Patricia Damery's Blog, page 9
February 25, 2016
Retirement: Eulogy for a Beloved Professional Life
After 40 years in private psychotherapy practice, today is my last day. I am retiring from doing analysis and analytic psychotherapy. It’s not an easy thing, for sure, taking down the shingle that I worked so hard to establish. It brings memories of that first “client”, a family that a fellow student and I met with early in our training. During class we worked before a one way mirror while our supervisor directed us through an ear piece. The family never returned. Our kind supervisor consoled, Don’t worry. The important thing is that you learn.
As with most things in my life, I took the rocky path to establishing myself professionally. Yes, I sought out the best supervision and therapy that I could afford, but establishing oneself in private practice is also a business venture, one that requires contacts and referrals and networking. Having little experience in the public and non-profit sectors, I had to work extra hard at developing referral bases. I supplemented my income with very part time work at a couple of agencies doing psychotherapy. I remember a prospective client (again, who came for only one session!) criticizing my thread-worn chairs, the only furniture I thought that I could afford at the time. But slowly my referral base supported a viable practice.
In 1989 I was accepted into candidacy at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and the next years (partially recorded in my book Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation) were ones of accelerated growth. I had some wonderful teachers. One, Donald Sandner, MD, became an important mentor. He told my candidacy group of the importance of having a spiritual discipline. It mattered less what that discipline was, he explained, just that you had one.
I have come to see this is true. My work hour by hour has also proven to be part of my spiritual discipline. Each hour I get another chance to practice sitting without preconceived ideas or judgement and simply being present and getting to know who is there. We who do this work enjoy the privilege of sharing such deep places of soul work. When it works, we all grow.
I imagine this will continue, but now in other ways. Although I am stopping the day to day work of deep analytic holding of personal work, I will continue to do some consultation, teaching, and presentations. My work with the psyche will concentrate on my writing and land use activism.
When my mother retired from teaching, she said she wanted to do it early enough that she could have the time with my father. He was a farmer. She said she wanted to be available if he came home and said, Let’s go to Assumption and get some tractor parts and have lunch.
I take my queues from her and also from that first supervisor who once told me her greatest regret in life was that she put her work before her family at a time she wished she had been more present. This is part of it as well. My husband is older than I, and I want time with him. I also want to be more available to my children and my grandchildren.
Nevertheless, today when I lock the door for the last time and turn in my key, I will give thanks for this professional path that has grown me and sustained my family and me, while also giving me the gift of sharing in so many lives.
The post Retirement: Eulogy for a Beloved Professional Life appeared first on Patricia Damery.
February 22, 2016
Sante Fe Presentation: Messiaen’s Symphonic Work and the Land
On Tuesday, June 28, Photographer Deborah O’Grady and I will be presenting our work on Messiaen’s piece, From the Canyons to the Stars at the 2016 Jung Society for Scholarly Studies Conference, Earth/Psyche: Foregrounding Earth’s Relations to Psyche (Sunday evening, June 26-Wednesday evening, June 29, 2016).
Deborah was commissioned by the St. Louis Symphony to create a multimedia performance to this Bicentennial creation of Messiaen, which was inspired by Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park. Her work provides a ritual entry into the soundscape of these desert landscapes, emphasizing man’s participation in them. A review of the Los Angeles performance is in this week’s New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/messiaens-canyons-and-abrahamsens-let-me-tell-you
My talk will amplify the consciousness Messiaen affords through his masterpiece, a consciousness which appears similar to that of the native Southern Paiute, a consciousness that is imperative that we develop if we are to live in balance with the earth.
We will send more information as we have it, but consider attending the conference which will be held at the La Fonda Hotel on the Plaza in Sante Fe, New Mexico. For more information and registration, contact JSSS.
The post Sante Fe Presentation: Messiaen’s Symphonic Work and the Land appeared first on Patricia Damery.
February 15, 2016
Everyday Surprises
Happening across the unexpected always stops me in my tracks. It feels like a message from the Lords and Ladies of Creation, as my spiritual teacher used to put it. Open your eyes! Look what’s here! Life is precious! One of those surprises happens each January when I enter the garden to find the yellow jonquils, which I am pretty certain that I did not plant, popping into bloom.
