I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.
C. G. Jung
This week’s article is necessarily brief. I am writing closer to deadline than usual, and this time of year is very busy in both my business and personal life. I trust my readers will understand, and may even appreciate the departure from my usual loquaciousness.
As we approach the end of the Western calendar, journalists reliably turn to the retrospective to fill their blank pages. The typical “Year in Review” has become an accepted and even expected feature on editorial boards, though it most usually occupies that week just prior to January However there’s already a more temporally relevant article scheduled for that week, so we’ll drop this here for now.
I have noted in earlier articles that this has been a difficult year and transformative year for me. In approaching this article, I have come to consider that enumerating this again would be a disrespectful disservice to my readers. While the need to offer content that is more than “first do this- then do that” requires writing in the context of experience and perspective, there is a thin line between being self aware, self analytical, and self indulgent.
For this reason I open with the quote from Jung. Growth is a necessary condition of life. Without growth, stagnation occurs. From an ecological standpoint, stagnation ultimately results in the consumption of resources without the regenerative processes needed to maintain a viable environment. It can only continue for a finite period.
It is a fool that ignores history, whether it’s their own or the wider world’s. Like astrology or tarot, such attention and analysis gives us a view to patterns and tendencies that can be beneficial or baneful depending on how we exploit them. But like the mantic arts, preoccupation and obsession with these patterns and tendencies can become paralytic.
There’s a great deal of emphasis on “shadow work” and “personal healing” in much of the writings in the modern occult community. I can understand that we have an almost generational awareness of the sorry state that much of the world is in, and this seems echoed in experiences of personal trauma and a kind of vague emptiness. The forced confinement of the past few years, combined with the real loss related to global pandemic has generated an almost universal climate of introspection.
Certainly these influences have figured in my motivation to begin writing publicly on these topics regularly for the first time. But I also feel the need to lift my head up from the earth, and look on to the horizon, and await the sun’s rise.
I am acutely aware of the tendency to become maudlin and melancholy as the days grow shorter. I say this in regard to the astronomical effect of the earth’s annual tilting on it’s axis, and the metaphor of growing age. When I started writing in April, it was motivated by an awareness of mortality and passing time that has become increasingly more concrete as this year has progressed.
At times it has been a struggle to find positivity, motivation, and mirth each week when faced with repeated reminders of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. ” And then about mid year I ran across the quote above. Along with other influences, from reading new and comparatively younger works in the occult genre, and exploration of Eastern ideas and perspectives that, in earlier parts of my life seemed not to fit, I have found the means to reinvigorate and reinvent.
I hope I have done so effectively for my audience. It was my intention that this series of articles would reach at least some few who might find them enriching. This was never meant to be a how-to blog. What I offer is hopefully a catalyst to personal exploration and investigation. I hope that it spurs and sparks the imagination, to perhaps set a foot on a path not as distinctly glimpsed from the main trail. Or at least, to send one wandering in the woods for a bit.
If I have succeeded in that, even in a little part, then this has not simply been a self-indulgent exercise in personal analysis. Meeting these self-imposed deadlines each week while dealing with the “real world” has been both confidence building and somewhat therapeutic. It has helped set the stage for the successful implementation of future plans, which I will discuss a bit next week. I hope you will join me again, even though this short article is not so directly in the occult vein as my other writings.
In any case, if you have just started on this journey, or have been with me from the beginning, I offer a heart-felt thank you for your continued patronage.