What Remains

A couple of weeks ago I attended a four day writer's retreat in the beautiful foothills above Santa Barbara, led by my favorite professor from Pacifica Graduate Institute, with 40 other kindred souls in love with literature, mythology, philosophy, and Jung. It blew my mind, touched my heart, and got the creative juices flowing.

Now that the 'afterglow' of the retreat is starting to fade, what remains? The challenge of going to these gatherings is, of course, to bring something back to everyday life. Joseph Campbell called it the "boon"--the treasure of great value, that is hard won by the hero and brought back to the people. Although seeing the sacred spiral in Dante's terza rhima was a sparkling intellectual jewel, right now I can appreciate the dull but solid rocks I hold in my hands--a fledgling practice of writing and walking (nearly) every day that I actually WANT to do. I had been 'wanting to want' to write and walk for some time, so what's different now? I think I have faith now. Faith that if I just do it, boring and uninspiring as it may seem, something else will happen, something else will eventually come out of it.


Trust in that process had been lacking, even though I KNOW what Marie Louse von Franz had said about showing up every day to meet Psyche at the writing desk, even though I know what Marion Woodman has said about making your way to the river every day, because Sophia is making her way,too, from the other side. I knew these things, but couldn't live them. If you lack faith, you cannot be faithful, you cannot show up for self or Self.

The faith I feel, and the faithfulness I am showing now is still new and tentative, but seems more rooted than ever before. The experience of the weekend was a weaving together of threads I had been gathering for some time. Observing the patterns in my intimate relationships, I found the grief tied to multiple emotional abandonments--nothing dramatic or tragic, but subtle and pervasive. Getting beyond the mythology of being the victim, and through a fair amount of bodywork, I have seen the deeper pattern--how I routinely abandon myself in the subtle and pervasive decisions of everyday life: what to eat for breakfast, whether to take the stairs or the elevator, whether to sleep in or walk the dogs, whether to journal or spend 3 hours on Facebook, whether to REALLY take care of myself or keep looking for someone else to do that for me.

This is the boon I still hold in my hands. This is what I most needed to hold onto.