Through a Jungian Lens

I took this photo yesterday afternoon.  This is a prairie hail storm in action.  Besides hail, at least two inches (5 cm) of rain fell in less than two hours.  The streets of our small town became lakes and rivers.  Storms are fascinating.  I find that they provide good photo opportunities both during and after the event.  How can one capture the energy, the wildness of the storm with an image?  That was my intent.  And for once, there is a hint of this wildness.

I think there is a bit of the “wild” person in each of us even if it is buried under so many layers that one has lost all sight of that wild person.  Here is a snippet from an interview with Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves:

Bert: What is the “wild woman”?

Dr. Estés: She is … God.

Bert: Are you talking about finding a god within?

That comment provides a starting point for trying to understand the “wildness” whether that wildness is in nature or within a person.  I remember as a child, repeating the old refrain about thunder as being God moving the furniture around in heaven.  Storms are seen as payback for a society’s or a culture’s sinful ways with the story of Noah’s Ark being the ultimate story of wildness and the power of God – God as a “wild deity.”  Dr. Estés goes on to say:

Dr. Estés: My sensibility is that what is wild is nature. We need to see and understand that whatever stands behind nature is what is god. Nature itself, it is the manifestation. We see things about nature that are beautiful, like your blue sky outside today, and it fills us with almost a prayerful excitement. When I look at it, I feel still. I have seen this sky every day of my life and I am still in awed by it. That is what the wild is — this intense medicinal beauty. To look at it makes you feel whole. To hear it, if it is ocean or water running in a stream, is to feel made whole again. To see a thunderstorm or a lightning storm is to somehow be energized by it. Even tornadoes and earthquakes — to be rocked to your very foundations by the power made in all these things. If that is the wild and if that is in every human being, then a man and a woman would essentially be no different from one another at the very elemental core.

I guess that helps explain my fascination with storms, a fascination that revels in the energy.  I don’t seem to have a fear of storms, even a healthy fear of storms with the exception of a prairie blizzard in the middle of winter.  Then, it is more about disliking the intense cold than it is about being stung by the snow and bent over by the wind and seemingly lost in fury and whiteness.  I guess it is about seeing some of the faces of God, about resonating with those faces as being a part of something deep within myself.