I suspect one of my daughters-in-law, Lisa, or my friend Elizabeth, but neither is fessing up. This makes it all the more mysterious. I question myself! Did I planted those bulbs some years ago, and forget?
But this is not the only spot in which bulbs push jonquils and daffodils and paper whites. We have some kind of a Johnny Appleseed planter at work here! Clumps of paper whites display delicate white flowers at the kitchen door each Christmas and a small clump of daffodils bloom just inside the vineyard gate shortly thereafter. I would never think of planting in that spot.
There is a story of Johnny Appleseed bulb planter in our valley. Each spring Douglas Iris push their purple tufts of petals along the forest edge. It’s been said that a pioneer woman planted these in the valley, and that they naturalized. As my grandson Wesley says, this may be only a legend.
Yet each year, coming upon the gift of these late winter and early spring flowers— including the Douglas iris— makes me smile! I wonder again: who did this? It reminds me of how the mystery of annonmous gifts of nature opens the heart and stimulates something far beyond the immediate.
The post Everyday Surprises appeared first on Patricia Damery.
February 8, 2016
Initiatives and Oaks
I continue to be shocked at how acrimonious things get when you get between a rich man and his oak! (see the comments on my Letter to the Editor, Napa Register, February 4, 2016) This so-called controversy is never more apparent than when the discussion turns to the importance of watersheds and what keeps them healthy— and in Napa County, this means the oak woodlands and forests. To this end, an Initiative has been proposed for the November 2016 ballot, Water, Forest and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative of 2016.
The Initiative states that its purpose is “to protect the water quality, biological productivity, and economic and environmental value of Napa County’s streams, watersheds, wetlands and forests, and to safeguard the public health, safety and welfare of the County’s residents.”
What can be controversial about that?
Well, turns out, to some, a lot! Americans become nutty when we start talking about private property rights—or a rich man and his investment potential. The need to protect the commons, the oaks and forest lands, can bring out the craziness in us. How dare you tell me what to do on my own land!! Yet, what we do on our own property does have impact on the whole, the Commons. Do we have the right to do something on our land even if it impacts the community, including water quality and quantity? Do those of us wealthy enough to own land have the right to make decisions with implications of this scale? Does wealth trump the environment?
Our watersheds have been invisible to most of us until now. Years ago I learned from my friend Elizabeth about the Atascadero Watershed in Sonoma County, California, the watershed we both lived in. This was the first time I thought seriously about the relationship of the water, land, and me. Watersheds do that, whether we know it or not. They are the veins moving water and life through our lands. When we ignore what keeps them healthy, streams, aquifers, and rivers suffer, and before long even the climate. We create dryness and even deserts.
To protect our watersheds, we have to see the forest for the trees! We have to see how our own piece of earth fits into the larger ecology of the area and its health. That lovely valley oak and its descendents growing on my private property are also part of the oak woodlands and forests which help restore aquifers and prevent erosion. Oak woodlands and forests do not know property boundaries! Unfortunately as investors move into Napa Valley, drawn by its world class wines and investment potential, the trees become something to be removed to plant vineyards. The valley floor is pretty much planted; the hills, which also produce great wines, are the next frontier—the hills that for the most part are still claimed by oak woodlands and forests and the small meadows that are part of that ecology.
We are not a culture that has cared much about the Commons and what the Commons involves. After all, our country was so large that our impact seemed insignificant. Things have changed! We have had an enormous impact by our ignorance and greed. We cannot count on investment interests in ourselves or others to protect what is Common to us all… our watersheds. It is critically important that we back this Napa County Initiative and think about each other and the land we love. As Aldo Leopold stated, we cannot heal the earth without healing our relationships with each other, and we cannot heal our relationships with each other, without healing our relationship to the earth. Watersheds underscore this.
The post Initiatives and Oaks appeared first on Patricia Damery.
January 27, 2016
Celebrating George Wagner
On Saturday I attended a celebration for the life of George W. Wagner (1932-2015). I first got to know George in 2010 when his wife Suzanne Wagner and I participated in an Extended Education Earth Day event at our Institute, Listening to the Psyche/ Listening to the Earth. The day, planned in part by Suzanne, included talks by several analysts and by Navajo medicine man Johnson Dennison. The presenters had dinner together the night before and the evening after, which afforded the luxury of getting to know each other. This is when I first met George.
