Blog Posts

Oracles

3/20/2019

Response from Apple Farm writer/poet Amy Carpenter, Grand Rapids, MI

Daily there are voices in the streets,
the voices of the marginalized
in the fight for their lives.

Also heard is the Tao
making no sound.

The loud-then-quiet oracles of Black parents
crying over their dead children.

At night, I dream the voices
of people I don’t know.
They walk across a field.

My own voice joins the shout:
the people united, will never be divided!

In the woods, the snow falls,
speaks its own language.

Justice*, reinvisioned as a large queer Black woman,
cries out, fist raised, surrounded by her people.

The wind weaves a story,
my memory fills in the voice.

Later, in circle, an Anishinaabe elder
tells me stories of the strawberry, of Turtle Island.

I hear the land
and the land knows me, a colonizer.

Black and brown folks sit in circles,
speak healing between themselves,
the ancestors, the land.

I hear water,
how it pours and splashes.

Justice rumbles if
white folks refuse to be a part of violence.
I hear the sound of dismantling.

The Tao makes no sound,
does by not doing.

*Image: Justice, from the Next World Tarot by Cristy C Road, https://goo.gl/images/oDRrTD-Amy Carpenter

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The Weather Inside

3/16/2019

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AIRS Captures Polar Vortex 2019

All that is outside, also is inside,” we could say with Goethe. – Carl Jung, CW9i, 101

Jung and Pauli suggested synchronicity is essentially direct insight into the hidden confluence of psyche and matter. It shocks us into broadening our view of the world and the fabric of reality. – Iona Miller, Synchronicity: When Cosmos Mirrors Inner Events, Scientific GOD Journal | March 2012 | Vol. 3 | Issue 3 | pp. 251-279

The polar vortex and its brutally cold temperatures got my attention at the end of January. I’m not one to fuss too much over winter weather, growing up in Michigan and living in the Midwest my entire life. Now that I have my own counseling business, though, I had to tend to the practical matters of cancellations and attempting to reschedule some sessions by phone or video link. That whole week become one of feeling off-kilter on schedule – not doing what I would typically do on any given day; missing the time of one phone session by a few minutes and then not being able to get in touch with the client; being in bed much more than usual to stay warm; and so on. I wouldn’t have thought so deeply about being connected with the weather itself, except for how it disrupted my routine, had not another one of my clients helped me do so. She hails from a warmer part of the country and had been very frightened by the talk of the “polar vortex” on TV weathercasts. After our session, she called me excitedly at the end of the week after being home from work about several epiphanies she’d had regarding her history with bipolar disorder, finding that it occurred during the polar vortex highly ironic but also satisfying. It got me thinking not only about the meaning and significance of “polar vortex” specifically, but my/our bodily and psychic connection with major weather trends in general.

I found out, in researching the “polar vortex”, that it always exists as a low pressure area (a wide expanse of swirling cold air), but is generally stays near the North Pole, when it is working strongly to keep the jet stream further north. However, sometimes the polar vortex weakens and part of the system breaks off and comes much further south. So our experience with it several weeks ago meant the polar vortex had actually weakened, not strengthened. (https://scijinks.gov/polar-vortex/). I also think about the bipolar nature of things, like the Earth, and about a vortex – a swirling circle that pulls us into a center point.

So what does this mean for me? What about when the cold, frozen archetype of winter sinks down south enough that I must encounter it? That it stops me in my tracks and swirls me in its grip, and I can’t just keep going through winter trudging along, like my Michigan toughness encourages me to do? What synchronicities shock me into broadening my view of the polar vortex?

One of the things it asked of me was to explore death – the cold, barren, brutal, killing part of winter. A family member has Stage 4 cancer and is going through chemo. Needless to say, this has rippled winter very profoundly through my family as we all look death in the face, or try to look away. I’d been struggling with trying to talk about death and feeling no one else wanted to. During the polar vortex week, I felt very disconnected from my family, but also somehow came to the conclusion that we are doing the best we can; I let my expectations of “doing this death perfectly” die, and I also let die my hubris that I somehow knew best how to handle it. I made arrangements to visit several weeks later, which was lovely, and helped us all look at death and the importance of life and love together. Winter reminds us that snow, like grace, covers everything equally – there is no ego or individuality when a blanket of snow-grace descends.

