very late in life when he flew to Singapore to visit my sister. He did, however, take short trips to odd places in Indiana, making do with what was available.

So, travel is a theme. I’m the less traveled of my siblings, only visiting foreign countries, never staying anywhere longer than a week. Mary has traveled a lot, spending years in Southeast Asia working, visiting Tibet, India, Indonesia, Europe, the Emirates. Mark has lived the travel theme most adventurously. He’s been across Russia on the Trans-Siberian railway, picked olives in a kibbutz in Israel, taught in Thailand, Cambodia and Saudi Arabia. We’re a gradation of the wanderer archetype, the one who visits but doesn’t stay.

Then, there’s the fascination with writing and language. Dad was a journalism major and well thought of at Oklahoma State University, a school with a respected journalism department. He wrote professionally, as a reporter and an editor, most of his life.

Mary and Mark advanced this theme by teaching English as a second language (ESL). I’ve advanced this theme through novels, short stories, sermons, essays, this blog. In this instance we’re a spectrum of the Hermes archetype, the one who takes messages and delivers them.

Mom was a teacher. Many of my cousins are teachers, on both sides of the family. Mark has taught ESL as an instructor while Mary has advanced from that role to that of University professor, teaching teachers of ESL for the nation of Singapore. I’ve never taught formally, but many of my roles have involved teaching of one kind or another. Here, we’re a spectrum of the elder archetype, when the elder is one who passes on the tradition.

There are other themes, some more subtle, but these three: wanderer, Hermes and elder seem most predominant. We did not engage these archetypes; these archetypes engaged us, shaped us, set us on our paths.

The second thought is about being alone in our interior. Reading an article in the New York Times today about Hinduism, a comment made me stop, think. The interior life is one path to liberation, the interviewee said, but at bottom the life of devotion and meditation is decidedly anti-individual. What? Yes, he said, at bottom we find in ourselves a deep oneness with all creation, with the brahma. So, at our most interior we are also at our most connected.

So this bounced around for a while. Then, a thought occurred to me. How does he know?  We can say for certain that we know each person’s interior life is unique and private. We can say this much based on our own experience and the mediation of other’s interior experience through interaction. Since those interactions are not identical, hardly identical, we can infer with confidence that the interior life of those we know is different from ours and different from others. It is also self-reported as different by those we know.

It’s an attractive idea, the idea of a substrata of oneness to be found at the end of our meditation, an idea known in the west through Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. But I don’t see how it can possibly be proven and without proof the notion of a layer of oneness underneath it all seems far fetched to me; as does, too, a layer of oneness that transcends our individual state.