Through a Jungian Lens

As I looked for a photo for today’s post, I came across this one I took in early August while I was in Jamestown, North Dakota.  For a while there was a disconnect in my mind as I didn’t remember the scene of the photo.  Then, in seeing the photos that surrounded it in my archives I was able to place the image and was taken back in time to standing before the sign where I decided that this would one day be a photo for this place.  The scene?  This sign was found on the residential part of the Jamestown College.  I imagine that students living here see the sign every day, at least as part of the landscape.  It is an appropriate sign for that stage in life where one has finished high school and is beginning a new stage of life at college.  But, it also serves as a reminder to all, the instructors, the ancillary staff, visitors and passersby.

I am coming to understand that I must “begin my journey” with each day that I wake up.  It is easy to fall into a mindset where one feels that the journey is almost over and that one needs to just tidy up the messes made during the journey or to spend time looking back over the events of the journey already lived.  It is easy to get stuck in the repetition of the present as if there is no place to go, nothing of worth to do, as though one is just “spinning the wheels.”  I need to feel alive and the only way I feel alive is in active participation in and on the journey.  Sitting still the past few days is reminding me of this need.  Yesterday’s post was yet another reminder of this need.  And so, I find myself once again getting ready and doing the stuff needed to begin yet another journey, today’s journey, this year’s journey; the journey of discoveries about my self and others, the journey of discovery in the inner and outer worlds in which I am to be found.