Land Elders

Charlie Toledo by newly built straw bale shed on Suskol House land.

On June 23, 2012, we will have two speakers at Harms Vineyards and Lavender Fields Open House: Charlie Toledo, Executive Director of the Suscol Intertribal Council, and Clare C. Marcus, Professor Emerita of Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of California, Berkeley.

At 11 am, Charlie Toledo, of Towa descent, will be speaking on “First People’s Sustainable Ways”. We were honored to have her with us last year as she spoke of “First People’s Agriculture”. The Napa Valley “was a cultivated wilderness, though the Europeans couldn’t see the cultivation,” Charlie said in a three part harmsfarmlog interview last spring. “Now, the Department of Fish and Game and other groups are finally acknowledging that the area was indeed cultivated… and now they’re scrambling to learn from Native American elders because of intense problems with erosion, wildfires, wildlife habitat, and more which these groups are now facing in Napa Valley area.”

I visited the land which the Suscol Intertribal Council recently acquired. The land is a spiritual center for Native American peoples in the Pope Valley, also serving as a bridge to heal the relationship of native peoples with peoples now living in the area. This talk is a benefit for the building of Suskol House. ($10 donation)

The property is beautiful, serene and quiet, yet also with a strong voice. It is not a place for crowds, but for contemplation and prayer. Being with Charlie on the site reminds me of being with Lakota medicine woman Pansy Hawkwing during the years I benefited from her teachings. There is that atunement to the energies of the trees, the paths, the slope of the mountain, the flow of rainwater. “Native relationship to trees and animals were sibling relationships,” Charlie says. “They were perceived as part of the same family. It is often perceived that the native people pray to the moon or to fire. It’s not like that; they pray with the moon and fire.”

Within 25 years of European contact, 98% of the indigenous population was killed, and with them, knowledge of tending the balance of man and nature. Western Europeans are much more into domination of nature. Yet in meeting with individuals such as Charlie or Pansy Hawkwing, the attitude toward the natural world and our part in it still lives. Perhaps if we can learn this less dominating way, we can incorporate what knowledge is still present about balance, learning from a more receptive attitude.

Clare Cooper Marcus

At 2 pm, Clare Marcus Cooper will read from her recent memoir, Iona Dreaming: The Healing Power of Place. Clare embodies a western European version of this receptive attitude toward the natural world and to the psyche. She taught in the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and has written about the impact of the natural and manmade environments on the human psyche. She is author of the bestselling book House as Mirror of Self and co-author of Healing Gardens.

I wrote about the rich read of Iona Dreaming in a blog of November 17, 2011. Clare’s poetic account of her time on Iona, an island off the Scottish coast, was instructive in attunement to the landscapes of the environment and the psyche, at once. Through remembrances of her childhood in wartime England, to her life in Berkeley in the ’60’s, into retirement and then life threatening illness and the Jungian analysis that, in partnership with the landscape of Iona, served to heal, Clare shows us the power of consciousness of spirit of place. Through attending to numerous synchronicities, she is lead to where she needs to be.

… if a place, a culture, an island keeps recurring in your dreams, appears unbidden in pensive moments, you can be sure it has something to tell you that you need to hear. Heeding the call, your life is changed. (p. 368)

We hope you can attend these presentations by these two remarkable elders. We will also be doing Biodynamic tours of our ranch for those of you interested in our own ways of learning to listen to the earth. (Our beginning recorded in Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation.)

Harms Vineyards Open House, June 23, from 10 am to 4 pm. Free Biodynamic Tours at 10 am, 12:30, and 3 pm. Directions: 3185 Dry Creek Road, Napa, CA 94558. For more details: harmsfarmlog.com.

Another Elder Story

Three years after I dreamed of the turtle gift from MJ (described in the blog of May 16), a small group of women, now all analysts, asked MJ to do a reading group, and when she agreed, we chose The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Taoist text translated from Chinese into German by Richard Wilhelm, a friend of Carl Jung. Wilhelm asked Jung to do the introduction. In fact, the manuscript was Jung’s introduction to alchemy. The rest of Jung’s life would be devoted to the study of both eastern and western alchemy.

Synchronistically, a Taoist art exhibit was coming to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and MJ, also a docent at the museum (she was in her late 80’s), had been studying the objects and their history . Many of the objects had been “rediscovered” in recent years after having been stored for centuries. She offered to give our group a private tour as a way to begin our reading of the Taoist/Buddhist manuscript.

