Blog Posts

Godfather Death: To Respect the Power of Death

2/16/2018

FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Jane Smith-Eivemark. Jane lives in Hamilton, Ontario

Godfather Death is a Grimm Brother’s fairytale about the relationship between life and death. It begins with a father who is poor and must choose a suitable godfather for his thirteenth child, a new son. There is no mention of a mother; the feminine is totally absent throughout the tale. When the father makes a choice for a godfather he does not choose God or the Devil. Instead, he chooses Death to be the godfather of his child because Death does not discriminate.
While Godfather Death is a rather sullen tale, it shows that intimacy with death can bring us a powerful gift which can enhance our humanity. The tale reveals that the healing alliance between life and death is both a physical and a psychological fact. The tale shows that each person has a singular purpose in life and an allotted time in which to undertake it by showing us the dangers of unduly prolonging life.
Recently I have been captured by a book written by Jungian analyst, Greg Mogenson.  Its title is: Greeting the Angels: An Imaginal View of Mourning.  While Mogenson says many things about mourning that are very worthwhile (and I do recommend his writing) what is pertinent to this fairytale is Mogenson’s assertion that, to a large extent, we in the western world have lost our sense of being able to embrace death when it comes knocking at the door – exemplifying our own temptations to thwart death that are not dissimilar to the doctor’s actions within the tale, Godfather Death.
The theme of the tale, Godfather Death, is that we can neither escape nor defy death. There are huge consequences to the folly of the doctor’s actions whereby the doctor believes he can defy death and he, not Death, can decide when someone dies. My questions from this tale surround the importance of our recognition of the power of death when the time comes for our loved ones and for ourselves.  As our technology and our expectations surrounding medical treatment change, like the doctor in the tale was tempted, we too are tempted to prolong life. Where will we draw our line in the name of the love of the life we hold dear?

To review the story:  https://www.grimmstories.com/en/grimm_fairy-tales/godfather_death

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BLUEBEARD

2/10/2018

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Don Troyer

     The figure of Bluebeard in the Grimm’s brothers’ tale is powerful. He has means, he’s used to getting what he wants and feel entirely entitled to it. He is wary of rivals and crushes them whenever possible. He may give lip service to a code of noble virtues but they serve as a cover to justify control by whatever means. He is possessive – people are objects and are his to manipulate. He demands loyalty above all. He holds weakness in contempt. Relationship is all about who wins and who loses, and winning is everything in his world.
     The blue tint of his beard symbolizes coldness and absence of empathy, but also a distorted kind of single-mindedness. Just as the mantle of the virgin is traditionally blue symbolizing purity of devotion, this polar opposite represents a pure culture of devotion to rapacity. Hairyness in general and beards in particular can symbolize strength.
     The story is a window into an amoral archetypal core typically associated with the masculine. Its appearance on the human plane can take many forms, from the bully coach such as Woody Hayes or Bobby Knight who justify tyrannical training methods in the service of winning to psychopathic figures such as Hannibal Lector in literature. In business, politics and the entertainment industry they are the narcissistic opportunists who crave power, fame and fortune over any relational or personal values. Their sadism can express itself in contempt, harassment, physical or sexual abuse and rape. In these areas, the profound intimacy of sexuality is violated in the service of domination and control.
     What does the susceptible “bride” bring to this encounter? In the story she is a fatherless daughter who feels responsible for her widowed mother and her dependent sister. Vulnerable to intimidation, she is seduced by Bluebeard’s promises of wealth, power, and security, both for herself and her family. Unconsciously she basks in the external recognition of her superior worth! These overcome her initial wariness and her inhibitions. One is reminder of the character of Carmella Soprano in the HBO series “The Sopranos” who realizes her enmeshment in her husband Tony’s crime underworld too late. The pattern of the Co-Dependent partner or spouse can be a prison, protecting one from facing the terrors of change, insecurity, responsibility, decision-making and facing the world alone. It is the world of Psyche in the palace of Eros, where her every wish is granted, except that she is forbidden from seeing the true form of Eros.
     Eventually, in both the bride and Psyche’s cases, curiosity goads them to break the arbitrary rules of the tyrant and see the truth for themselves. This launches conflict of homicidal proportions. They call for help and receive it, a testimony to the value of sharing one’s story and garnering support from the community. We certainly can see the power of this in the current “MeToo” movement and the need for vulnerable minorities to cultivate bonds of trust in community.

