projections

People crowded into a lecture room. Languages filled space waiting for a lecture on the symbolism of fire.

I found a chair, took a small hourglass out of my pack and turned it upside down. Sand flowed.

“Jung talked about the spiritus contra spiritum, a god of ecstatic vision,” the speaker said. “Jung talked about the need for ecstasy without the chaos and how the archetypal ecstasy was for a god and soul.”

“Is the female ego in charge of the animus?” a man asked.

“Yes. The animus speaks of women with a deep connection. It is a force that can seize you.”

“Is that why there is pain and delight in human relationships?” a woman asked.

“Yes,” the speaker said. “The collective unconscious is too big to live out our personality so we create outer figures, projections saying, bear my anima for me. This creates the pain and suffering. When there is individuation there is a strong ego personality.”

“Can you please give us an example?” someone said.

“Well, war is like a falling in love experience. The shadow, the dark side, exists with the bright side and is misunderstood. The shadow is projected in dreams. In war. Veterans carry images of losing, darkness, violence, destruction and evil inside them.”

“What is the healing tendency?”

“One must find meaning. It requires self honesty. They respect dreams and the unconscious. They play. Fantasy is good, dynamic play. It is about symbolic levels. The collective unconscious is manifested in all cultures. Thank you for your attention."

 

tomorrows

they laugh.

what do you see? i see a man carrying one red brick. he’s looking for a place to put it down. he is confused. he had no idea his day would involve carrying a brick AND making a decision. 

he needs a woman to tell him what do. this is rare because men, in his culture, are the boss and tell women what to do. usually they tell them to lie down and get ready for the big thing. 

he is confused about loss. his wife wears the pants. she is the now. 

i see an exuberant extraordinary solid particle cow patty land-mine in the middle of sunday’s broken pot holed road. it’s a steaming green mountain. 

it smells like an art project. it will be discovered by a speeding SUV leaving a trace of aroma past sweeping weeping women. it will spread itself over the entire olfactory landscape.

it will create new tomorrows. 

the village barber had a customer. a white haired war veteran. he’d fought against Thailand, Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge. he didn’t talk about it. he survived and that was his conversation. his legacy. 

he sat in a solid steel chair staring at his reflection. he saw a thin serene brown face and wavy white hair. a long mole resembling an inverted Buddhist pagoda hung down from the left side of his chin. the mole saved him from the Khmer Rouge executioners. they were superstitious peasants and said he was the Devil, an evil spirit. they’d let him go.

a housewife in a rural village. her task is sweeping dust into piles of dust outside her bamboo shack. she has all day to complete this arduous task. repeat.

dust to dust. dawn to dusk. poetic ramifications in the theatre of the absurd. a housewife has a house. she is a wife. she has 10 children. having children is her DUTY. sex for her is nothing but a DUTY. she is a duty free outlet. her price tag has expired. everything must go.

many children gives her mother and extended family someone to love and play with and yell at. yelling at kids here is abNORMAL and healthy. it nurtures their self-esteem and neurotic adolescence with punctuation marks.

her husband is sleeping. he loves sleeping, eating and making babies, because he doesn’t have to carry them around for nine months and experience hormonal feelings. he sleeps forever dreaming of a hammock in a bamboo forest.

naked children play with trash. they set fire to the forest.

fire is their great fun and games besides Yelling and Whining. 

one day

One day I went to the market with my brother and grandmother. We scavenged for food. She looked for money. My stomach comes first. I found a rope. It smelled like food. It tasted sweet. My brother found a piece of sugar cane. He is older, smarter and faster and needs the energy. 

My grandmother sat down at life's intersection. She held out her begging bowl. 

At dark we went home.

Thank you for your attention.

 

heart day

 Five things to improve happiness. 

1. Be grateful. Write letters to someone who helped you in some way.

2. Be optimistic. Visualize your ideal future. Describe the image in a journal entry.

3. Count your blessings. Write down three good things that happen to you every week.

4. Use your strengths. 

5. Practice acts of kindness. Helping others helps ourselves. 

Hope & Exile

Hope had many choices and she chose Exile. They married at the Cathedral of Dreams and ran through fields over Spanish mountains to the edge of the Mediterranean. 

“There’s a big world out there,” Hope said to Exile pointing over the sea. 

“Yes and that’s only the top of it. Let’s share an orange,” Exile said to Hope. 

“Yes,” said Hope, smiling at real and imaginary worlds over the horizon, “we will sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Delicious.”

Hope birthed Patience. Raising Patience was a test for Hope and Exile because she gave them the test first and the lessons later.

Exile was a strange wild bird and while he loved Patience she challenged it, his love. She tested his stability, honesty, devotion and his way of constructing a world inside a world, a universe inside the swirling molecules of their experience. He was a risk taker not a ticket taker and Patience admired this reality. 

They studied and evaluated their character traits and imperfections. They took personality tests. Patience tested his trust, his ability to forgive and forget with gratitude and love. Patience handed him small portions of fear, anger, jealousy, ignorance, and desire. He created a diamond reflecting 10,000 things. These were the things Patience cherished.

Hope was relieved when she saw Exile was content. She didn’t know how long it would last. He always enjoyed living on the edge of somewhere else.

The old forest when they saw the axe handle entering, said, “Look it is one of us.”

“No one dies,“ Exile said one evening as they chopped and carried wood on the edge of a rain forest.

“No, I suppose not,” said Hope. “Patience will never die. She will live forever because she has a magic about her. I felt it before she was born. It was like a stream of light was floating inside me.”

“She is radiant,” Exile said. “She is beauty, truth and wisdom incarnate. She will learn how to float, how to project her spirit energies. She will be a fine healer.”

Exile raised Labrys, his double bladed laughing axe above wood. Streams of splinters blasted into twilight. Exile chopped and Hope carried. These were the choices they made as the moon rose through orange and blue streaks of light.

“He went to the cemetario today,” Hope said. 

“Who?”

“The forcestero, the outsider.”

“He was there yesterday as well, why?”

“Visiting the spirit sources.” 

“Indeed,” said Exile, “they will be out tomorrow with the full moon. Clearly.”

Hope and Exile danced in the meadow under the moon.

Light pierced their being and they floated. Nobody else saw them floating. They were protected by a veil of light dancing behind a curtain of surrender. Their spirits were free of their physical being. They were free spirits in a free world blessed by their imaginary limitations. 

They left their temporal bodies and floated down to the Rio Guadalete to combine their energies with water. The water was clear, cold and delicious. It flowed from dark gray Sierra mountains in a rush of sound through a rocky path. It flowed flowers absorbing their scent inside water. 

As petals danced in air Exile and Hope gathered warm flowers around them below the moon. They ran along the valley through fresh turned soil, past olive and cork trees, inside forests of pine, fir, evergreen, pinsapar, maple and trees without a name. 

Bare trees pointed at the moon.

“Look there,” trees said, pointing thin branches toward the sky, “there, there we are.”

Trees pointed to pulsating white stars. “Yes,” they sang, “there we are.”

“Look,” said one, pointing far away, “there we are.”

“And there and there,” they sang reaching every direction. The wind listened to the stars whisper secrets telling star tales seeing star trails across the emptiness of sky inside the vast vacuum of silence. 

Hope and Exile were light.