I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a grave
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.
For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.
– C.G. Jung
The gregarious
And mild-tempered never know
Each other by name:
Creatures who make friends are shy
And liable to anger.
*
Unable to see
A neighbor to frown at,
Eutroplus beat his wife.
(after K. Lorenz)
*
A dead man
Who never caused others to die
Seldom rates a statue.
*
Small tyrants, threatened by big,
Sincerely believe
They love Liberty.
*
Tyrants may get killed,
But their hangmen usually
Die in their beds.
*
Patriots? Little boys
Obsessed by bigness,
Big pricks, big money, big bangs.
*
He praised his God
For the expertise
Of his torturer and his chef.
*
Reluctant at first
To break his sworn promise
Of Safe Conduct, after
Consulting his confessor,
In good spirits
He signed a death-warrant.
*
“Be godly,” he told his flock,
“Bloody and extreme
Like the Holy Ghost.”
*
After the massacre,
They pacified their conscience
By telling jokes.
*
When their Infidel
Paymaster fell in arrears,
The mercenaries
Recalled their unstained childhoods
In devout Christian homes.
*
With silver mines,
Recruiting grounds,
A general of real genius,
He thought himself invulnerable:
In one battle
He lost all three.
*
The last king
Of a fallen dynasty
Is never well spoken of.
*
Intelligent, rich,
Humane, the young man dreamed of
Posthumous glory
As connoisseur and patron
Of Scholarship and the Arts.
An age bent on war,
The ambitions of his king,
Decreed otherwise:
He was to be remembered
As a destroyer of towns.
*
Born to flirt and write light verses,
He died bravely
By the headsman’s axe.
*
Into the prosperous quiet
Between two wars
Came Anopheles.
*
The Queen fled, leaving
Books behind her
That shocked the pious usurper.
*
Assembling
With ceremonial pomp,
The Imperial Diet
Cravely debated
Legislation
It had no power to reject.
*
Victorious over
The foreign tyrant,
The patriots retained
His emergency
Police regulations,
Devised to suppress them.
*
In States unable
To alleviate Distress,
Discontent is hanged.
*
In semi-literate countries
Demagogues pay
Court to teen-agers.
*
To maintain a stud
Of polo ponies he now
Was too stout to ride,
He slapped taxes on windows,
Hearth-stones and door-steps and wives.
*
He walked like someone
Who’d never had to
Open a door for himself.
*
Abandoning his wives,
He fled with their jewels
And two hundred dogs.
*
Providentially
Right for once in his lifetime
(His reasons were wrong),
The old sod was permitted
To save civilization.
*
Who died in Nineteen-Sixty-Five
More worthy of honors
Than Lark, the cow
Who gave to mankind
One hundred and fifteen thousand
Litres of milk?
*
When we do evil,
We and our victims
Are equally bewildered.
* *
The decent, probably,
Outnumber the swine,
But few can inherit
The genes, or procure
Both the money and time,
To join the civilized.
When we give a thing a name we imagine we have got hold of it. We imagine that we have got hold of being. Perhaps we should do better not to flatter ourselves too soon that we can name God.
–Gregory of Nyssa
We are saved in the end by the things that ignore us. Their presence awakens silence in us. They refresh our courage with the purity of their detachment. – Andrew Harvey
By D. H. Lawrence
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels
of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,
and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing
himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed
in an undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
“To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?
Thus the better we are able to conceive of the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense will be our suffering in affliction and our compassion for others. What does suffering take from him who is without joy?
And if we conceive the fullness of joy, suffering is still to joy what hunger is to food.
It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering. Otherwise life is nothing but a more or less evil dream,” – Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.
In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to the cellar carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar.
Gaston Bachelard
…anyone who is struggling with depression, addiction; anyone who may be giving up, suicidal or self-harming.
I know you. I think I know what you are going through. I’ve been there.
Nine years ago on December 22, 2016, a cold, icy day, with freezing rain pouring down, I pulled into my garage thinking it would be a good time for me to die there. I was so turned around and struggling to recover from addictions, the darkness of the winter solstice seemed to have found a home within me.
After what felt like hours, I realized that my plan was selfish and would only serve to hurt the people–family, friends–who had been caring for me, carrying me until I could get back on my feet. I reached out to people, wise friends and family, who gave me good orderly direction. They told me to listen to the professionals who, without hesitation, were there to guide me.
I spent Christmas and several days after in a mental hospital, a place where I found rest and a sense of peace that I hadn’t felt for several years. I’m not saying that the path was easy, far from it. But I was on a different path in a different direction.
Kenosis is a theological term. In short, it means that we empty our own will and become entirely receptive to God’s will for us. The God that I came to know and hear was not a Catholic or Christian God, not Allah, not Yahweh, not Buddha but an internal light that shone on my place in the unified field of existence.
Over time I learned to listen to the wisdom of others who had lived through similar experiences, no longer trying to control the direction of my life.
So today I bless you and pray you can make the turn to life, the life you are meant to live.
If you are interested in a completely anonymous chat, please contact me.
My world in December 2016:
My world today
On this day when the earth begins to turn towards the light, I wish you peace and all good things.
What we do not know, or fear acknowledging, does in fact hurt us, and often others as well…so often the one who receives the Shadow projection of others-be it Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, the witches of Salem, the devils of Loudon, the Jews of Poland, gays, or a host of other martyrs to unconsciousness – will be vilified, crucified, marginalized, gassed, burned, or ignored. They are the carrier of our secret life, and for this we shall bate them, revile them, and destroy them, for they have committed the most heinous of offenses. They remind us of some aspect of ourselves we cannot bear to see. Sadly, the weaker the ego state, the more intolerable this summons, and the greater the potential for “categorical judgment” of others, which is to say bigotry and prejudice. – James Hollis
Edge of Atlantic 