Category Archives: Anima/Animus

Finches

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Finches

Each year the nest more delicate, nonetheless they return,
my faithful little finches, watching it by turn
until the eggs all hatch and the nestlings start their squeal,
prompting parent after parent to fly off to find their meal.

In the rafter near the kitchen, they continue serenading,
keeping up their clatter as their folks go promenading,
in search of constant aphids and seeds that are their food,
creating angry nestlings, demanding in their mood.

Of all of nature’s visitors, these finches are the best,
although I’m glad my kitchen is not my place of rest.
Their insistent chirping  is not the stuff of dreams.
Their continual conversation begins with the first beams

of morning sun, continuing all the long day through,
like living in an aviary at my private zoo.
Nature all around us reminds us of our place.
It humbles with its beauty and slows our human pace

to take notice of her cycles and her stubborn repetitions,
planning  out each life form  in particular renditions.
I cannot be but humbled as I cook up my creations,
listening to the chorus of my avian relations.

Prompt words today are return, nest, delicate and humiliate. Also, Granny’s Bird of the Day prompt.

Constant Contradiction: Anima vs. Animus, Virgin and Warrior, Gun Control vs. the NRA

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Someone on a social site I post on once stated that he couldn’t understand the contradiction between my statement that I was an agnostic and the fact that a number of my retablos made use of images of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

One side of the Mexican coin as well as the Universal coin.

I answered that for me, she was a symbol of that gentle, loving, peaceful, motherly, female side of Mexico that balanced the macho, warlike, violent male side. He didn’t understand this and actually ended our correspondence—a perfect example of that force I sought to counterbalance. Some years ago I completed another retablo entitled “Macho” that demonstrates the male side of the dichotomy.

My newest retablo deals with the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine in both Mexico and the world.My  retablo deals with the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine in both Mexico and the world.

It seems to me that this constant struggle between these two forces in our lives is especially evident in the past two years. The masculine demands its right to exercise its power in whatever means it might choose. The right to possess and fire a gun retains its power in our “land of the free” despite its ever-increasing tendency to wholesale slaughter. The voices of mothers and those sane souls male or female who cry out to restore balance through gun control fall on the deaf ears of those meant to serve our needs.

Below is another  sculpture I completed in 2012 entitled, “Anima/Animus.”

ANIMA/ANIMUSSHADOWED ANIMA

Since first reading Jung 37 years ago, I have been almost constantly engaged in examining that force which seems to drive the world—that shifting between anima and animus that the I Ching might call yin and yang and that religion might classify as good and evil. Not that either the anima or  animus is purely good or evil, as they signify the unconscious male impulse in a woman and the unconscious female impulse in a male. The anima is the feminine part of a man’s personality and the animus is the male part of a woman’s personality, so each sex contains elements of both.  The struggle in the world is partially a matter of trying to balance the two, and in our present society, there is certainly good evidence that we are out of balance..  This is a simplistic statement of a very complex matter, but one I often deal with in my work.

ANIMA/UNSHADOWED

ANIMA/UNSHADOWED

ANIMUS/ANIMA CLOSEUP

This detail symbolizes the shattering of the male side of the ego by a feminine consciousness. The gold object in the glass case is a small replica of the instrument used to sever the head in sacrificial prehispanic temple ceremonies. The hammer shattering the glass is meant to symbolize the gentling effect of the feminine on the msculine.This detail examines the shattering of the male side of the ego by a feminine consciousness. The gold object in the glass case is a small replica of the instrument used to sever the head in sacrificial preHispanic temple ceremonies. The hammer shattering the glass is meant to symbolize the gentling effect of the feminine on the masculine. Would that this balance is soon restored in our society, which presently suffers 25 times the deaths by gunfire of any other developed nation.

Below are some quotations and links for various articles I researched concerning the issue of gun control and the rampant gun violence and mass shootings in the U.S. as compared to the rest of the world:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/14/school-shootings-in-america-2018-how-many-so-far

“But the emotional impact of school shootings has sparked a booming school safety industry. In 2017, the market for security equipment in the education sector was estimated at $2.68bn, according to industry analysts at IHS Markit. Some companies have capitalized on parents’ fears by selling bulletproof backpacks or whiteboards, as well as offering ways to fortify school buildings themselves against attack.

While refusing to pass substantive gun control restrictions, Congress has approved hundreds of millions of dollars in federal spending to help put police officers in public schools, including $45m in 2013, the year after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.

In 2009,mericans own 48 percent of the estimated 750 million civilian owned guns worldwide.

