Patricia Damery's Blog, page 10
December 21, 2015
Why I Believe in Santa Claus
Another reprint of a favorite memory!
I have been thinking about Santa Claus, that jolly old Christmas saint of giving. To me he is as sparkly as Christmas lights, one of the few mysteries we participate in collectively.
As a young child I remember being taken to the “real” Santa who arrived in a parade the day after Thanksgiving and took up residence in a yearly assembled Christmas house in the center of town. We stood in long lines to see him, always a little intimidated when we finally got to sit on his lap. My mother told me that the Santas we saw on street corners and other places were not the real Santa, only his helpers, and this made sense to me.
Christmas eve we were instructed to go to sleep “so Santa Claus could come.” This was torture! I remember trying to sleep and my mother coming to the door to check on me. Once I thought I heard sleigh bells and this panicked me even more.
Eventually, though, I slept, and then my sister and I woke early. We peered into the darkened living room to check if Santa had been there yet, (Yes, he had!) and then raced to wake my parents.
We were not a wealthy family, getting “big” toys only for Christmas or, to a lesser degree, our birthdays. So to rush into the living room and see the very thing we had asked for was a most amazing experience! Those years the ultimate toy was a doll, one we perused the Sears Christmas catalogue to choose, and here she was! Our grandmother made complete wardrobes for these dolls. (She was another of Santa’s helpers, my mother explained.)
There were other gifts too: a stocking full of doll baby bottles, doll shoes, candy cane, and a red delicious apple on the top, a variety my mother never bought because it was too expensive.
I believed in Santa until I was six when one of my first grade classmates told me my parents were really Santa. When I asked my mother about this, she pulled me aside so my younger sister would not hear and told me that moms and dads are the helpers and that Santa Claus is a spirit. I don’t remember being particularly devastated, but I didn’t tell my younger sister, who believed in Santa until she was nine. Christmas was not quite the same after I found out. This transition to spirit Santa involved a kind of coming-of-age, the mantle of which I more fully accepted when we “played Santa” for our own sons.
This year Santa came to Petaluma, California, on a tug boat, which blasted down the river into the center of town. He and Mrs. Claus stood by the mast waving to the crowds as the tug, horn booming, streamed by. Suddenly I felt overcome with emotion! I felt the crowd’s excitement as Santa disembarked the tug and walked through a long receiving line to his temporary strip mall office.
The phenomenon of Santa Claus is a collective imagining of a saint of giving, most popular in United States, but with 2000 year old European ancestors in Saint Nicholas (a bishop living in 300 A.D. Patara, now Turkey), Father Christmas (England), and Kris Kringle (Germany). It is said that the first Dutch settlers coming to United States had a figure of St. Nicholas on the bow of their ships, much like in Petaluma! And the truth is, our current version is a much whitewashed version of a darker pole of the archetype!
Santa is vulnerable to being hijacked by commercial interests, or by intellectual reasoning. Yes, there is a let-down in the news of the lack of concreteness of his identity, but that does not negate the importance of his reality as an inhabitant of the mystery of the season. (Einstein held that imagination is more important than knowledge.) Santa inspires awe, and generosity, opening us to Spirit of timelessness and hope, but he may also serve as an initiator for children and adults alike— into a more mature version of the imaginal realm.
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December 18, 2015
A Christmas Story: The Salvation Army and Paying It Forward
Another of my favorite old memories I love to recount!
This time of year I remember an experience I had many years ago as a teenager. My sister Judy, our Greek American Fields Service sister Charoula, and I were visiting our Uncle Rufus in Chicago. We lived in central Illinois, so the city was an especially exciting if confounding place for us, and the three of us were exploring it by riding the “L” (elevated train). The winds blowing off Lake Michigan were bitterly cold, so cold that our nylon hose practically froze to our legs (something all girls wore in those days.) We visited the Museum of Science and Industry and did some window shopping, dodging into shops to thaw when the winds got to be too much.
