Through a Jungian Lens

This is a bay that I found on walking the shoreline of Lake Diefenbaker, a flooded section of the South Saskatchewan River near Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park.  The hills in the background look the same as the hills I see from my living room windows though they are a different set of hills.  The scene is about 65 kilometres from my home.  Between my place and this recreational area are scattered farms and a small community of less than 500 people.  This is a land that somehow doesn’t encourage people to stay in spite of its beauty, a beauty that is overlooked.

Personally, I am a forest, trees, small meadows, streams, rivers and lakes kind of guy when I am not hugging an ocean shoreline.  I find myself at home in the woods.  Yet, I recognize a need for connection to people, a need for relationships.  In that context, I would have to say I am a city person rather than a small rural town person.  In the city there is a better chance that I can maintain my privacy yet have the opportunity to converse with someone on topics that I find interesting and stimulating.  It’s interesting that somehow I find myself living in the semi-desert country where trees are scarce, where water is scarce and where people are scarce.  Not only does this contradict how I understand myself, but I am also allergic to the grasses, alfalfa, poplar trees and dust that form the ecosystem of the prairies.  All that said, here I am wandering rare shorelines naked of trees with no human visible as far as I can see, which is quite far indeed.  This is quite the paradox.  Why?  The answer is actually quite simple – there is a woman . . .

“At this point the fact forces itself on my attention that beside the field of reflection there is another equally broad if not broader area in which rational understanding and rational modes of representation find scarcely anything they are able to grasp. This is the realm of Eros. In classical times, when such things were properly understood, Eros was considered a god whose divinity transcended our human limits, and who therefore could be neither comprehended nor represented in any way. I might, as many before me have attempted to do, venture an approach to this daimon, whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces of the heavens to the dark abysses of hell; but I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love.”  (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 353)