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...some thoughts Edward Edinger put together

4/8/2017

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Joe Breznau
Joe Breznau sends his thoughts from his home in Moscow, Idaho

The blogpost by Mary Theis brought to mind some thoughts Edward Edinger put together about 20 years ago in his book, Archetype of the Apocalypse. From the editor’s Preface to the book: “It seems absolutely inevitable that immense turmoil, convulsive movements and eruptions of chaos of vast proportions are in the making so far as the political–historical aspect of mankind is concerned. That, I think, will dwarf the upheaval that took place at the beginning of the Christian era with the gradual disintegration of the Roman Empire. That was small potatoes by comparison to what will happen this time." (Edinger) "Yet Edinger believed that this terrible transition in culture (what the poet Yeats called the "rough beast, it’s hour come round at last”) will be bearable if we understand the meaning of what is going on. Edinger goes further: he states the hypothesis that if enough people understand what is really going on, if enough people internalize the meaning of "Apocalypse" in their own life process, then the worst of external catastrophe can be softened."
In chapter 1 Edinger further says, "...this archetype of the apocalypse is experienced in quite different ways if occurring in the individual psyche or in the collective life; but in either case, it is a momentous event – literally world shattering. This is what the content of the apocalypse archetype presents: the shattering of the world as it has been, followed by its reconstitution."

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...before the New foundation is laid

3/9/2017

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Mary Theis
Mary is a therapist living in the Chicago area.

    I remember Apple Farm Founder Jane Bishop saying that we should pay attention to the news and understand what is going on in the world.  I can’t do that right now. I get too upset. One thing I can do is maintain my relationships with my siblings who voted for Donald Trump. And lately I have been interested in understanding where they are coming from.  When I talk with them, they sound very rational. I can’t find any cracks in their logic – in what they are saying.  So I just listen and also tell them what I think and feel about the situation. Our positive connection has been restored in this way, in fact even deepened.
I cannot go along with my Quaker Friends. Many of them feel that we must do all we can to oppose what is happening. That is not my way. I don’t believe that Trump et al are the cause of the terrible rifts in our society. I believe that those rifts were there all along and they are being exposed and allowed to have more effect by the current political situation. This chaos is happening all over the world.
A few years ago a friend, who knows nothing about C. J. Jung, went to just one Jungian talk. His takeaway from that talk is that there is nothing created without destruction. I think this is true. I think we are entering further into the chaos and destruction that is necessary before the new foundation is laid.
I have been reading Depth Psychology and a New Ethic by Erich Neumann. I’m not sure when it was written, but it was translated into English in 1969.  Neumann says (Pg 29) that “…external collective developments are decades behind the development of the individual, which is like a kind of avant-garde of the collective and is concerned at a far earlier stage with the problems which subsequently catch the attention of the collective as a whole.
It is not difficult to understand why positive attempts at a solution appear earlier and are more easily recognizable in the development of the individual than in that of the collective…..In order to survive at all, he needs, as a matter not of arbitrary choice but of urgent necessity, the aid of the forces of the deep unconscious;  in them and in himself he may be able to find new ways, new forms of life, new values and new guiding symbols.”

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Being Witness To An American Mass-Phenomena

3/2/2017

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, John Stempien
John has been a public school teacher for 17 years in Michigan.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. - Abraham Lincoln, Address To Young Men’s Lyceum, January 27, 1838

The morning after the election my wife and I are getting ready to face the day. Learning the outcome of the presidential election I feel like someone has kicked me in the gut. Hollowed-out. Lost. Betrayed. A speaker at a protest gathering in Kalamazoo described it as waking up Christmas morning only to discover your home was robbed- tree and all. Speaking to my wife I explain that despite how upset we feel we want to make sure we set a normal tone for our children. I’m surprised by a sudden burst of emotion when she yells back at me, “Don’t tell me how to feel!”
The morning tone leaks into my workday. I teach 8th grade at a public school just outside Grand Rapids. The winning candidate had just visited the city the night before. At school during my planning period I come across a colleague in the hall who is in tears. “John, what’s going to happen? Some of my students are afraid that they’ll have to go to war. What’s going to happen?” She doesn’t say students, though. She says “my children” and I just now remember that she doesn’t have a son or daughter. Her students are her children. She is just as afraid as my wife but instead of anger it’s the end resolve of tears. My response to her comes not so much as a history teacher but as a student of C.G. Jung, “Just know there is nothing so bad that some good can’t come out of it.” I believe in the statement and it’s like a mantra that helps me through the week.