We were about to ride back to my uncle’s apartment when we discovered that we were a dime short on the “L” fare. This was utterly despairing to us, as we had simply run out of money, and there were no ATM’s in those days. A dime was more like a dollar then, so when a man handed me the dime, I was surprised. “But how can I repay you?” I asked. He said simply, “Just put a dime in the Salvation Army Bucket.”
I will never know what his motives were. Perhaps he was a father of teenage girls himself and took pity on us. Perhaps he was simply one of these generous spirits whose first impulse is to fill need. Whatever his motives, his act became my first experience of anonymous giving, giving that has no expectation of return or even recognition.
I cannot hear a Salvation Army bell, nor walk by the bucket, without remembering this man, and I cannot walk by without paying it forward with a dime— or a dollar/s. He was like an angel, spreading good will. After all, generosity is contagious! For me, he still embodies the Christmas spirit.
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December 16, 2015
Jung and the Board of Supervisors
Thoughts on what Carl Jung might have to offer Napa Valley
The Napa County Board of Supervisors’ room was packed, standing room only, and the overflow rooms, overflowing. Police in uniform strutted back and forth in the hallways and guarded doorways. I overheard a county official tell one of the police that their uniformed presence changed the feeling in the crowd.
I felt an edginess I didn’t usually feel at these meetings. I wondered if it was the nature of the group that day or if it came from the San Bernardino shootings last week. At the beginning of the meeting, Chair Diane Dillon asked for a moment of silence for the county employees shot in the terrorist incident last week. She said that she had been co-chairing a meeting with a San Bernardino official in LA last week when the news came of the shooting. She was in London at the time of the Paris attacks two weeks before.
Watching the televised meeting in the packed, standing-room-only lobby of the county building, I began to wonder for our safety. Fear is infectious!
But what was to come bothered me more. The topic of the day was the Agricultural Protection Advisory Committee’s (APAC) recommendations to the Board of Supervisors (BOS) on wineries and vineyards in the Valley, recommendations that grew out of 10 meetings of 17 representatives appointed by the BOS—representatives, I might add, weighted in the direction of the wine industry. Since the March 10, 2015 meeting when 400 people filled the auditorium at Napa High School to comment with the alarm on the overgrowth of the wine industry, the Board of Supervisors has been paying close attention to these larger considerations in our valley .
Most of the first four hours of public comment was taken up by workers of what seemed like one or two wineries, many arriving an hour early to get the “reserved” seats in the main room, although there were also a handful of disgruntled winery owners. Vineyard workers needing translators and cashiers at a wineshop expressed anxieties about losing their jobs if the regulations were adopted. Did these people have any idea what was being presented to the BOS and why? I doubt it. It was rumored that a large winery owner had closed his establishment for the day and encouraged his workers to come make public comment, skewing the nature of the discussion and preventing any real addressing of the issues at hand. And who placed green sheets on all the chairs of the main room with signs saying “Support Napa County Ag”. This was true in the overflow rooms as well. Although the culprit wasn’t known, his intention of usurping “green” —and saving the seats— was. Any of us arriving at 9 am had no place to sit unless we took one of these (and we did).
Obviously, the wine-industry is threatened. The recommendations have to do with enforcing permits, limiting variances, and limiting new wineries in the Ag Preserve and Ag Watersheds. I personally was verbally accosted in the hallway outside the main room by an owner of a known winery who had noticed my Vision 2050 badge. “You have cost me $500,000,” he raged. “Plus penalties!” “Plus penalties?” I asked. Really! “I don’t think we can blame Vision 2050 (who has spearheaded these discussions) for your penalties!” But we talked. Yes, he feels the wine industry has made the valley and I should only be grateful (and obviously continue to give them full reign), but we did have a discussion, and the heat went down between us.
The space for the business at hand with the BOS got hijacked that day. It was a misuse of the democratic process by a few people who wanted to use their power to protect their private interests by stopping discussion of the real issues. Was it a filibuster? —or the creation of a straw man, as my neighbor suggested? Yes, it is happening everywhere. Our Congress is a horrible example. True discussion is prevented by the misuse of power to try to get what we want, and the common ground, the common good, usurped. The opposites become more extreme, and the tension grows. Violence threatens.