I also had a friend several years younger than me who had a massive stroke during the polar vortex, and lay in the hospital through the brutal cold, having several surgeries and then family making difficult decisions about life and death. Those of us who loved her spent several agonizing but also powerfully loving weeks praying for her and her young adult son, who was her legal medical representative. I had profound questions and curiosity during this time about what she was experiencing in her semi-conscious state and wondering if it was a cold, barren, snowy place, or a place of immense awareness and spring-like wonder? Two days ago I attended her funeral on a bright, sunny day, and heard and felt so much love as people talked about her love for them, while also feeling so much grief, that I thought something in me would burst and break free . . . like the polar vortex . . . and like the clots that had caused her death.

One that’s harder to talk about, because I think it’s less conscious for me, is the Snow Queen archetype that accompanies the Polar Vortex . . . the story behind Disney’s film “Frozen.” The general idea is that the snow queen attempts to live in solitude to control her powers to create ice and snow and freeze everything. I find, as a therapist, I can get into “Frozen” space for several days sometimes, where I feel as though each relationship I’m in seems to be freezing, or that my capacity to be an effective therapist and business owner is as barren and frozen as those late January days. That client whose call I missed, I know is hurt by this and has canceled further sessions. I’ve had to chat with my internal Snow Queen who thought she should isolate herself for this as a bad therapist, when other parts of me know this was a crucial event in our relationship (that is much about the client’s own frozen ability to be safe in relationship) and invites some profound conversation to thaw things, if we are both willing. When people decided to cancel instead of talking on the phone or over video during this dangerously cold week, I often froze for a time wondering why. Had my personal ice frozen something in our relationship? Other spring and summer parts of me (that allow feelings to simply come without freezing them out) know that every client is a whole person capable of many things, including not seeing me for a week . . .

Then there was also the warm, cozy, snuggle-up-by-the fire part of me who was home all week with my wife – unlike a typical work week – and I enjoyed the relaxing stay at home without having to get up early, get dressed, and get out the door. There were memories of Midwest blizzards I’d experienced, that were defining moments in my childhood – 1967, as a young child – and 1978, as a high school student. I recall fondly as a 6-year-old walking down my driveway feeling like I was in a tunnel with impossibly high sides where my tall Dad had shoveled the snow higher and higher. Or walking to the grocery store with a sled in high school since driving wasn’t possible for several days. As with this year’s polar vortex, back then we hunkered down and worked together and all allowed ourselves to really surrender to the power of Nature, because we had to and because we agreed to. There is something powerfully binding about that experience.

I’m finishing up this piece on an evening with a high wind warning and concern all day about losing power. What will this wind blow in, clear out, or break down? How can I stay in good connection with “all my relations” (honoring the Lakota people), within and without? What is your inside weather report in this lingering wintertime?

“When we say Mitakuye Oyasin, ‘All Our Relations,’ many people don't understand the meaning of those words. The phrase Mitakuye Oyasin has a bigger meaning than just our blood relatives. Yes, it’s true; we are all one human race. But the word Mitakuye means relations and Oyasin means more than family, more than a Nation, more than all of humankind, everything that has a spirit. The Earth herself, Maka Unci, is our relation, and so is the sky, Grandfather Sky, and so is the Buffalo and so are each of the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, those that swim, those that fly, the root nation and the crawling beings who share the world with us. Mitakuye Oyasin refers to the interconnectedness of all beings and all things. We are all interconnected. We are all One.” —Chief Arvol Looking Horse, Excerpt from his book White Buffalo Teachings.

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How to Be in relationship with Death

3/6/2019

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Response from Apple Farm Writer Donice Wooster from Columbus, Ohio

What has my attention, and has for a while, is how to be in relationship to death. I tried several ways of steering myself away from this answer, but nothing else was as true. When I was diagnosed with cancer about four years ago, I began a rigorous course in the tension of opposites. How does one live committed to the ongoing ceremony of daily life, with its pleasures and dear relationships, and also open the psyche as much as possible to the inevitable that now seems much closer than expected? How does one metabolize and integrate this dilemma as part of the inner journey along with the outer facts? If there is fear, what does it want to say?

