• Tag Archives psyche

  • Gotta Take That Wild Last Ride

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    61  bar steep rise 29.76  4mph W dew-point 53  Beltane, sunny and cool

                    First Quarter of the Flower Moon

    Decided to cancel the Gettysburg leg of my trip.  Need to be at home.  Another time.  Gettysburg is not going anywhere.

    A bit more about radical individualism.  Last night I proposed, as I wrote here yesterday, that civilization, especially through work and love, constrain the unfettered, natural–wild part of us.  There was good criticism of that position, i.e. part of the natural state of humanity is life in family, in relationship.  Another position asserted that deconstructing (I’m not sure about this use of the term, but it is what was used.) ourselves so that wildness could break out denies the process of integration of the mature person. (individuation, perhaps?)  Wildness, in this view, must somehow come together with all of psyche’s zoo or, better, pantheon (my terms) to define a full person.

    It is true that the very nature of what it means to be human gains its definition in a social context.  In that sense, yes, to be human is to be in a family, a clan, a community.  It is also true that the integration model of maturity requires a delicate balancing and harmonizing of disparate impulses, desires and drives into a well-functioning individual. 

    Even so.  A first reaction over against both of these arguments is this:  we all die alone.  This is the existentialist’s key and, to my eye, keen observation.  It can be pushed back through life itself.  We are all born alone, that is we are the only one to emerge from the womb as that distinct individual.  Even triplets are born into different bodies, at a slightly different time, and have unique life experiences.  In life we inhabit our body and no other.  We may, more or less, empathetically walk in another person’s shoes, but we can never get in there while their foot is in the shoe.  You are unique and, whether you wish it to be the case or not, can have it no other way.

    Second, the Jungian model of individuation, which I embrace, calls us to live into our Self, to become, that is, whom we already are.  This may involve harmonization and balancing, but it may also include embracing aspects of our Self heretofore submerged or repressed.  The journey is not to maturity in this view, rather it is toward the clearest and most distinct realization of our uniqueness.

    As a note I read moments ago by James Hillman said, the individuation process prepares us to die.  Last night I did not mention my final thought on wildness.  The last wild act of our life is death.  It is that moment most natural, most terrifying, most awesome, least understood and never tamed.  Death is, for each of us, our wildest moment.  Individuation ensures that we come to that last natural divide, that last wild place, as who we are, shorn of cultural convention and psychological repression.  That we come dressed only in the clothes which our psyche had for us to wear from the very beginning.  That we come to the most wild moment in our life, in other words, as the natural, wild Self into which we were born.

    This journey, this ancient trail, is the ancient trail.  It is one we walk alone from birth until death.  It is this realization that makes me a radical individualist, proud and happy to live in community, yes, but as a person free and unfettered.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Cast Out Your Doubts. Carpe Diem.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    68  bar steady  29.67  3mph NE  dew-point 56  Beltane, cloudy and warm

                   Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

    “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

    A wise thought from our third  greatest president (after GW and Abe).  What we doubt we can do today will not happen tomorrow.  It may even fade from the horizon line of possibility altogether.  A terrible example is the 3/5’s compromise.  The generation which founded our country had many leaders who knew slavery was a burden too great for the Republic to bear.  Among them were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.  Too many, though, doubted a solution to slavery was possible at this time and so agreed to count 3/5’s of the slave population when it came to census figures determining congressional representation.  This doubt obscured slavery’s tragedy, a holocaust of freedom, in a nation founded on the principles of freedom and liberty for all.

    The payment for these doubts came due in 1861 with the Confederate shelling of Ft. Sumter in  Charleston, South Carolina’s harbor.  The next four years would exact a price in blood so high and a rent in the body politic so deep that this nation has not recovered.  The tragedy compounded during reconstruction as freed slaves became tenant farmers, sharecroppers in states with Jim Crow laws.  Lynchings.  The KKK.  Segregation.  Limited practical voting rights.  Employment discrimination. 

    Think how much further along our society would be in a movement toward a common culture, one shared by all Americans regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual preference or national origin if our founding fathers (yes, fathers) had set aside their doubts and made real the full promise of the American revolution.