One can only hope we find the space within ourselves to listen to the other, even when we disagree. Psychologist Carl Jung stated that it is only when we can hold the opposite view along with our conscious view, that we can reach resolution, resolution that is neither opposite but something entirely new. We need this in our valley, not any one group winning, but perhaps an establishment of the common good.
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December 14, 2015
Abundant Life: A Christmas Story
Abundant Life: A Christmas Story
This is another reprint of my favorite personal Christmas stories, those stories that remain in my heart this season.
My departure from organized religion began when I realized “eternal life” was “abundant life”— spiritually abundant. At the moment of epiphany I was sitting on the stage near the altar of our old country church, drafted to play the part of Virgin Mary in the annual nativity pageant. As every year before, the main players, Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus (the newest born in the congregation), some shepherds, wise men, and an angel, had paraded down the center isle of the candlelit sanctuary to the stage, now bedecked with evergreens and a back drop of the star-studded skyline of Bethlehem, painted by my mother several years before. We were accompanied by the voice of God: the deep, booming voice of Bill Sheppard, a good friend of my parents and distant relative, reading the Christmas story from the balcony:
In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled… And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of David, which is called Bethlehem…to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, for there was no place for them in the inn (Luke 2: 1-7).
This year there was an additional scene to our standard format in which Mary and her kinswoman Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, also had a discussion. God knows how that script ever got into our church, as it was a sterling sample of gnosticism! What were the words? I do not remember, except that Mary was telling Elizabeth that “abundant life is eternal life.” As I read those words (for I was home on vacation from college and had not had time to memorize them), it was as if the Holy Ghost descended upon me. I felt such happiness, such joie de vivre! Eternal life means valuing this physical life, I realized, enjoying the pleasures of liveliness. This is how we enter the state of eternity. Our task is to live as fully as possible!
It is true, we had an unusual church. For this I am forever grateful. The church was founded by Irish protestant immigrants in the late 19th century on a tract of land next to the railroad tracks. The building was simple, built by my great grandfather who is now buried in the cemetery nearby and attended by every generation after. When my dear grandmother died, one of the women took me aside and reminded me that the dead are all around us, that my grandmother had only undergone a transformation, a cocoon releasing a butterfly. At the time, I did not find this particularly comforting, as I wanted the flesh and blood version, but I still remember this woman’s words and now know them to be true. Our church year revolved around the seasons, most of the congregation being farmers. We had Stewardship Sunday in June honoring the land, a church bazaar in the fall after harvest, and of course, this candlelight nativity pageant on one of the darkest nights of the year. Ours was a religion honoring cycles, soil, life.
My revelation was not well received by everyone in the church. (Of course, I couldn’t keep it quiet!) I remember one of the more fundamentalist types telling my mother that this is what happens when you send a kid to college. Although my mother was raised Baptist, she was also educated and liberal minded and buffered a lot between us kids and some of the more conservative members of the congregation. I know she also worried at my increasingly liberal views of Christianity, even up to the time of her death.
She need not have. Could she not understand that my path led me to Jung and to Rudolf Steiner and to others who appreciated the importance of the mystery of the Incarnating Divine? That Christmas before the backdrop my mother painted years before, I experienced the birth of a new consciousness, one that I would spend the rest of my life nurturing.
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December 10, 2015
The Mystery of the Present and Play
With the increasing darkness of the season, I reprint an older blog on Mystery.
“Play is the highest form of research.” – Albert Einstein
If it is important even for our survival on the planet to relearn re-entering the Mystery of the Present, what serves this end?
This question is one I contemplate this season as the dark comes before 5 in the evening and stays well past 7 in the morning. Mystery crackles in the fire I build in the wood stove, glows in the candlelight on the altar, sparkles in the Christmas tree bulbs we put on the little blue spruce we brought in for its second year. If only I notice!
Do introverts have it little easier in these tasks? I am not sure. We so love the quiet, the time alone with a fire or a candle. Apprehending beauty always brings mystery for me, something it is so easy to not see when I am busy rushing around.