George was an outgoing, creative man who had done a variety of things in his life. Like me, he had grown up on a farm, in his case, a dairy farm in Southern California. He was in the Navy during the Korean War and, for the rest of his life, processed the tragedy of wars’ sufferings. He was an attorney, environmental activist (a pioneer in California’s Coastal Protection Act), past Executive Director of the LA Jung Institute, and executive producer of the film A Matter of Heart and the Remembering Jung series on DVD.
A big venture of his was establishing a financial backing for Wind Harvest International. George told me that the design of this unique wind turbine came from a numinous dream of Bob Thomas, who was an engineer working for the Navy, specializing in aerodynamics. I asked Suzanne more about this design process and she told me that Thomas “… worked with the image in the dream and came up eventually with a vertical axis wind turbine that spins in a circle around a central axis.” She added that George met Bob Thomas and also artist Sam Francis, an early financial backer of the project, in a seminar on Mysterium Coniunctionis given every Monday evening by James Kirsch in Kirsch’s home. “The three of them got together to start research and development of this new design. This led eventually to the present company Wind Harvest International. George was the major financial investment seeker for all these years. Without his ability to find investors, the company would not have made it thus far.”
When Naomi Lowinsky and I co-edited Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, George and Suzanne both wrote reviews for the Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche (Vol.7, #2). George particularly addressed the way each author of the thirteen essays approached his or her authentic personality. “Readers will be moved, saddened, and challenged by the notion that to strive for individuation is truly difficult, heavy hard work. But it appears to be worth it— not only for yourself, your colleagues, and your family, but also for the planet,” he wrote. “These stories give us courage and guidance in our own attempts to live our lives authentically.”
At Saturday’s celebration for George, family members told stories and remembrances which brought home the truth about him of these, his reflections on others. George’s life is one to study: he lived close to the language of the unconscious and the guidance offered, driven by the full sway of his creativity. His was a living example of a life lived fully, serving not only his own individuation process, but also his family, colleagues, and our planet.
Thank you, George. May your liveliness continue forever harnessing in the spirit wind and breath of our planet.
The post Celebrating George Wagner appeared first on Patricia Damery.
January 21, 2016
When the Earth Turns to Water and Goats Die
Last week our goat Gaviota died. She had sustained a deep puncture wound in October that became infected with an antibiotic-resistant e-coli strain. We went through a regiment of cleansing and packing the wound with Manuka honey laced with lavender, cinnamon, and oregano essential oils, all which have been shown to make the particular e-coli strain more receptive to the broad spectrum antibiotic that she was also receiving. But the wound was deep into her sternum, and bone infections in goats are very, very difficult to treat, as University of Davis Veterinary Medicine informed us from the beginning.
For several weeks it seemed she was holding her own or improving. Every other day we flushed the wound and changed the bandage; every five days she got the antibiotic shot. Then two weeks ago tomorrow I let her walk with the goats down our driveway, and she ran back. After that she didn’t want to walk at all. Our vet Vanessa suggested that she could just be sore, recovering from the run. Let her walk a little, but not too much. But within a couple of days it was clear: she was failing.
Yes, I went through those stages of grief: first, the buffering fantasy that this was a healing crisis. But denial slowly relinquished the hard facts of the situation. Even Rafaela, the animal communicator whom we have worked with for years, said, Gaviota is a very, very sick goat. She asked Gaviota, Do you need help passing? Gaviota told her: Give me a week.
Denial again: I thought she meant give her a week for the tide to turn. Ramon dreamed that our last pygmy goat Ana, who died last March, returned, lost, but not dead. This shook my denial. Something in me knew death was imminent.
Last Friday she no longer stood up, and her breathing was labored. I remembered Rafaela’s statement: if you ask, you need to respect the answer: Give me a week. I swam in the delimma: was delaying euthanizing her cruel, letting her suffer? or were we only taking a natural dying process into our own hands?