    With Obama’s candidacy we may be ready for a third movement forward toward such a culture.  The Civil War was one.  The 1950’s and 1960’s were another with Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Civil Rights act and the struggles of Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims–especially Malcom X, CORE, the NAACP, SNICC and grass roots uprisings in many American cities.

    Take stock of the doubts you have today about what you may realize tomorrow.  They are the great barrier reef in your psyche between the ego’s fears and the manifestation of your full Self.       

    Some time outside this morning laying down weed preventer.  This is prologomena to a thorough weeding this week before I take off for Alabama.  A major focus this week will be helping Kate.  She’s going to be here with the dogs for 10 days, again, after 6 days last week.  Anything I can do now to make those days easier will be good.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Politics 📎and tagged

  • Neither Noble nor Ignoble

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    55  bar falls 29.40 2mph S  dewpoint 38 Spring

               Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

    “A man may be so much of everything that his is nothing of anything.” – Samuel Johnson

    A study of valedictorians I read a while back said that, as a group, they rarely distinguish themselves.  Many get their Ph.D’s, but do not gain prizes or renown.  Why is this, the article asked?  It answered that in order to become a valedictorian you have to spread yourself over several areas.  They just don’t have the intensity of focus on one subject, one area that leads to great breakthroughs.  Johnson’s quote reminds me of that article and of my life.

    As a high school valedictorian, I did just what the article suggested.  I worked hard at everything and had no true favorite subject.  I liked Latin and chemistry and English and algebra.  I didn’t much like physics or analytical geometry, but I worked at them anyhow.  Since then, my life has followed the same pattern.  In college I had two majors, anthropology and philosophy, but I had enough credits for a minor in geography, too.  All the while the political movements of the day occupied a great deal of time, as did bridge.  The closest I’ve come to focus was going to seminary and that lead me into more political and organizational work.  The preaching and pastoral care aspects of ministry, the traditional focus for protestants didn’t interest me as much. 

    After I moved away from the ministry, I started to write.  Writing let me do a lot of research in various areas that interested me, still does, but again, no focused intensity.  When I became a Unitarian-Universalist, I guess you could say I became a generalist in the field of faith traditions.  Even my current interest in art is at an encyclopedic museum, although I have carved out a niche for myself in Asian art.  Asian art, however, is a vast field in itself.  Chinese art alone is a lifetime’s study and Japanese art is not far behind.  India, too.

    When I’m down, I see myself as nothing of anything.  When I feel good, I’m a polymath.  In neither case am I Nobel prize material.  Not even ignoble prize material. 

    It has taken many years to accept this almost random curiousity as just who I am.  It feels genetic, or, if not, then it became grafted into my sense of self so early that I can’t find the origin. 


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • Doing Those Things I Would Not Do And Vice Versa

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    58  bar steep fall 29.69 1mph S dewpoint 34 Spring

        Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

    “Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

    I’ve had two instances of this this week and I seem to have trouble learning the lesson.  On Wednesday AM Heather, who manages the corral in the museum’s lobby, demanded my presence and Grace Googins.  We were needed immediately, at 9:50 AM, to greet our 10:00 tours.  When we showed up a bit later than she liked, she was rude and insistent that “a memo had gone out.”  Later, I confronted her, told her I did not like her attitude.  She had an attitude and her facts were wrong.  Our tour group, it turned out, didn’t show up until 10:10 AM.  She apologized later, but I was still angry.  My reaction to her injured me, a lesson I recognize from years of being angry at my father.  Still, not a lesson I’ve learned.  Such confrontations weigh on me.  I need to learn a new style.

    This morning I had a chance to indicate I’d learned a lesson.  Michelle Byfield-Stead was the lead docent for a tour I had agreed to do as a sub for Careen Heegard.  This was the third time I had Michelle as a lead docent.  Each time she has called at the last minute, last night it was late in the evening, and had this excuse or another.  I have never had a tour with her where she was prompt.  This is disrespectful and downright annoying.

    So, I could have gone in this morning and assertively explained to her my problem.  Instead, I only saw her in a group and I was rude.  Again, not a positive response.  I was downright passive aggressive.  Geez.  I know better than this, but somehow, every once in a while, especially if I’m really irked, I act out.  Not always, but sometimes. 

    Still niggling at me even now.  Sigh.   I expect better of myself, but like Paul, find myself doing those I would not do and not doing those things I would.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged