Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 New (Artemis) Moon<\/p>\n
This month is the Artemis moon because Artemis is the goddess of honeybees and the name goddess for our hives.\u00a0 Why this month?\u00a0 Because the end of August is the usual time for honey extraction among beekeepers in our area.\u00a0 Our brand new extraction equipment is in en route to us from Dadant Bee Supplies in 5 boxes of approximately 34 pounds each.\u00a0 Some assembly required.<\/p>\n
The honey labels, designed by fellow Woolly and graphic artist Mark (LockMan) Odegard, are spectacular.\u00a0 Literally.\u00a0 You’ll have to see them.\u00a0 I’ll post an image when I have a photograph.\u00a0 Odie offered to do this design work because he always wanted to keep bees himself.\u00a0 His work displays\u00a0 long study and careful craftmanship.<\/p>\n
A short bit on a longer topic.\u00a0 Analysis.\u00a0 A New York Times Magazine piece, My Life In Therapy<\/a>, raised a question I’ve pondered many times.\u00a0 That is, does therapy accomplish anything? The author, Daphne Merkin, seems to say no, or mostly no; but, her criteria, character change, is, I think, precisely the wrong measure and gives rise to the dilemma that haunts her piece.<\/p>\n Ms. Merkin started in therapy early, at age 10, and has experienced several therapists, most of them Freudian if I read between the lines.\u00a0 I didn’t get started so early, age 24 or so, but I saw therapists and counselors from several schools:\u00a0 existentialist, bumbling pastoral counseling, Adlerian until I hit the big hole in my therapeutic road, treatment for alcoholism.\u00a0 My month long stint in a Hazelden outpatient program spelled the end of my bouncing from this to that trying to sort out the unusual strategies I had for getting in my own way, many of them, near as I could figure out, related to grief over my mother’s sudden death at 46.<\/p>\n Getting sober made a lot of things come clear that had been foggy.\u00a0 Without the medication and confusion of drinking, a lot of my life snapped into focus.\u00a0 Not fast enough however to have prevented a second marriage while I was still drinking.\u00a0 That marriage, like the first one, ended up in the divorce courts.<\/p>\n Raeone and I parted ways in 1988, but not before I sought therapy once again.\u00a0 This time I landed, and I don’t recall how, in the offices of John Desteian, a Jungian analyst.\u00a0 John himself and the Jungian paradigm in particular fit me.\u00a0 Exploration of dreams, the linkage between imagination and self-knowledge and Jung’s special attention to the creative combined to move me forward on that most ancientrail of all, self-knowledge.\u00a0 John encouraged me and forced me deeper in my self-exploration, helping me see the very real boxes I constructed, boxes that prevented me from getting to the core of my self and my true pilgrimage.<\/p>\n It took a long time, maybe 18\u00a0 years off and on, perhaps mostly off, but at certain points weekly for a couple of years at a whack.\u00a0 Over the course of time I did not go through a character change.\u00a0 I went through a dramatic change in self-acceptance.\u00a0 Those melancholic mood swings?\u00a0 Yes, probably somewhat related to my mother’s death.\u00a0 Now though they presage a return to creative activity, an ingathering of energy and self collecting itself for a push forward.\u00a0 The ministry?\u00a0 An aspect of my three-part self certainly– scholar, monk and poet–but not well related, since the monk is a meditative, solitary archetype for the religious life and the ministry has an extroverted, communal structure.\u00a0 A better fit?\u00a0 Writing, solitary work.<\/p>\n The writing has not been a royal road to success, measured in the externals of publishing and money-making and those are real measures.\u00a0 It did, however, let me focus on creativity, on the domestic front:\u00a0 cooking, husband, father, gardener and now bee-keeper and on the inner work of the religious or faith pilgrimage.\u00a0 It’s not that I’ve not written, I have. Six novels.\u00a0 Many short stories and essays.\u00a0 This blog and many handwritten journals.\u00a0 The shift did allow what I call my Self to lead me rather than the demands of the culture or my own ratocinations based on expectations from childhood.<\/p>\n No, I do not believe the goal of therapy or analysis is character change, a goal that may not be achievable at all.\u00a0 Rather, I see the goal of analysis as the clarification of self, stripping away the accretions of fear, role, pleasing others, traps which cause us to shut some or even all of our self away as unworthy or unnecessary or unwanted,\u00a0 and in that clarification coming to design a life congruent with the Self, one that nurtures and explores its unique possibilities.\u00a0 This may mean dramatic role changes; it did for me, moving from the ministry to the study.\u00a0 This may mean accepting parts of your self that seem unacceptable, for me melancholy and introversion and my need to write, all of which felt unwanted at one time or the other.\u00a0 This may mean moving from a place of external success to a place of internal satisfaction.\u00a0 It has for me.<\/p>\n Analysis with John Desteian, using the insights of Carl Jung, helped me achieve a goal I didn’t even know I had, becoming more like who I already was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 New (Artemis) Moon This month is the Artemis moon because Artemis is the goddess of honeybees and the name goddess for our hives.\u00a0 Why this month?\u00a0 Because the end of August is the usual time for honey extraction among beekeepers in our area.\u00a0 Our brand new extraction equipment is in en route to us … Continue reading What is Analysis for?<\/span>