But there is also the Mystery of the Other, Mystery that comes when I don’t know and am open to listening. It is a discipline I exercise regularly in my analytic practice when I sit with someone whose pain is an enigma to us both and yet a guide into new territory. But at home it is so easy to assume I know my husband, my children and grandchildren, my friends, or, for that matter, the graceful old Valley Oaks in the meadow, or a dear goat. It is so easy to forget the Mystery of the Other in efficient, busy states of mind!
One of my favorite people contemplating the mystery of olives!
I have been wondering, do laughter and fun promote the apprehension of Mystery in the Other? I love lingering meals with friends and family, long walks with friends or goats, the meanderings of uncharted days with loved ones, experiences which render me open.
I read where it is important to do nothing some part of every day. Is doing nothing play?
Does play serve opening into mystery?
Mysterious questions! Ones of the season? What opens the door of Mystery for you?
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December 8, 2015
Portal of Boredom and Consciousness
One of the lingering images from The C. G. Jung Institute’s December 5 event (celebrating the upcoming multimedia performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux Etoiles), was Deborah O’Grady’s full moon rising over a ridge to one movement of Messiaen’s symphonic piece. As we watched the white orb slip from behind the ridge and then slowly lift into the night sky, I was surprised to find myself thinking of a criticism I heard of Sesame Street. Yes, preschoolers learn the alphabet and their numbers seemingly effortlessly and are entertained in the process. But the show also addicts them to fast action and loud music, changing the way they learn: anything slow becomes boring. Kindergarten and first grade have a tough show to follow!
The challenge of sitting with something you do not understand, or of reading and allowing one’s imagination to paint the images, or of sleepily watching dust motes sink in the sunlight as you listen to your teacher talk … all these things become boring in comparison to fast-paced music and colors and dancing. What child has the opportunity to study a water strider on a pond? —or sit quietly for fifteen minutes in a forest to see what arrives, as a National Park ranger suggested to my young sons years ago. These days children learn early on that it is boring “to be bored” and are offered every opportunity to avoid it.
Unfortunately, in our noisy, busy world, many of us feel this way!
But sometimes boring is a portal into another state of mind: Enter the rising moon. When did you last allow yourself the stretch of time to watch it, to enter this lunar consciousness?
In his presentation Saturday, “What is the Music of the Stars?”, Joscelyn Godwin commented that listening to Messiaen’s work is best described as a ritual of an entry into a state of mind. I thought of this as we watched Deborah’s musical moonrise. Slowing ourselves into the unfamiliar rhythms and sounds of Messiaen’s work offers an entry into presence. We are not being overwhelmed with the recognizable: we are being challenged to simply see what is here: to wait and see. To tolerate the unknown.
And it is a challenge! Our lives are so busy, multitasking, making lists, fulfilling them. Something is always driving us. Being in the present requires turning off the cell phone and not allowing e-mail or the television to define the evening. Presence is looking at your spouse’s face at dinner as he or she tells you about the day. Presence means tasting the food washed in candlelight, noticing the plop of the dog as she settles under the table. The click of the wood stove from the last log you just added. The sound of no sound.
With this state of mind comes an opening into a space we knew as children, unless ye become as little children… ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Presence is heaven, isn’t it?—heaven on earth. Perhaps it is also an evolution of consciousness involving a return to that which we once knew.
Sabien meeting tadpoles.
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December 3, 2015
Music, Liminality, and Hope
On Saturday, December 5, 2015, the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco will hold an event in Berkeley, Inscape and Landscape: From the Canyons to the Stars, to celebrate the upcoming January performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux Etoites Cal Performances, Zellerbach Auditorium. I will be speaking about the Alchemy of Catastrophe: Climate Change, Spirit, and Matter. So much of this alchemy rests on our ability to tolerate the unknown. Community can help us tolerate such realms, even the community we experience when we listen to such symphonic works as Messiaen’s. The following is a blog that I posted last February and addresses the space of liminality.