Some of the voices and experiences that have spoken to me: reflections from people who are farther into this journey which is different and the same for each person, the rise and fall of life in nature, sometimes I sit in my garden and can feel perfectly at one with the just-so of what comes to life, blooms and dies, and can feel myself part of it, Helen Luke's essay on Suffering, accompanying my husband in his dying, a year and a half ago. It becomes clear that the body has its own wisdom and prepares itself for death. An image told by Marie-Louise von Franz, from a dying woman who saw, in a dream, a candle burning on the windowsill, and then burning just outside the closed window. The flame endures, but beyond a boundary. My own dreams, which show me also how deeply in life I really am. They invite a playful, creative spirit and I am grateful when they come with their puzzles and story telling. Music, a deep thread in my life and one that also exists in time. Poetry that carries images one can hold, turn over in the hand, and befriend.

This is very much a “here's where I am now” bulletin from the journey. Some years ago, I asked a dear friend who was dying to send me a message if she could from the other side. A bit later I had a dream that she was telling me about a place we could stay, with “so much room, so many rooms, so much bigger than expected”. I'm glad to know that death, like life, is so much bigger than expected. In the meantime, I am living -with curiosity and as much patience as I can muster for the holy unknown.

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El Lugar y El Tiempo/ Time and Place (series of Prints)

2/21/2019

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El Lugar y El Tiempo/ Time and Place (Series of Prints) Juan Genoves

If I say a murder of crows
I’m not talking about an actual murder.
You’re not talking about actual crows.
Just ragged black shapes on a white ground
And one shape that will be murdered in six seconds.

Why does it matter what the protest is about
Look at the faces, look at the skin color, hear them shout
La gente, unido, jamas sera vencido.
But I can’t see their faces
Just ragged feet on a white ground
Moving in the same direction, marching, flying
Like crows without wings.

Ruth Andrews

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Wisdom and Voice

2/13/2019

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Response from Apple Farm Writer Mary Theis. Mary guides the Apple Farm Writing Group and lives near Chicago.

Of course, the loudest voice declares: “I am getting old. My body is changing – and I don’t like it.  I don’t like how it looks and how it feels.”

And I hear my poor body responding: “Don’t you love me?  After all I have done for you? I have served you well.”  (This is one oracle – wisdom source, the body itself).

Then another voice – my soul crying: “I have so much to do – so much unlived life. Why am I awakening so late?  There won’t be enough time.”

And the Spirit says: “I am ageless and I do not see death on the horizon.”  And it reassures me that: “What I can do is enough. I only have to continue to listen and respond as best I can.  I will never finish, and do not need to finish.”
I am listening for/to the voice that lies deep within. Sometimes, when I am able to clear the “dross” I can actually hear it, but mostly I feel it as an impulse to do a certain thing, or refrain from doing what I feel an urgency to do, or move in a certain direction. And I don’t understand why I am being guided in this way, but am at my best when I trust those impulses/voices.

There is an image that reflects how this trusting comes about in me. It is an image of large, black talons releasing my heart.  I interpret the talons as representing the lifelong effort of something in me to control everything in order to protect me. Finally, as old age approaches, I can envision those talons releasing my heart so it can sing.

The response needed changes from day to day. Sometimes I feel called to express what I am learning as an image. I can allow it to unfold in this manner and understand it in a new way.

Sometimes it is a poem that shows the truth.

And sometimes, perhaps the most difficult, is by showing who I am; by trusting and acting on those impulses that I know are true. In this way, I may use my new-found understanding to deepen my work and relationships.  Sometimes, for all of us, as we are true to ourselves in this way, those we touch are helped to discover their own Wisdom and Voice.

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Divining

2/8/2019

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Response from Apple Farm Writer Jo Marie Thompson from Kevala retreat in Wisconsin

I.
The pronouncement of an oracle is sought -
and on her terms – perhaps on the
seventh day of every lunar month,
and only by those who have
sacrificed plenty and well.

The ravings of a prophet
are stringently avoided
though revered on arrival –
issuing from the throat
of a roundly disturbed man to
his unsettled audience, cringing
down the funnel of history.

Now a seer is another matter,
with a livelihood to earn and clients
to satisfy, but riding hard
after God’s hound nonetheless.

An omen is tender and close -
arriving in a cloak of silence
near the edge of vision
in one unchosen moment -
the leading edge of
the eclipse of what was
by the white heat
of knowing.

The Muse is closer still
and more dear.
What poet hasn’t felt
the whisper of a poem
arriving, left a list undone,
dishes stacked in a sink while
she leans in hard for an
hour or a week, straining to hear?

The augury of The Dream is famous
in my family, and perhaps in yours,
and also among anxious mothers
everywhere with children abroad.
I once dreamed of an acquaintance
on a bus in Russia, my dreaming self
knew that because we were in Russia
I would later marry him. And I did.
And my waking self still confounds
at the meaning of Russia in the
meaning of Marriage. [...]

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Thoughts On Noah's Ark

4/1/2018

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER,  Marlene Sarle. Marlene is from Michigan and Arizona.

We all know the story of Noah’s Ark. Humankind had become so naughty—evil is what the story says—that God’s mercy, which endures forever, hit a brick wall. God was angry, and the people had to be punished, wiped out, drowned to death. But God’s mercy, which endures forever, which had hit a brick wall, found a soft spot in the wall. A male and female of every kind of animal would be saved. Noah’s family would be saved. We got a second chance. God told Noah to build an ark, a really big boat, load it with animals of every kind, male and female, clean and unclean, crawling and flying. It seems that the swimming creatures had a good chance of surviving.  He was to load his family and apparently lots of food. We are not told that mana fell daily from the ceilings. Forty days later all the people and animals outside the ark were dead, and God’s wrath was assuaged. God hung a rainbow in the sky as a promise never to do that again.
This is not the simple and easy story that many of us grew up with. It is difficult to contemplate the God we love, the God who loves us, being so angry with us that he would kill most of us. This is the same God who killed his own son so that he would not have to kill us off again. But, of course, he does kill us again, in eternal flames, if we don’t conform exactly to his demands. This is our example of parenthood and caring for and loving our fellow humans. If we learn nothing from this story, we do get a big dose of paradox. Apparently exclusive truths can both be true. The Story of Noah’s Ark might be a teacher as we face challenging questions and paradox in our times.
God told Noah to lead the animals onto the ark. Then God shut the door. Noah, his family, and the animals were shut in together on the ark. It began to rain. It rained for forty days and forty nights. Noah found grace in God’s eyes, but was his whole family innocent? Shut up in that boat with the dark storm raging, were they all sweet, kind, and polite to each other during that forty-day cruise? I would guess there were some stressful, testy moments. And there was no early disembarkation at an alternative port.
It may feel like we, currently, are sailing in a dark, windy, rainy storm. God has closed the door, and we are shut up together. We are not sinless. We are not always sweet, kind, and polite to each other. We struggle with how to sail this ship and survive the storm. The story does not provide us with secrets and clues of living together.  But we need the willingness to seek answers. It is still ours to figure out. We are in this together and are not deboarding until the storm is over and the door is opened.
Lest we on the ark become too self-focused, we might consider those sinners who were not allowed on the ark, but were left out in the rain to drown, the castaways. Were the children really more sinful than all of Noah’s family? Were they really excluded from the ark because they didn’t meet God’s criteria? It feels familiar in these times when those who don’t meet expectations are excluded, when children, whom we often call “the innocents”, are disallowed food, shelter, education, medical care, and a safe haven from storms because we only take care of our own and those whom we deem worthy. They must, in their rebuff, feel akin to those poor souls who were shut out of the ark and left to drown.
If we are willing, we might just see the dark side of God in ourselves—the vengeful, the vindictive. Is this all there is to see? It feels like living with no answers, with paradox. In our deepest hearts we don’t want to believe that this is all there is. The unknown, the unreconciled, is not satisfying. Rilke suggested that we “live the questions”, and that is what we must do. Noah’s story and our story may for a long time be only partly resolved. Living with this plight can restrict our consciousness and our souls or it can expand our consciousness and our souls. We might also consider what Jung/Edinger said about Job’s testing: God wanted Job to see God. How can we see God or seek God in the midst of current events?
There is more to the story. God put a rainbow in the sky as a promise that he would not destroy humankind again. Did God have regrets? This may have been an evolutionary moment in the development of God. Jesus was another moment in the evolution of God. He brought a new message. No longer would the undesirable be excluded.
I read recently of six times that Jesus contradicted the Old Testament. For example, Deuteronomy 19:21 says “Show no pity: life shall be for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth…” Jesus rebutted this directive by saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ But I say unto you, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and do good to them that hate you…’”
In the midst of raging storms of our times, we may sense an evolutionary moment on the horizon. People are rising up to disavow vindictive exclusion, violence, and injustice. The rainbow was a promise of a new day. Maybe we need a new symbol to replace the rainbow, to express a new way of being in the world. One that would embrace the stranger and alien, the poor, children and elderly, the sick and imprisoned; that would protect diversity and dignity; that would be spacious enough to allow the whole of humanity and all that is onto the ark.

