Cutting Your Losses in the Spirit of Autumn

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Life can be a strange road.  Just when we think we have begun to regain our footing after a period of adversity another unexpected development can come along and shake us up even more.  This has been my recent experience.  The last few days have proven to be quite a surprise.  I had never imagined I would be where I am now.  I will disclose that what I am experiencing now reminds me so much of my mother and her life.  I have thought of her often since this past Saturday.

Loss has been omnipresent lately.  Actually it is a common experience we all share each and every day we live.  Yet many people are not conscious of this truth.  When one loss after another after another piles up in succession I cannot help but wonder if an entirely new strategy is necessary to break the momentum of something as grueling as what I have been enduring.  None of us can ever ‘see’ the future with perfect clarity; we are always navigating between future possible realities that we may create through a combination of intention, dedication and will and the current reality that we live within.  All of us can try the imperfect art of prediction; none of us can truly know.

I came across a copy of Robert Bly’s book Iron John yesterday.  Before the day had ended I had read over half of it.  I found myself enthralled.  It offers something I want to begin to engage with more and more.  It offers a way to begin to move beyond psychological thinking to a more expansive mythological thinking.  This intrigues me because it is my firm belief that truly deep healing may be more easily realized when we find a way to contextualize our own lives within the much broader realm of human history and the world at large.

I met Bly at the Minnesota Men’s Conference last month.  It was an enjoyable experience.  I have tasted only the slightest draught of his poetic powers.  The texture of his words and thoughts is manifold.  When I read his poetry I am transported to some place whose dimensions defy description.  The complexity and yearnings of the human heart are given life through Bly’s prolific imagination.

My fascination with mythology began years ago when I was a student of Naropa University in Oakland, California.  In the autumn of 2004 I journeyed to the Netherlands to visit that special place where my paternal ancestry had lived until the 1870s.  The first night I slept in the village of Ootmarsum (the village my ancestry had come from) in the eastern part of the Netherlands I had a most profound dream.  The Celtic goddess known as the Morrigan appeared to me in a dream.  When I awoke the next morning I felt as if I had had a near death experience.  That following morning I awoke and felt I was a very different person.  Though the finest details of the dream may have faded over the last nine years I still remember the profound mixture of exuberance, shock and fascination I felt when my eyes first opened.

In some way it seems to me that psychology added to mythology creates some hybrid discipline that offers so much more explanatory power and wisdom than either discipline can offer in isolation.  As I continue to do my therapeutic work I wish to delve more deeply into the many stories one can find in mythology.  At the present time my greatest interest lies in the stories of Thor.

Summer now seems to be some strange and ancient memory.  The fairly tepid warmth of early October has been blown away and replaced by a sharp chill and some sparse bursts of snow flurries.  Yesterday morning, while on my way to an informational interview, I saw a flow of water frozen on a sidewalk.  This evening, as I made my way to a new men’s group I noticed that the planters in downtown Minneapolis have been changed out since my last visit only a few days ago.  Hardy winter plants are now to be seen everywhere.

Yes, it is already that time of the year.  It is soon to be the time of stasis.  Soon the earth shall be hard and silent.  Soon comes the winter’s rest.  Soon comes the darkness swollen to its greatest power.  It is the time of going inwards.  It is the time of stripping, of saving, of hiding that which we value in the warmth of our sheltering homes.  It is the time to bring in the plants, the dogs and the cats.  It is the time to gaze wistfully at the frosty full moon rising above newly stripped trees and honor the rising of Orion.