The U.S. makes up less that 5% of the world’s population , yet holds 31% of the global mass shooters. (2012 statistics.)”

“In February 2017, US President Donald Trump signed a measure that scrapped an Obama-era regulation aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of some severely mentally ill people.”

“Some gun rights advocates have pushed to expand gun-carrying in schools further. Andrew McDaniel, a state legislator in Missouri who introduced legislation last year to make it easier to carry guns in schools, told the Guardianthat, in rural schools where it might take 20 or 30 minutes for law enforcement to respond to a school shooting in progress, it made sense to have other armed citizens ready to step in.”

Quote from Denver Post: “In the wake of massacres like Wednesday’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, a small number of states have passed “red flag laws” that allow the seizure of guns before people can commit acts of violence.

California, Washington, Oregon, Indiana and Connecticut have statutes that can be used to temporarily take guns away from people whom a judge deems a threat to themselves or others. Lawmakers in 18 other states – including Florida – plus the District of Columbia have proposed similar measures.

Mental illness, escalating threats, substance abuse and domestic violence are among the circumstances under which a judge can order weapon restrictions.”

“This morning I heard the sheriff [in Parkland] lament the fact that he did not have the tools to remove the firearms from the shooter,” Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said Thursday. “Had he lived in one of those states where this law is in place, he would have had the tools, and this shooting may have been averted.”

“The nation’s patchwork of federal and state gun laws mainly involves background checks and actions to prevent people who pose a threat from buying firearms. The approach of red flag laws is to seize guns from people who have them and to restrict their access until they are no longer dangerous.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/every-attempt-to-change-gun-laws-under-trump.html

“He must have been the kind of child who had to be told more than once not to put his hand in the fire on the gas stove.That’s the only reasonable explanation as to why Colorado House Minority Leader Patrick Neville (R), who was a sophomore at Columbine High School when one of the first of the modern mass school shootings took place, is introducing legislation to eliminate gun-free zones in Colorado schools.”

 

Images and copy from a post I made 5 years ago are used in this posting.The prompt today is constant.

The Moon is Full and Waiting

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IMG_0557

The Moon is Full and Waiting

The moon is full and waiting,
but the night is full of chill,
though my true love expects me
over yonder hill.
His ardent calls invite me
to join him for the night,
and yet I dread the cold cold wind
and the night air’s bite.
If I were only twenty
I’d have no choice to make,
but I have guests arriving
and sweet bites yet to bake.

My true love lies waiting
over yonder hill,
but he’ll return another night.
I’m confident he will.
For he has no other
to overlook his flaws:
the roughness of his ardor,
the power of his jaws.
His embrace often bruises,
though this is not his intent.
In the excess of his ardor,
only tenderness is meant.

The warm cave of our meeting
still carves out yonder hill,
but tonight I will not join him.
It may be I never will.
Tomorrow night the full moon
will partially be spent,
and perhaps by next month’s equal,
I will once more not relent.
Perhaps I’ll find another
closer to my kind,
though an equal to his passion
I’m unlikely to find.

A mild wind blows the clouds away
to clear the shrouded moon.
My guests will be arriving.
I know it will be soon.
I stir in leavening powder.
I stir in heavy cream.
Across the hand I stir with
falls the moon’s broad beam.
I drop the spoon and go again
to open up the door.
I hear the gentle song of wind,
my lover’s beckoning roar.

I answer with a beat of blood.
A spasm in my thigh
invites me to be climbing
over distant hill and high.
The crumbs fall from my fingers
as I run into the night.
I do not feel the bruising stones
or the wind’s cold bite.
My lover calls me onward,
and once again I go.
For when the full moon calls me,
not once have I said no.

 

 

IMG_0562Both of these photos were taken on Christmas Eve, 2015, from my sister’s back terrace in Peoria, Arizona.

