“The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for if you want the kernel, you must break the shell.” Meister Eckhart
Dear Folks,
One of my Christmas treats was to read the book In the Ever After: Fairy Tales and the Second Half of Life by Allen B. Chinen, a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, and teacher. These evocative stories, culled from over 4000, are pure gold for anyone and maybe especially for those over 40. Some elements are common: the protagonists are poor materially or otherwise, they live on the edge of a forest or beside the sea, and they are prompted to travel from their “marginal” place to encounter enchantment of some sort. The invitation is to embrace the darkness, life’s losses and “little deaths,” in order to become a wise elder instead of just being elderly!
The marginal location symbolizes the boundary between conscious life and the unconscious, and illustrates a central theme in elder tales: confronting neglected aspects of the self, buried in the unconscious. Often the protagonist is pictured “gathering wood” from the forest for a living or fishing in the sea, each action illustrating the recovery of lost spiritual material.
In these locations “at the edge of something,” a stranger is encountered, unbidden, and the elder’s task is to notice and accept his or her “magic.” If the protagonist rejected the stranger, or was hostile to or suspicious of him/her, nothing would happen. So, the wise one accepts the gift of the unconscious, which was previously neglected or hidden. The stranger acts as an ally for the protagonist, offering advice and revealing something important, inviting self-confrontation and reformation. And this incorporation of something lost invites self-transcendence.
From a Jungian perspective, the stranger represents the protagonist’s inner self, an image of psychological completion and integration. Further, the stranger offers an encounter with the Divine self and a way to access transcendent knowledge. In the elder tale, the protagonist’s response to this divine “gold” is the opposite of greediness or grasping; rather, she is trusting and free with the gift, in a way that an objective observer might call foolish. Yet, this freedom reflects the elder’s “emancipated innocence”: having confronted greed or acquisitive materialism and mastering it, she transcends herself, and so she is now able to trust her heart’s intuition. The elder realizes that the gift is not for herself alone, but for the world. Giving it away is the only thing that makes “sense.”
In fact at this point in the tale, frequently the elder “loses” the gift he has been given, but in this loss, others are saved: the elder brings magic into the world in order to help the next generation.
Accepting life as it is, plumbing the depths of what one has hidden away, embracing loss and mortality are all nourishing crumbs on the Soul’s path, the way toward integration and healing, and finally access to self-transcendence. Fear not, says the divine messenger: Spirit’s light makes even the darkness visible. Do you see? The wise elder discovers that whatever gold he or she may possess is on loan and only has value when it is given away.
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait… So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.” T.S. Eliot
Love,
David