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...before the New foundation is laid

3/9/2017

4 Comments

 
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.”  
4 Comments

Being Witness To An American Mass-Phenomena

3/2/2017

2 Comments

 
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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    ...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

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