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A Myth for Dark Times

2/24/2017

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Don Raiche
Don lives and works at Apple Farm.

  Last autumn Barack Obama spoke of what is needed at this time, “The only way anything gets done is to recognize the truth of the person opposite you; get in their heads and see through their eyes.” Now autocratic governance, exemplified by arbitrary exercise of power, and assertions that those in power may act without regard for truth, or the well-being of all life and the planet itself, challenges our ways of response. Obama has put his finger on a basic and ancient truth.
We all know stories where virtues of empathy or compassion triumph against ruthless power.  I have long thought that J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a myth for our times. Most of us are familiar enough with this myth to permit me to pick up within the story.  The hero Frodo is not trying to achieve a great prize. No, the task is to destroy something that appears to confer power on its possessor; to rid middle earth of the Ring of Power through which its possessor can dominate and control all others.
The Ring of Power must never be put on, even to try to destroy the power of domination.   Those with legitimate authority can act from that authority but not with the Ring of Power.  Aragon, the rightful king, can fight for the restoration of Gondor; Gandalf can fight against the evils of corrupted wizards; Frodo has inherited the Ring from his uncle Bilbo.  Nevertheless the Ring of Power itself can’t conquer the evil of Sauron.

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The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting

2/18/2017

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Jo Marie Thompson
Jo lives, works and writes from her home in Wisconsin.

“The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera

Who?

Who knows
the names of things
and can recover them entire
from the obscuration, and
forever dwelling fog
of forgetting?

From the couldn’t quite hear,
couldn’t quite bear to see;
the nearly murdered,
and still suffering;
the tremors
and tribulations;
the urgings into being
and the stampings out
(the way it’s always come about)?

Even now – notice:
The penumbra of an eclipsed sun;
the remains of a fallen moment;
the four extinctions that occurred today
of species not yet named.

Well (and of course),
who cares to consort
with those who
name grief
anyway?

Driving through the deserts of New Mexico recently I was moved to pick up a book titled “Witchcraft in the Southwest” by Marc Simmons. In my ignorance I expected to find a story of Christianity’s conflict with “pagan” religion, and descriptions of Native people’s wisdom traditions persecuted as “witchcraft” by European colonizers. Instead I found a portrait of the windy path of human identification with one or the other dualistic extreme of “good” or “evil” and the subsequent compensation of the collective psyche, seeking balance and wholeness. The tracery of either pole is impossible to track as it inverts itself over and over, and winds in turn over the terrain of cultures variously blending through migration, colonization & war. The story proved to be anything but straight forward, at least through the lens of this particular piece of anthropological research. Most aspects of the history ring familiar in the echoes emanating now from contemporary political landscapes - if not in fact, definitely in motif: Scapegoating and projection, fear, subversion, persecution, retribution. The familiar dichotomies spring to life: fundamentalism vs wisdom; superstition & demands to conform to collective understanding vs discernment and growth. Other subtler themes arise: When does resistance, subversion and wisdom itself begin to revert to unseeing collectivism? What exactly is “evil?” What is supernatural? What is the role of sorcery and its apprentices? When does their work degenerate into its own clinging to power, greed and violence? At what point in these processes does the call to awaken, to become more conscious, to grow & discern, become THE fundamental call. How do we do the work of transforming injustice and inhumanity while protecting that call and resisting the fall into the obscuration of forgetting?

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What might we have to say from Apple Farm in these times?

2/12/2017

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Sara Sage
Sara lives and works in the Elkhart/South Bend, IN area. She writes in response to the fairy tale The Elves and the Shoemaker

This cycle of campaigning, the election, and the inauguration has been a challenge for many, regardless of political leanings. The cynicism, attacks, and untruths in the election process, and autocratic manner in which many perceive the first days of the Trump administration to represent, have been very depressing for many and outright frightening for others. Many Americans felt the same fear when President Obama was elected. It is clear that a variety of groups of people are feeling dispossessed and ignored. In the midst of an energy that makes many I’ve talked with recently personally and professionally want to simply “tune out” on social media and news, what are we to do that makes a difference?

