Better late than never: Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Mercury retrograde

If I could turn back time (and other delusions).

“The suspense is terrible! I hope it will last.”

Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder edition, of course)

In the spirit of today’s Mercury retrograde station when our thoughts take a turn backward or at least slantwise toward recollection and reflection, I’m sharing a passage that would have made a marvelous end to last week’s recounting of the empty threats I made as a freshly minted divorcée to make a mad dash to the woods and begin anew as resident spinster mistress to mystery.   

If you read it then you know the truth that my setting sail into spinsterhood looked more like Cher aboard the battleship USS Missouri than anything reminiscent of a monastic aesthetic.

In my dreams…

It’s worth mentioning here that the ocean (along with the woods) is the archetypal symbol of the collective unconscious: the otherworldly home of the archetypes we’re all human hosts to. If we’re going to be lost in the woods or inside the stormy seas of psyche, then please, let there be Cher. Unmoored, but make it Billboard.

The following excerpt from Jungian priest Dr. Robert Johnson’s book She: Understanding Feminine Psychology speaks directly to what Carl Jung called the “tension of opposites.”  Those inner aspects of ourselves that are so diametrically opposed in nature it often makes mere existence feel more like an underwater ping-pong match than a life.   

“There seems to be a great urgency in the inner world now to bridge the two worlds of heaven and earth. If only heaven would wait until the children are grown or until life has settled a little! But heaven shows no sign of waiting. [A woman] is jerked from the world of practicality into the white world of vision - and terrified that if she explores that world she will not find her way back into the practical time-space world. This is a severe danger and it is easy to fall into the trap of the either-or mentality.  Dr. Jung once said that medieval man lived by either-or, but that modern people have to live either-and-or.  A truly modern person cannot go off to a convent or the Himalayas exclusively to search for spirituality; nor can she pour herself exclusively into her family, profession, and practicality. It is the prime task of a truly modern mind to endure both the spiritual and the practical as a framework for her life…

The dream is unfinished – as it should be since she has not yet reached the midpoint of her life. It will take another half lifetime to draw it to a synthesis and to bring the earth and heaven elements to a workable conclusion. The promise from the old myth [of Eros and Psyche] is that a daughter is born – whose name is Pleasure. When one has grown strong and wise enough, the warring elements which cost so much suffering and anxiety, will become complementary elements and produce the great work of art which is your own life.”

Robert Johnson

Jung said we don’t solve our problems, instead we grow larger than them.  But how do we do that?  Once we’ve acquired some measure of that elusive elixir, consciousness, then it becomes a matter of endurance.  When we are willing to carry the tension of opposites within - heaven and earth, matter and spirit, shadow and light, feminine and masculine… along with the bounty of antithetical archetypes that have made their mark on you and are each asking something of you (whether Venusian, virginal, Dionysian, delusional… you get the idea) - and we are able to endure this intrapsychic sensation of being torn apart, then we may just be gifted with what’s called the transcendent function.  It’s the moment in fairy tales when the fairy godmother appears and - bippity-boppity-boo - just like that a new path appears before you illuminating a way through the thicket that prior could never have occurred to you.  

There’s more to come on my midwinter mansoon and what it’s meant for me as I march forward into what I’m hoping will become my own mashup of The Middle Way (fingers crossed).  For now I’ll leave you in the tension of our time with this little love poem from long ago, last week (what is time anyway?). I’m calling it Unwritten, but of course, that’s subject to change.

I thought you would send me letters
It’s because you said so
Don’t you remember?
I told you we always give the medicine we most need to receive
Meanwhile, the inkwell threatens to run dry
You know where I live
It is the deep reservoir we call home
With no forwarding address