Posts related to the psyche.
Are you familiar with grafted plants? Nowadays most cultivated roses, fruit and ornamental trees have been grafted. In grafting, a horticulturist attaches the trunk of a preferred plant variety—say an especially beautiful rose—to the rootstock of a wild and more vigorous plant of the same species. The resulting plant carries the best characteristics of both…
Bizarre skid marks on morning pavement, greet me on my way to work. Bent guard rail and black scuffed curbs, all the shadow’s handiwork. Night time can be a dangerous time. “Nothing good happens after 10:00 p.m.,” say those who would know. The sun goes down and consciousness wanes. The shadow comes out to…
My neighbor’s black and white cat, Beanie, knows no boundaries, at least not the ones we humans adhere to such as property lines, private home space and things like that. She climbs over fences without a care, enters a garage if the door is left open, or drinks out of the backyard birdbath. She is…
There is an old Masonic cemetery in Virginia City, Nevada, with gravestones dating back to the first residents of this mining town. Around many of the burial plots are wrought iron fences, most no more than three feet high. They are gated and of ornate design common to the Victorian era. I visited the cemetery…
Are you afraid of snakes? If you are, you are not alone. Snakes are strange creatures—no arms, legs, or other appendages, just a scale-covered spine with a mouth at one end. Snakes slither along the ground in a mysterious and stealthy way. They are cold-blooded and the bite of some can be deadly. It is…
A woman dreamed, I am with my daughter, Sarah, in a large underground cavern. The area seems suffused with daylight, although I cannot make out its source. The rock walls are a deep forest green, rounded and smooth, as if the space has been carved out of the earth and then polished. It is divided…
“…we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning–for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie.” Carl Jung Midlife is an important period of transition in most people’s lives. In the “first half”…
Is God a blind and sleeping slug, an unconscious and amoral being whose only eyes are the eyes of man? Does he move about in a blundering stupor, waiting for man to take his hand and guide him to the path of Goodness? Are we God’s teacher, more noble than our creator, the grand and…
In his book, The Eternal Drama, Jungian psychologist Edward F. Edinger shares the dream of a man who was contemplating leaving his wife and children to pursue a relationship with a younger, wealthy woman: I stand in the middle of the street looking up at gray, fast-moving skies. Behind the stormy façade I catch momentary…
“To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” So begins the famous bible passage of Ecclesiastes. The beauty of this poem extends beyond its rhyme and simple, poignant imagery. It goes beyond the wisdom it offers for our outer life and relationships. To me, its greatest gift is…