Daoist Priest's Robe, c. 1850-1900
Chinese, from http://www.philamuseum.org/booklets/3_18_37_0.html

I remember standing before an exhibit of Taoist priest robes as MJ described the priesthood, a later development in Taoism. Suddenly I was in another realm. As I examined the robes’ embroidered depictions of the universe, intricate stars and planets, sky and earth, animals and plants over their entirety, I remembered the dream I had had of the turtle. When I checked back to see when I had had the dream, it was three years to the day.

I have talked about some of my insights and learnings from the dream in the previous blog, but here I want to focus on a perspective I gained from this synchronistic experience: Sometimes things end as we have known them, but what is of value is not lost. A kind of distillation of what is essential is occurring, the nonessential falling away.

MJ explained that although Taoism disappeared from common practice for centuries in China (although it was kept alive in Taiwan), it has been seeded back into eastern and western culture. Witness the publishing of other Taoist manuscripts, and particularly the Tao de Ching.

Taoism, or The Way, begins with the “anterior heaven” of oneness, then separates into opposites and the interplay of yin and yang. In the holding of opposites and the chaos it creates, the new born child develops, psychologically and spiritually, —as well as the 10,000 things. Like Jung’s transcendent function, this results in another kind of wholeness, a “later heaven”.

Many of the values of this shamanic, nature-based philosophy, have sprouted in this eleventh hour as we realize the extent of our devaluing of nature. Taoism originated as a counterbalance to the rising conservative forces at the end of the Zhou Dynasty (700 BC-200 BC) which worked to accumulate power and suppress of women. In contrast, Taoism held sacred the holy mountains, streams, and female deities, a religion of the common people. One might wonder if its reappearance now is also a counterbalance to the conservative push of powerful men to control not only wealth but also women and the natural feminine world.

At the time of this writing, I realize how much Taoism has influenced me and my work in analytical psychology and in farming. The turtle dream presaged the importance Taoist concepts would have for me, its honoring the natural world, its feminine, nonhierarchical process, and shamanic substructure.

But I also wonder if the synchronicity reflects a parallel process of Jung’s work moving into the common culture. Jung’s The Red Book, the account of his own in-turning to learn to communicate with figures in the psyche, has been a huge success, many non-Jungians purchasing the very large and expensive volume. In fact, I see more excitement about analytical psychology outside the psychological community in the educated public than within it. Will analytical psychology be held in the collective to be seeded back into psychology sometime in the future?

As educated elder, MJ modeled the feminine holding of the humus of history in which seeds of the essential plant can take root again. Her wisdom shows brightest in her willingness face the chaos of the unknown. What version of this plant will grow this time? This is a time requiring surrender and the incubating warmth of our attentions from which creative initiative can germinate.

Updates on Media

This week Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation got  media coverage!

Saturday evening, May 12,  I was interviewed live by Solarzar on Good Vibrations Radio. You can listen through the free download by clicking on the link. Good Vibrations Radio is a live show on Saturday evenings out of Monterey, CA. You might check it out for other programs as well. I very much enjoyed their thoughtful, warm presentation.

Then Naomi Lowinsky posted a blog on her review of Farming Soul  in Psychological Perspectives, Volume 55, Issue 1. It is a brave review, and I will have to say, I felt met and seen in it. Thank you, Naomi! Her blog title: The Serpent Muse.

A Big Dream

Excerpt from Dream Journal

A number of years ago when I was navigating a particularly difficult terrain in my analytic training, I had a dream.

In the dream MJ, my control analyst in training at the time, gives me a Christmas gift at an Institute party, a flat turtle about ten inches across. I open the turtle, which is a kind of purse, and am stunned by the beauty of its insides. Upper and lower sides are sewn with Celtic knots, convoluted like intestines. The designs are appliquéd with tiny pieces of different animal skins. Top and bottom are like the sky and the earth. There are many, almost imperceptible stitches. Stunned by the beauty of the gift, I realize it will take years to assimilate its meaning.

This dream is one that has defined my path. I also remember knowing at the time that what I had received in this dream was a gift. You can see from the picture above in my almost translucent papered dream journal (from China), that the drawing I made of the inside of the turtle was two circles divided by into quarters, essentially two Celtic crosses. In the lower left quadrant of the first circle I made some attempt to fill in the Celtic knots—or intestines.

The turtle was particularly interesting to me. In the drawing, the top and bottom of the purse show the in-turned tail and head. This turtle is at rest, even protecting itself. At the time, I was feeling self protective. I also felt that I was going through my candidacy at a very slow, turtle pace, of which I was tired.