M. Sarle 03/18

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Cinderella

3/20/2018

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER,  Barbra Goering. Barbra lives in Chicago.

The Cinderella story is so ubiquitous, has so many versions, and is so embedded in our popular culture that I initially found it hard to discuss as a “tale” with a Jungian perspective. But I wanted to try, because this is the story that for some time was played out, over and over again, by my granddaughter “M” as she turned from four to five. I was fascinated by the elements that caught her—and struck by the elements that she didn’t seem to care about at all.
Here is the “M” version of Cinderella—after several storybook variations and of course the Disney movie:

Cinderella lived with her mean stepmother and mean stepsisters. They made her do all the work in the house!  The stepmother made her serve breakfast in bed, and do all the wash, and clean everything, and she was never nice to Cinderella! But Cinderella never got mad. She was good and kind. And she loved all the animals in the house (stepmother’s cat possibly excepted).
She wanted to go to the ball, but the mean stepmother would not let her.  But the fairy godmother came and turned the pumpkin into a coach and gave her a beautiful dress and she went to the ball.
At the ball she was nice to the stepsisters and gave them oranges and lemons. No one knew who she was, but they knew that she was the most beautiful.  She danced with the prince and then ran away when the clock struck. She left her slipper!
They tried the slipper on everyone but only when they got to Cinderella did it fit!  She got the beautiful dress and was happy.

We acted this story out over and over.  The focus was on the stepmother—played by Grandma—who would lie on the bed, shouting orders and sneering.  Cinderella (M) would rush to do all the jobs and also take care of the little animals who loved her. The stepmother and stepsisters would deny her the ball and she would cry, brokenhearted. Then came the fairy godmother, a roundup of the raw elements of the coach and horses, and off to the ball.
M loved to go back again and again to act out the service to the shadow stepmother with unwearying frequency.  As she worked on the hard, dull tasks set for her, she also surrounded herself with the little animals, some of them considered vermin, connecting her to the basics of life.  In my various supporting roles, I tried to follow her cues.  The stepmother perpetually had breakfast in bed while pointing out more menial jobs to do. The godmother sent Cinderella herself scrambling for the materials to be transformed--the pumpkin, the mice, the rats, and the lizards—before the magic could happen.  The stepsisters at the ball had to enact amazement and be thrilled when the strange guest presented them with oranges and lemons.
The prince barely intrudes into M’s version of the story. Instead, Cinderella has her transformation and her moment of approach and generosity to the stepsisters at the ball before the clock strikes. And again, the prince does not cut much of a figure at the end; Cinderella simply comes into her own and proves her worth, in M’s version.   Revenge against her persecutors isn’t much of a theme; instead, Cinderella shines for a moment, then it’s back to the beginning of the story to see what else can come out of it.
Cinderella has her work cut out for her in M’s version of the story.  The toil in the dark, the scramble for the raw materials of change, and the effort to approach the hostile sisters form the story.   The happy denouement has its moment, then the child wants to delve back again into the hard work of facing the stepmother, transforming, approaching the shadow stepsisters, and finding, again, the lost shoe.
In my own meditations I am struck again and again by the problem of responding to the power impulse.  The urge to power and revenge is so potent.  I feel that M is working through a way to encounter the raw urge to power, and to work through the desire we all have to exact revenge when we are bludgeoned by others (within or without) grabbing for dominance.  This may be systemic in the outside or the inner world.  With the help of the little animals, and her own resilience, Cinderella is able to transform the scenario into her own story of love and triumph. But the work continues, over and over again. That should not be forgotten. The story is really never over, something that little M seemed to grasp, and even to relish.
M has moved on to other stories now. I am still contemplating the way she illuminated this common fairy tale.

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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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