I sat alone in my studio, meditating. Having the companionship of our animals is a great responsibility. I believe in the death process, in letting the soul separate from the body at its own pace. I believe in this process for humans and I believe in it for our animals. I threw the I Ching, asking the impact of telling Gaviota it is time now for you to have help; it is okay to go. I got “Gradual Development” moving to “Well spring”. Sitting there alone, I knew: it is time to call Vanessa.
As we waited, Gaviota wretched, laid her head on my lap, and groaned over and over. Occasionally she stopped breathing. “It is okay to go,” I reassured her. When we moved her so we could work with her, Gaviota died. Her face was only inches from mine. Our eyes locked as hers grew large and shocked in pain and/or awe, and then, in that gaze, she disappeared. But that locked gaze pulled me with her— into the watery realms of death.
It rained hard all night, and all the next day. Dawn and evening were the same as midday, and the earth seeped with rain while the sky wept moisture. Gaviota’s grave was liquified, perhaps what alchemists call solutio. There was nothing to do all weekend but make soup and remember that little goat we picked up from an organic Peruvian goat dairy in Pope Valley— eight years ago now, her horns then only stubs. She was one of three: Agaleah, Lily, and Gaviota, but she was the one who warmed up the quickest, always wanting to walk right next to me, kind of like nine year old girls do. We bottle fed them goat milk until they were five months old, perhaps excessive, some suggested, but the goat milk built not only strong bones but also strong bonds.
That bond goes into death I know now. I walked a distance with her as she crossed last weekend— and yes, she was right, it took her a week from the day of her last run. The numbness of shock gave way to gratitude as I remembered our many walks, how she always wanted to be right by my side. How she greeted any stranger and loved the open houses at the ranch. Before I turned back, I called to her, “Meet me when it’s my turn.” And I think she will.
Gaviota shortly after joining us with Agaleah and Lily behind.
Gaviota supervising pruning in 2011.
The post When the Earth Turns to Water and Goats Die appeared first on Patricia Damery.
January 12, 2016
Meditation on Space: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: the Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondo (Ten Speed Press, 2014), is truly magical in its meditation on the space of your home. The tiny book can easily be held in your hand like a manual of life as you head into piles and clutter. The headings draw you in (It has for many—it is a New York Times Bestseller): Why can’t I keep my house in order?; Finish discarding first; Storing your things to make your life shine; The magic of tidying dramatically transforms your life.
I have been aware for a while of the too muchness of our culture, how goods are forced on us by advertising and made easily-bought by being cheap and often not lasting very long. When my parents died, my siblings and I were left to clean out their packed home of not only their own belongings, but my grandparents’ and great grandparents’ stuff as well, all who had lived in the house before my parents. As my husband so aptly put it, no one ever moved out! Throwing their stuff out was a burden of decades of not letting go of what was no longer needed or useful! (See On Materialism)
Kondo’s technique is unique from other decluttering books and articles, in that it sorts not by what you use but whether that item brings joy. “We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of,” Kondo asserts. She recommends holding each item in your hand and asking this question, “Does this spark joy? If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it (p. 41).”
This question, simple as it is, initiates transformation. It is a question that our culture overrides all too often. Some years ago after a particularly stressful time, my physician ordered me to do nothing that I didn’t want to do for two years! I recovered without a serious illness. I have carried this into the present as a guiding star, and now Kondo has extended this principle into sorting the items in my home.
It is a shocking process: it is all there: the gold pants I paid too much for and keep out of guilt, even though I don’t wear them because they doesn’t suit me any more. The gifts that don’t “spark joy” but I keep— out of guilt, I guess. But there is more too: the items of times past, items I loved but that are more magnets of memory, not sparklers of joy in the present! All of these situations Kondo addresses. It is a kind of life review of the unconscious meaning of the contents of your home and how they clutter your psyche.