There are many answers to that question, but one I’d like to focus on involves, as always, our personal responsibility to ourselves and our inner work. We might also look at how the United States can look collectively at our maturity as a nation, and at a tendency to avoid the need to do the hard, adult work of democracy in disagreeing and talking and working it through (perhaps a need to find the transcendent function as a nation?). In order to frame this, I’d like to use the classic fairy tale The Elves and the Shoemaker. Assuming most of you know the story, I’ll just refer to a few of the details.

In this story, which Jungian analyst Allan Chinen refers to as a “midlife” story in his book Once Upon a Midlife (2003), the shoemaker and his wife have worked hard for a number of years but fallen on hard times. In come the elves, in the middle of the night, sliding in on a moonbeam, to bring the magic back to the couple by stitching up shoes for them, which sell for a good deal of money, allowing the couple to purchase more leather and so on. When the couple decides to watch one night and sees the naked, playful elves, they make clothing and boots for them, which delights the elves but also causes them never to come back. However, our couple continues their work and is successful through the rest of their lives.

As Chinen points out, one of the things that makes this story different from many fairy tales that include “lost” magical elements is that this couple is not being “punished” for being greedy or inappropriate – they are doing all the right things. When the magic of the elves leaves, they simply keep working and now incorporate this magic into their own skill and discipline, modeling the inevitable developmental task of “growing up” into the reality of work and persistence required for a successful life. Knowledge and consciousness in this story – like in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve leaving the garden – lead to more shoemaking and ongoing hard work. Also in this story, the shoes seem to represent a kind of groundedness – the shoes are not magical like in more youth-oriented fairy tales (e.g. Dorothy’s ruby slippers) – but seem to represent the solid responsibility of putting one foot in front of the other that we may learn in midlife and later years.

Of course, the elves could also represent dreams that come in the middle of the night, and help us determine creative solutions at any point in our lives. Maybe the shoemaker and his wife, having done the grind of responsibility for a number of years, needed to recall how to introduce the “magic” of the creativity found in the unconscious and to take the care to see the elves and pay attention to what they were doing. (Personally, my least favorite part of the story is clothing the elves – maybe sometimes we need to have fun and cavort in the unselfconscious nakedness of children’s play, even as mature adults, but we also have to acknowledge social conventions and be present in the real world!)

So our story may help us with our dilemma of what to do in these troubled times. It reminds us not only of our mature adult responsibility to keep working, to keep doing what we know is right and helps us be responsible citizens, and not expect “magic” to take care of things for us. It also reminds us to not neglect our creative life – to pay attention to our dreams and to use our active imagination – in the midst of our responsibility, and that perhaps some elven magic (even naked playfulness!) helps us balance some of the heaviness of responsibility and also come up with creative ways we can be active citizens, or resolve a conflict, or find ways to transcend our differences with friends, family, partners, and coworkers.

Chinen asks a series of provocative questions for discussion at the end of his chapter about The Elves and the Shoemaker. I’d like to end by quoting several of them below, from the community and national level of consciousness, for your own musing (Chinen, 2003, pp. 42-43):

In your workplace or community, who are the helpful elves? . . . Who in your community wants to find out about these helpers? Who wants to just leave well enough alone?
What gifts would these elves need to move on to better things?
Would your group be willing to give those gifts and go back to doing more work? Why would your community want to help the elves – noble virtue, liberal’s guilt, fundamentalist morality?
If the shoemaker were America, who are the elves who produce wonderful things for the country? . . . What would be involved in clothing these elves so they can move on?

Today, America relies on high-tech elves to solve problems, from pollution to AIDS and the war on terrorism. What would it mean for us to let those elves go on and do more work ourselves, not relying on their magic?

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2019 WINTER WRITING BLOG THEME

Here, at the beginning of 2019:
a. What voices do you notice are getting your attention, whether by intent or default?
b. What Oracle/Voice/Wisdom source are you listening to or seeking?
c. What is the response that seems to be being wanted of you---an action, ritual, story, painting, prayer, poem, ceremony.

...it is in part by our response to the great stories of the world that we too can begin to find, each of us this individual story expressing the symbolic meaning behind the facts of our fate and behind the motives that determine the day-to-day choices of our lives. -Helen Luke, The Inner Story

2019 WINTER WRITING BLOG THEME

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