Liminality is a word that people ask me to repeat twice when I say it, as if they didn’t hear it quite right the first time. As a Jungian analyst, I recognize the liminal state as that of many entering treatment. The old way no longer works, but the new hasn’t materialized. Our Western-European culture has trouble with the liminal, not wanting to suffer the disorientation or discomfort. We often want to return to the old way by denying anything has occurred. Sometimes we often think we just need to “adjust” and everything will be okay. Too often we are supported in medicating ourselves with pharmaceutical drugs— or with the more recreational varieties to this end—and miss the real soul opportunity.
The word liminal derives from the Latin limen, Limin-, threshold. Anthropologist Victor Turner described liminality as being the middle stage of a rite of passage ceremony in which the initiate is no longer of the old structure but the new has not yet come. Carl Jung offered a great deal in holding the tension of the liminal. Opposite feelings are recognized and suffered, even though this is intensely uncomfortable. If we are able to do this long enough and with enough consciousness, a new state may arrive that is something entirely different. This is the process of what Jung termed the transcendent function and it has an age old tradition in alchemy.
When people come into psychotherapy in such a threshold state, I often tell them of a story I read in which Columbus turned his ship around twice in his explorations of the New World simply because he did not want to confront the implications of what such a discovery meant. Threshold experiences are hard! The maps of our world change! But we become larger and more whole if we can allow ourselves to take it in.
Confronting Climate Change is a collective liminal experience with huge dimensions. Sailing back to the Old Word, expecting that temperatures and conditions will return to the old normal, or feeling that it doesn’t matter what we do, it is out of our control… all of these are defenses to tolerating the excruciating liminal space of climate change. There are no promises of where it will lead, if humankind can remain on our planet. But following the pattern of the liminal archetype, tolerating the uncertainty, which also means keeping our eyes open to the changes, and to our own part in these changes, to our fears and our grief, all of this is our only hope of some new order which may include humans on our dear Planet Earth.
This does mean getting to know others who are willing to suffer the knowledge of the present. For me, doing something helps, and this has meant activism around preservation of the oak woodlands and implied watershed of the ridge I live on. I also have found several books which offer ways of tolerating what seems intolerable. Mary Pipher’s book, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture, is one such book. Others include Marko Pogacnik’s Gaia’s Quantum Leap: a Guide to Living Through the Coming Earth Changes, and Dennis Klocek’s Sacred Agriculture: The Alchemy of Biodynamics. The important thing is to develop your liminal community, not just sit alone with your fears and grief. Join others who are willing to stay conscious in this time that needs us so much. In the serpentine way of suffering, this community with like minds is also our hope of dreaming in that new structure that may support life on this planet for even us.
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November 30, 2015
Messiaen’s Music, the Psyche, and Climate Change
Inscape and Landscape: From the Canyons to the Stars: In Celebration: A Day Long Event at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, CA. 9 am to 5 pm.
What do an esoteric symphonic piece composed by French composer Olivier Messiaen and the gathering this week in Paris of our earth’s most distinguished climate change scientists and international heads of state (United Nations Climate Change Conference 2015) have in common?
As it turns out, quite a lot! (We Jungians love synchronicity!) Inscape and Landscape: From the Canyons to the Stars, sponsored by The C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and Friends of the Institute, is smack in the middle of the two weeks of the Paris climate talks. The event celebrates the upcoming January 31, 2016, multimedia performance of Messiaen’s twelve movement Des Canyons aux Ėtoiles on the Berkeley campus in Zellerbach auditorium. The piece was inspired by the raw beauty of Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon National Parks, areas now profoundly impacted by climate change. David Robertson will be conducting the St. Louis Symphony, accompanied by a new visual performance piece by Northern California photographic artist Deborah O’Grady.
“O’Grady’s work, in deep accord with Messiaen’s, evokes the spiritual depths that reside for contemporary souls to rediscover in the sacred canyon lands of Utah.” I will be honest, I struggled with Messiaen’s work until I heard it paired with Deborah’s multimedia presentation: then time became non-existent and the heart opened. I was mesmerized.
On Saturday, Deborah will give us a preview. Several of us will talk on various aspects of landscape, music, and psyche. My talk, “The Alchemy of Catastrophe: Climate Change, Spirit, and Matter”, will address the challenge climate change brings to the psyche. Other speakers include analyst and musician Karlyn Ward, esoteric musicologist Jocelyn Godwin, Cassidy Anne Medicine Horse, and geohumanist historian Jared Farmer.