Don’t let Kondo’s obsessiveness allow you to discredit the value of her method. She lost me in a few places— and I get obsessive myself. While her method of folding clothes may have value, it crosses the line for me. And I will always have more than 30 books (which she keeps in a closed closet on one shelf). But the bedrock of her method: relating to our possessions, valuing them, being conscious of what we have and why: this is transformational. It is not that we should be less materialist, as Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon stated in his decades old book, Bed and Board. We need to be more so. Capon wrote, “Perhaps the largest single trouble with our abundance of possessions is the fact that so many of them are owned, not because of what they are, but of what they confer on us. They are there, but we seldom look at them. We have so much, but we love precious little of it for itself.”¹
Kondo’s method will help you rediscover the beingness of those items you live with and will give permission to let go of those items which deaden your perception. Clutter of our home environments does reflect clutter of the mind. And by extension, when we relate to the material world as if it is there only for what it confers on us, we exploit our dear Earth for her resources, regardless of the impact on everything and everyone else.
Kondo brings this idea home.
¹Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage, by Robert Farrar Capon. Simon and Schuster, 1965, p.115.
The post Meditation on Space: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up appeared first on Patricia Damery.
January 8, 2016
Silence and Technology
Our neighbor is running a leaf blower as I begin writing this. The noise is distracting— or might I say, my annoyance of it distracts me! It reminds me of an incident earlier this last week when a patient pointed out the ongoing barking of a neighborhood dog, a sound I hadn’t noticed until then. Then we were both disturbed by it for the rest of his hour.
At a time I am working to have less noise of one kind or another in my life, I find myself particularly activated by leaf blowers, barking dogs —and the grinding sound of heavy equipment over the hill. That ongoing drone over this last year is almost unbearable. The meadow and forestland is being converted to vineyard despite the impact increased water usage is having on nearby families’ water supplies. I try to not let my annoyance escalate to hatred, and yet it is so easy to demonize those who are the source of these sounds and these actions.
It is so much more complicated than this, I am learning.
I love the pounding of rain on the roof; the cry of the redtail, even the clicking of my clock. High winds, though, disturb me. We have lost too many drought-weakened trees these last years, and each storm threatens to down another two or three. Our world is too noisy, too dry, too polluted, too overbuilt. Perhaps my annoyances are healthy warnings about these impingements on Nature, of which we— and I— are a part.
Perhaps demonizing the other is a kind of psychological defense which prevents me from facing the real pain of the situation: I am a part of this. Overbuilding is severely impacting our environment, and yet, my husband and I also built our home and our road to our home on this hillside. We are part of this overbuilding.
The leaf-blower has stopped and the sun comes out a little between storms. How to take responsibility for the damage we all are doing to our earth through our use of tools that supposedly make life easier? On our insistence—our feelings of entitlement— to take more than our earth can give?
In 1949 Carl Jung wrote in a letter to the students of Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich in response to their questions about the impact of technology on the human psyche. He said that historically the repetition of physical work, and the resultant monotony, offered a kind of semi-conscious condition that can also be ecstatic and bring meaning of life. While technological tasks are often rhythmic and monotonous, they seldom are experienced as meaningful, often setting man apart from his instinctive self. Jung suggested that man find balance, working half a day on these tasks and half a day on his own land where he can literally see the fruits of his labor. (p. 152-153, the Nature Writings of C. G. Jung, edited by Meredith Sabini).
A simple statement and yet, profound. Nature speaks when we enter into collaboration with her in growing a garden, walking her trails, learning her soils. We have created technologies and now we need to learn to live in balance with those technologies and with Nature, including the nature of our own psyches. It does not help to demonize the other, only keeps us from taking real, creative action.
(Still, for me, silence helps!)
The post Silence and Technology appeared first on Patricia Damery.
December 30, 2015
Nostalgia and The Other Side of Christmas
We left our aging yellow labs alone in the house for two and a half days right after Christmas. Ramon checked them several times each day, letting them out and feeding them. Why we didn’t think about what they would do, I do not know, considering how they wait, beaver tails wagging wildly, to get their (wrapped) bones each Christmas. We never leave their gifts under the tree.
But I guess we thought the package Aunt Norma left for Genevieve was safe, as it wasn’t food. Who would imagine that they would chew a beeswax candle? And that the Christmas sack with the hot chocolate swizzle sticks that Elizabeth forgot was out of reach on the table—wasn’t it? I couldn’t imagine that they would tear into a sack of stocking goodies, delicately chewing the bottom off a cellophane package of frankincense and myrrh and grinding the resins into a powder still in the tiny bag. What precision they demonstrated! Even piercing the metal top of the turmeric bottle so it became like a salt shaker! Leo even bored into a tube of Weleda Body Wash and then wallowed in it.
