Tree water stone

One of Carl Jung's books on archetypes was in a £2:99 sale and I thought, well, why not? There is an obvious answer to that: you're running out of work, idiot - save your pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. Did I listen? Did I bollocks. I bought it.

In one of the early essays, he suggests that the spirit of modern man [sic] (in this book he doesn't seem that interested in modern woman... or indeed any woman) is so lost without access to symbols in the current cultural climate that she (for the man's spirit is the Anima and feminine) has sunk to a watery state. You find the soul in water.

So, the idea is that you look into the water and the first thing you see is your reflection. But not the reflection of your mask, which you present to the world, but the ugly face of the you that you hide. You see your Shadow. The Anima is the flowing water.

He goes on to say that the Greek work Aiolus (spelt Aeolus in Latin) is used, as well as Pneuma, for spirit or soul. Pneuma means breath. Aiolus is the King of the Winds, but also means sparkling or flowing. Of course, this made me think of Aeolus the Guardian Oak (who, by the way, is looking very well indeed).

If all goes well, you then meet the Wise Old Man (if you are a man). Interestingly, the Wise Old Man, and indeed the Anima, are neither good nor evil, but both. The black witch is as critical as the white for finding meaning. While Anima seems to be about the life force - the sparkling, flowing, drive of life; the Wise Old Man is about meaning and meaning isn't moral..... it goes deeper than that. Jung says he uses these figures to clarify, but symbols can never be explicated as they are more resonant than reason allows for.

All of this - the indistinctness of good and evil, the sense that so much cannot be expressed - chimes with the tree conversations. And of course it does: for my tree conversations are exercises of Active Imagination which Jung goes on the recommend.

He says you can work out how important a symbol is by how often it appears. The rose. More recently, the bear. Which (or who) as I now recall, lacerated all my limbs under the watchful eye of the healer Taiwo (which means the first twin, who comes into the world to see if the world is right for the second twin... or both twins...). One limb, bled red, one yellow, one black and the other.... I can't remember, which is a shame as I might have been on to something.

Anyway, all this inspired me to sit and look at water. I actually recorded sound but then I deleted it, so the slideshow is silent.

I move from trees to water to stones. That final stone, before the borderland-pebbled shore, features in about five pictures. First, I thought I was seeing a lovely heart-shaped hole... then it became a face, reminiscent of Edward Munch, and finally a sort of skull.

I am not sure that I came away from this much wiser.

Instead, I carried on thinking that the purpose of life is to develop the strength to cope with despair, without denying it, hiding from it, or crumpling beneath it. Why you should want to do that, I do not know. I guess to become a fully individuated human. But why that matters is another open question.