Please join us for a day of beauty and companioned thought on this most important topic of our relationship to the earth and inner and outer landscapes.
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November 19, 2015
Protect the Common Good
Statement to Planning Commission, County of Napa, November 19, 2015
Thank you for this time of public comment. Not all counties allow this kind of participation by the public. I think it is only through processes which include the public that we are going to come to agreements which protect the common good, which includes business, agriculture, and our environment.
We are in a time like no other in recorded history. Profit and business have trumped decisions that in turn have had the unintended consequence of the catastrophic environmental mess that we are in. Genuine scientific research has been skewed by industrial interests to the point people no longer trust science— or government.
That is true in our county as well. Each of us in this room, regardless our economic base, is faced with the conundrum of thinking of our personal interests in context of the common good, which above all, includes the environment in its breadth: the forests, the oak woodlands, the watersheds.
Every decision we make is a kind of hologram of the whole. In each decision, we impact the whole. That is true for each individual in the room, and it is true for you as Planning Commissioners.
As government officials, it is your job to champion the Common Good. When you do not let special interests bend the rules that supposedly protect the social and environmental fabric of our county, you restore trust.
Please be a part of restoring trust in the government of the County of Napa.
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November 10, 2015
The First Step to Mitigate Climate Change
“Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose.” This quote from C. G. Jung’s Alchemical Studies (❡229) is engraved on the wall of a subway station at 42nd street and Avenue of the Americas in New York City, an installation termed “Under Bryant Park”.
The quote is from a larger paper on Paracelsus delivered in two lectures in 1941 (CW 13, pp.109-189). In a 2004 New York Times article, several subway riders are interviewed about their reactions to the quote. Several found it confounding and disturbing, and some were even annoyed by the riddle quality of it.
And yet, this mosaic, called “Under Bryant Park” (and it literally is!), is the riddle that each of us live with, even these eleven years later, whether we know it or not. Jung is addressing the tension that comes when we recognize the sovereignty of Nature, and all that entails, along with our so-called rationality. But he also addresses the danger of not holding these seeming opposites. He continues, “…whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations— as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness— nature pops up with her inescapable demands(❡229).”
Yes, Nature has “popped up” through climate change, and there is no bargaining! We are at a point that we either evolve consciously as a species, recognizing Nature’s needs, or stubbornly kill off major parts of our planet by continuing our extractive, exploitive practices, which could include even killing off ourselves. We are faced with an evolution of consciousness on every level: personal, social, and political— or else.
But what is this evolution? A hint is in the alchemical work of Paracelsus, which refers to incorporation of a much older concept of the lumen naturae, the light of nature. This is instinctual knowing. For each of us it may be a little different. Some of us know by hearing, others by seeing, and still others by a gut feeling. The idea is that you hold this knowing along with what we have come to call rational thought. Jung felt the transcendent resolution of this tension is individuation.
For me, apprehension of the lumen naturae, “the light of the darkness itself” (CW13 ❡197), is an experience that can only be described as a shining within. When I first felt it, I was afraid that I was dying (and I write extensively about this in Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation.) Suddenly you see the light in everything: the leaves, the grass, the goats— everything. You feel it in your heart as a flame.
So much of my training to be a Biodynamic farmer— and a Jungian analyst, I might add!— is incorporating this older way of knowing. At once very simple and also complex, learning to work with Nature in a collaborative fashion is predicated in developing the “vision” of the lumen naturae. It also means valuing the sovereignty of Nature, quite a departure from centuries of dominion over attitudes that we have held sacrosanct. It means keeping one’s judgement and fixed beliefs at bay until one has perceived what is present, and only then thinking about what you have perceived. It comes in that mindless state of sitting before the roar of the ocean, or by a quiet fire in the evening, or under a tree when the leaves are telling stories of air.
Our first task in mitigating the impact of ourselves on the earth (and climate change) is learning another way of being, one in which we develop the ability to listen to nature. All the tools we need are right here, right before us. And it is critical that we each begin this week!
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