A little background on our returning: Some places are haunted for me, and one of these places is where Donald and I went right after Christmas: the coastal vacation community of Sea Ranch. I have gone to Sea Ranch at various times in my life. I first went there when I was five months pregnant with my first son and we stayed at the lodge which had a windowseat overlooking a meadow. When my sons were preschoolers, my parents, both now long gone, and my family spent a weekend there when my mother was recovering from open heart surgery. She walked the paved driveways between the weathered wood homes as part of her therapy.
Donald and I honeymooned in a condo on the cliff just south of the main lodge after our accommodations in Oregon fell through. When you sat in the living room, you stared into the horizon line of sea. We have spent many New Years there with our dear friends Dick and Karlyn, Dick now also gone.
Walking the trails along the coast brought back these memories, and I began to think about how, as heartwarming as these memories are, they are also memories often whitewashed of anything upsetting and have a way of keeping me out of the present. (Like how on the way back with my parents, we spent an extra frustrating 2 1/2 hours at the Sea Ranch chapel looking for my car keys only to discover that I had thrown them in the garbage can by the parking lot.)
So just when I was contemplating the function of nostalgia, including nostalgia of Christmases past when many of us were together who are not this year (this includes my youngest son and his family—I can really get on a roll with this!) my dogs helped me out! They brought me into the present with the immediacy of annoyance— and then awe— at the level of the intricacy of destruction.
The word nostalgia comes from Greek nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain.’¹
Perhaps our dogs took take the etymology literally: “returning home pain”! But then, aren’t we home when we are present— even with pain?
These Holy Nights, Leo and Moka welcomed my return in their unique way!
Leo and Moka
¹American Dictionary
The post Nostalgia and The Other Side of Christmas appeared first on Patricia Damery.
December 24, 2015
Manger Scene
Another Christmas story from earlier years.
My sister and I called the nativity the “manger scene”. We would get the set out of the attic for the first Sunday in Advent. The scene had the holy family, of course, and an assortment of angels, but also a cow, donkey, two sheep, and a shepherd. My grandmother’s set was so huge it stretched across her fireplace mantel. At one end a group of shepherds sat around a fire with a herd of sheep. On the other end were three kings with their camels, a well with a tiny moving bucket, and more angels. Mary, baby Jesus, and Joseph were in the center.
When my sons were born, we got a nativity set, which they often played with in their early years. The baby Jesus disappeared and we had to replace him, so he looks a little different from his parents. Since the death of my parents and grandparents I have added an assortment of their figures, plus a large bean bag serpent (a gift from friends when I was writing Snakes), several goats (all of these gifts), a large rabbit (family heirloom no one else wanted), and pictures of our several deceased relatives, friends, and animals.
St. Francis overlooks all of this. This saint loves animals. I realize the appropriateness of the word “manger” as a manger is a feeding trough for animals. By nurturing the animal within, our embodied selves, we await a new consciousness born in matter.
This poem addresses this. I wrote it when our goats first came into my life.
CHRIST
Grey day and rain, all night, rain.
I bring aromatic oat hay fragrant from July fields
and the goats wait, fat as potatoes from a week
of waiting. Waiting… for sun. The world is damp and sodden.
I smooth the stiff hair along the spine
of each fat black body, each warm earth body,
hunkered down in the darkened barn,
one small window embroidered by spider.
Pungent from a week of confinement,
steamy from body heat and urine,
they nuzzle the fresh straw I bring, then sink deep into it, tucking stocky legs underneath, to ruminate and to wait…Now I understand why Christ was born somewhere like this,
in our animalness, almond eyes glistening in the dim light,
sturdy bodies full of vitality, gaining substance
from the wait. I understand
why It happens in the longest darkness, in the whisper
of animal breath and the stinging scent of straw
dampened by days of goats waiting out storms.First published in Psychological Perspectives, (Vol. 44, 2002)
Goats Gaining Sustenance
Have a Very Merry Christmas!
The post Manger Scene appeared first on Patricia Damery.