The Prompt: Earworm––Write whatever you normally write about, and weave in a book quote, film quote, or song lyric that’s been sticking with you this week. (The song lyric I was inspired by was “Baby it’s cold outside,” but when I finished, it had no actual place in the poem other than to be its inspiration.) https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/earworm-2/

Dreaming A Path

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Dreaming A Path

Dream, Fri. Oct 18, 2013

We were at a booth in a café. It was a huge room with booths on every side and each booth had a clock, or at least I thought they did. I don’t think I ever looked. Our alarm started going off and there was no way to turn it off. It was by me and I tried and tried but couldn’t get it off. I said I was just going to unplug it, but Patti said perhaps it was timed with all the other clocks at tables and then it wouldn’t match. I said couldn’t they just reset it when we left? Someone agreed, but still we didn’t unplug it and it went on and on and on. Very annoying. Our booth came equipped with a little dog. It was tiny and light with long very curly white hair that was in loose corkscrew very long ringlets. It was so adorable and affectionate. I held it most of the time. It had legs like wires that went straight down..very skinny…and it jumped a lot. When the waitress came, we told her about the alarm and she said yes, she’d noticed that it was going off…but she didn’t do anything about it. We told her how cute the little dog was and she said yes…but then it seemed like it was the little dog who had the alarm that was going off. We ordered and afterwards I was wanting a dessert but thought I shouldn’t order one. Patti was to my right and I suddenly realized she was eating a very rich chocolate dessert—a sort of fudge flan or very moist slippery cake that was hot with a hot fudge sauce over it. She offered me a taste. It was a very small rectangle…not very big…but I tasted it and immediately said I’d have one, too. It was incredible. Still, the alarm went off. It was driving me crazy! Then I woke up and realized it was my own bedside alarm. I reached up with my eyes still closed and tried to turn it off, but couldn’t find the control. Finally I picked it up, opened my eyes and found the control. It was 8:10. The alarm had been going off for 10 minutes!!!!

My interpretation:

I found this dream in a folder on my computer. I have no memory at all of having dreamed it, and perhaps that distance makes it easier for me to interpret it. In a few weeks, I turn 67. For the past year, I’ve thought repeatedly about death and the fact that if I’m lucky, I probably have only 30 years left. For some reason, that awareness is very stressful. I feel a need to finish everything I’ve started and never completed. Earlier, that consisted of a lot of sorting, construction of storage spaces and weeding out of the contents of my house. That effort is ongoing. What also happened, however, is that I have an incredible drive to get everything published that has been lying around in file cabinets for many many years as well as a need to write new work and somehow disseminate it. My blog is part of that effort, as are my efforts to get all my books on Amazon and Kindle.

Seeing this dream as if for the first time, I clearly see that theme of time running out coupled by a sense of alarm that I need to do something about it. The little dog shows the attractive quality (adorable and affectionate) of finally dealing with all these loose ends—(note all his corkscrew hairs). Those wiry little legs that kept him always active certainly reflect the urgency I’ve been feeling to write write write.

One aspect of this awareness in my real life for a time consisted of my fear that I will stop breathing. This often gets me up gasping at night to run outside to try to breathe. For some reason I haven’t had any of these panic attacks since I started writing every morning. What I interpreted as a growing fear of death and a dread of ceasing to exist was perhaps a fear of not living and creating while I am alive.

I think the interplay between my sister Patti and me in the dream reflects a number of things. One is a difference in our approaches to life. I think in a way, she is more of a rule-follower and since she was my immediate pattern for most of my earlier life, I think a part of me feels this same need, but this is coupled with an equal and stronger need to create my own path in a direction unique from my two older and very competent sisters and to break a few rules to do so. At a very early age, much as I admired and imitated my sisters, I felt the need to prove myself. To find something to know that they didn’t already know. I found this route when I started venturing out at an early age to find new ground where they had not gone before me. It led me first into the homes of friends and strangers where I saw life being acted out in a manner entirely different from my own home. The road led further—to summer camp where I was a stranger to all and vice versa. I loved being the stranger. In choosing a college, I fell back on the reliability and comfort of attending the same school my sister had attended, but in my Jr. year I took my first big leap—a trip around the world on World Campus Afloat. That early adventure in seeing dozens of new and strange cultures set my life path. I’ve been traveling ever since and have been living in Mexico for the past 13 years.

I believe this dream depicts the sense of urgency I’ve had my entire life to “do” something with experience. My art and writing allow me to turn off the alarm for the hours in which I practice them. That small dessert might symbolize the rewards of doing what I need to do to do so.

P.S. An interesting insight I have had just as I started to post this: (And, interestingly enough, wordpress will not accept my blog entry. Perhaps it is insisting I add this P.S. before it does so.) I just got back to Mexico from a visit to the states wherein I visited my oldest sister Betty who is now in the depths of the world of Alzheimer’s. While I was there, she seemed increasingly distressed by the fact that she can no longer communicate, but one day as we were sitting in the living room portion of her small apartment in a managed care Alzheimer’s wing, she motioned to the middle of the floor and said, “Look a that cute little white thing there—that fluffy little white dog!” This was the first incidence that I know of of her actually hallucinating visually, and for some reason it popped into my mind in relation to the little dog in my dream. All of these images—of our dreams as well as our daily life—remind us to live while we can and to do what is most important to us. In my case as well as my sister’s—to communicate. Too late for her, although she continues to try. Not too late for me.