A native America creation story of California tells that the land is the back of a turtle (Turtle Island). Was new land being formed within my psyche? In fact, this dream has often seemed like a Noah’s ark kind of dream, with all the animals and plants being represented, along with the heavens and earth. Something was being saved to re-inhabit the world after the waters receded, and MJ’s dream gift was a reminder that there would be life after this time of what seemed like stagnation but was perhaps incubation.

As I contemplate the image now, I realize that the many animal skins, skins of instinctual forces, were offering protection. We need skin, and I certainly needed many kinds of skin during these trials. But the skins were also stitched in a most delicate and deliberate way. The in-turned time was also one of women’s work, like some of the alchemical drawings in Slendor Solis. A slow, feminine process was essential! 

The association to intestines also suggests a kind of digestion of what had been ingested. As Celtic knots, they were enigmatic strings of no end, reflecting natural cycles, death and rebirth, birth and death, on and on. And the fact the interior of the turtle was the universe brings to mind As Above, So Below. In a very deep way, I was being given a Christmas gift (celebrating divine birth) of wholeness, a worked piece that was at once natural and manmade, protective and incubating, in-turned and yet the ground of the new world. A purse often represents the womb, that place of incubation, or in the outer world, the place we carry our ID and valuables.

This dream came in the month that my husband, sons, and I moved into the house we had built over the last year and a half, a time that I was also questioning the direction I was going professionally. Although the way was not clear, the dream assured me I was on the right path. I am appreciative to MJ for the gift of this perspective, one I continue to fathom as I find my way, now as an analyst, farmer, and writer.

Three Elders I Have Known

Shortly before she died, Norma T., a spiritual teacher whom I write about in Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation, told me that there would be no more major “outer” teachers for me. “Now,” she said, “they will be in the inner. “

I felt bereft when I heard this. There is something so comforting about a teacher or mentor whom you can count on to see the larger picture, give advice, let you know if you are off track. I have had the benefit of some really wonderful teachers and mentors over time.

Several years before my work with Norma T., when I was a candidate in training to be a Jungian analyst, my control analyst, Don Sandner, mentored me as I described each session with my patient, offering his own insight, always at the edge of my awareness. In this way he never overwhelmed me with what was also a much larger perspective. My confidence grew along with my skill.

Don preparing to carry a Taos drum to top
of mesa for a drumming. Ojo Caliente, 1971. 

But Don also mentored us in several other ways. One summer he took my candidate group on a trip to the Southwest. By day we visited Native American sacred sites, often meditating in a kiva together for most of an hour; by night, Don taught us what he had learned from his own mentor, a Navajo medicine man, about the symbolic healing of Navajo sand paintings. Then we drummed for an hour . A single mother supporting two young boys, I felt I had gone to heaven these ten days! They changed my life. We learned from Don’s words and we learned by his being.

Shortly before Don died, he and I were discussing the coming of the new age, whatever that might be. Like Moses and the promised land, he informed me that although he had some idea of an overview, he would not live to see it. I objected. The turn of the century was only three years away! But he reiterated, “You will see the new millennium and the new age it brings: I will not.” He died suddenly a few months later, aged 68.

Southwest group preparing to make the assent with the drum.

Norma T. perceived energy, moving with me in the nonphysical, naming the territory. Through her, I gained confidence in my own perceptions in these other realms. Then, she too was gone, death moving her into the nonphysical, again before the turn of the millennium.

As the verse says, There is a time to give up childish ways (1 Corinthians 13). Eventually we have to take on the mantle of our own authority if we are to come into our own. Then it is our turn to give.

Another teacher and guide along the way, Joseph Henderson, one of the founding members of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, stated to my candidate group: individuation begins when therapy ends. I think he meant this: When we quit turning outward for answers, and turn inward for the hard work of our own inner guidance, when we have received enough tools to do this and have learned to communicate in these inner realms, then we are developing, maturing, becoming elder material ourselves. This we pass on, not only by teaching, but by being present to witness.

My main work with Norma T. occurred in the last nine months of her life, the gestation period for new birth. While I grieved her physical presence as a mentor, I have come to see the importance of turning to inner guidance, whether that be of the higher self or other beings. Perhaps this is the stuff of the new age: less hierarchical, more creative, open to the divinity without and within. It is facilitated through the living presence that elders can offer.

Importance of Elders

Birth of Elderhood: Birth of Our/My First
Grandchild, Wesley, on his birth day,
and also mine!

Last month I had an experience that made me rethink the importance of elders and mentors.

I attended an eco-psychology workshop with a number of activists, land use peoples, and healers of various disciplines of all ages. The workshop, based on the work of Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, addressed the impact of the environmental crisis on the human psyche. Coming from her own grief and despair about the state of the earth, Macy developed a process which moves from gratitude for what is present and the resultant opening of the heart, into shifts in perspectives, and finally, into action.

As we shared, I felt the intense anxiety of the young. Would it be safe to bring babies into this world? Would their good efforts make any difference at all? Will anything work?

As we sat in a circle, I felt the age differences. Those of us who were a generation or so older had grappled with these questions for many years. It was not as if we had solved many of the issues that we had worked to change, nor that we did not also feel anger, grief, and despair about current conditions, but many of us older participants had another perspective. Were we elders?

What is an elder? In old days elders imparted knowledge and advice about how to handle key life issues often based on past experience. They provided continuity, being living representatives of the life force. Mentors too could teach or lead a young person to develop necessary life skills. One of my first mentors was Mrs. Ebbs, my 7th and 8th grade English teacher, who encouraged me to write about what I knew, to describe the present, to use language to help the reader know my present. She gave me confidence in my writing ability as well as direction in how to develop it.

And there was Mr. Moore, my high school chemistry teacher who introduced me to Plato’s “Myth of the Divided Line” through C.P. Snow’s Science is a Sacred Cow. I see underlined in that yellowed paperback, “the highest truths can only be expressed in the form of myth”. This was the antecedent to my study of analytical psychology. Mr. Moore probably unintentionally pointed me in that direction.

In fact, I have been blessed in my life by a series of elders and mentors, and as I sat in the circle at that workshop, I remembered them, grateful for the guidance they offered me. But as each participant expressed despair and grief about the environment, I was well aware that we older people could offer little practical know-how about current situations. We no longer can be that kind of elder, at least in these environmental issues.

Then I remembered a time when I was in training in a program that was in dire trouble. The community was dealing with major crises and was no longer able to train. Instead it seemed to project all ills onto its trainees. Although the so-called training continued, the students lost heart and quit meeting as a student group, the will to live as a group having died.

A couple of years later, the trainee group began to meet again. Newer students bemoaned the fact that the student culture of the training program had not been passed down by older students. I remember saying to them: That is the bad news and that is the good news! What I meant was, that culture should not be passed down; a new one needed to form.

But I think the mistake we made is that while the group did not need the older students’ disgruntlement and despair nor the culture it stemmed from, they needed our presence and energy to sustain them as the possibility of another way formed. They just did not need our “wisdom”.

I wonder if this applies with our young activists today as well. We who lived during the time of intense fear of nuclear holocaust, protested nuclear proliferation, as well as several wars, may not be able to pass down answers to the younger generation as elders did in times past, as we are in a time new attitudes and solutions must form, but we can show up and witness their struggles as well as ours. Our children and grandchildren are coming into a world with so many unknowns that there are few precedents to follow.

Macy holds that keeping open hearts in the face of the intolerable, thereby staying connected to each other and our land, is our hope for new perspectives and creative initiative and action. This is something we elders can facilitate through our presence. Our young need our interest, stories of our own struggles to face enormous problems with varying results, and the encouragement to love each other and the earth even under very difficult circumstances.

Chilies in Chimayó

The chili man, selling his wares.
Courtesy of Dan Safran, photographer.

Another story from our editing days in Truchas, New Mexico. 

Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way

Meaning “only lives when we experience it in and through ourselves.” The Red Book
On Sunday afternoon in the late, brilliant sunlight of fall, Naomi, Dan, Donald and I meet the Tree of Life.

We have sought out a man who sells chilies in front of a shop across the street from the El Santuario de Chimayó. Donald and I had bought a variety of chilies from him two years ago and used them to spice up our legumes and meats, so we are excited to find him again and replenish our supply. 

He tells the four of us that he was a chef in Santa Fe for years, and he describes each bag of chilies with great care. He tells us which are male chilies and which are female chilies, and how to use each. The female chilies, he says, are hotter. When we question him further, he says the actual plants are male and female, the female being taller. After he has drawn pictures of salt shakers on our plastic bags of chilies with an indelible marker by way of instruction to use salt, and describes how to use each, he sells me a cookbook of his grandmother’s Spanish recipes. Later Naomi tells me she saw a recipe for how to cook a goat head. 

Then he instructs us to enter his shop and see his paintings. There on the back wall are beautiful collage paintings of a tree. The colors are deep, rich shades of greens and browns. Naomi declares, The Tree of Life! and we realize that the book that we have been editing is itself a Tree of Life.

Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way can be ordered at fisherkingpress.com or amazon.com.

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