P.S.S.  By the way, the instant I completed the above P.S., the wordpress page that had continued to not allow me to post this blog entry flashed the message:  What do you want to post?  Text? Picture?  I chose text and and you have just read it.

The prompt: Freudian Flips. Do you remember a recent dream you had? Or an older one that stayed vivid in your mind? Today, you’re your own Freud: Tell us the dream, then interpret it for us! Feel free to be as serious or humorous as you see fit, or to invent a dream if you can’t remember a real one.

Note in response to this prompt: (When I think of dreams, I think of Jung, not Freud, and he continues to influence my thoughts and actions much more than Freud ever did.)

 

Dichotomy

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Someone on a social site I post on once stated that he couldn’t understand the contradiction between my statement that I was an agnostic and the fact that a number of my retablos made use of images of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

One side of the Mexican coin as well as the Universal coin.

One side of the Mexican coin as well as the Universal coin. (click on images to make larger.)

I answered that for me, she was a symbol of that gentle, loving, peaceful, motherly, female side of Mexico that balanced the macho, warlike, violent male side. He didn’t understand this and actually ended our correspondence—a perfect example of that force I sought to counterbalance. I have just finished a retablo entitled “Macho” that demonstrates the male side of the dichotomy.

 

My newest retablo deals with the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine in both Mexico and the world.

My newest retablo deals with the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine in both Mexico and the world.

I also have a sculpture I completed over a year ago entitled, “Anima/Animus.”

ANIMA/ANIMUSSHADOWED ANIMA

Since first reading Jung 32 years ago, I have been almost constantly engaged in examining that force which seems to drive the world—that shifting between anima and animus that the I Ching might call yin and yang and that religion might classify as good and evil. Not that either the anima or  animus is purely good or evil, but certainly all is a matter of trying to balance.  This is a simplistic statement of a very complex matter, but one I often deal with in my work.  This statement is being made after the fact as I very rarely have a concept in mind when I begin a work.  I like to see where each piece leads me and I’m as surprised as the viewer may be at where I am led by the process.

ANIMA/UNSHADOWED

ANIMA/UNSHADOWED

ANIMUS/ANIMA CLOSEUP

This detail symbolizes the shattering of the male side of the ego by a feminine consciousness. The gold object in the glass case is a small replica of the instrument used to sever the head in sacrificial prehispanic temple ceremonies. The hammer shattering the glass is meant to symbolize the gentling effect of the feminine on the msculine.

This detail examines the shattering of the male side of the ego by a feminine consciousness. The gold object in the glass case is a small replica of the instrument used to sever the head in sacrificial prehispanic temple ceremonies. The hammer shattering the glass is meant to symbolize the gentling effect of the feminine on the masculine.

Yellow (Day 28 of NaPoWriMo)

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Day 28 The prompt today was to write a poem about a color.

Yellow

You were so red, so white.
So much of you was blue.
Yellow is what I missed in you—
that brilliant optimism—
that power of the sun.
There was that black in you
that cancelled it out.
You were the artist who understood color the most.
That color created by the union of yellow and black, you knew.

Your white hair, confined in a pony tail
or streaming down your back
in your wild man look
prompted strangers to ask
if you were a shaman,
or declare you to be one.

That red that flamed out from your work,
subtly put there even in places where it had no
logical purpose for being.
That red tried to make things right.

All of us who knew you
knew the blue.
It was the background color of all of your days.
It was the blanket in which we wrapped ourselves at night,
trying to be close,
but always always divided
by blue.

For fifteen years,
I believed that one day I’d bring you to yellow.
There were splashes of it, surely,
throughout our lives together.
You on the stage, reading your heart,
me in the audience, recognizing
all the colors from within you—even yellow.

Finding the pictures you had taken of me
at the art show, looking at your work—
those pictures taken even before we ever met.
I discovered, after you’d passed,
that you had recognized
me even then, when I thought
I was the only one
angling for a meeting—
sure of my need to know those secret parts of you
that I will never know
now that you have given yourself
to the black
or blue
or red
or even to the white.

Whatever your ever after
has delivered you to.

A new life later,
I am suffused
by my own canvas
of memories of you—
every other pigment
splashed against
a vivid background
of yellow.