Through a Jungian Lens

I took this photo yesterday, a photo of my garden shed.  As you can see, the aluminum shed is covered over with the green life of nature.  In a way, it is not much different that what I see in many places around the world where the works of man, roads and structures, deteriorate and become taken over by nature.  The power of the feminine.  And, it is real power.

For men not in touch with the feminine, for those who resist and deny out of fear of being consumed by the feminine, there is a harshness that rears its ugly head in patriarchy.

It is a common knowledge among most of the men and the women I know, that in “most” marriages, the woman is in fact the boss.  The common expression goes: “If mama is happy, everyone is happy; if mama isn’t happy, no one is happy.”  In this modern western world, men willingly carry the purses and bags, wear the clothes picked out by their mates, are learning to “express” themselves, and are entering the “beauty”  market in a major way so as to lose the “beast” within.

I don’t think that there is a rightness or a wrongness to any of this as that would presume I have answers.  I don’t.  I do know that men that are “in love” or “in lust” are in a hurry to enter into the cave, the dark and moist depths of the feminine.  I think back to stories I have heard of hermits who have abandoned the world of relationships and how many of them have crawled into nature’s caves.  In these caves they also escape the masculine.

Neither matriarchy nor patriarchy are solutions to the messiness of eros versus logos.

Tzabnah Caves, Tecoh, Yucatan Mexico

Las grutas de Tzabnah at the edges of a Mexican village called Tecoh in the Yucatan. Grutas are caves, dark places under the surface. In these places one would be well advised to travel with a guide. In the photo that I took displayed above, I used what little natural light I could find, light that filtered through one of the natural openings to the surface above. As I travelled about in this cave, I was limited in how far I could wander as I entered without a source of light or without a guide. My only light was the laser beam from the camera that would flash before I depressed the shutter button completely. Even with this light source, it was a risky business. I walked with one hand above and in front of my head as there were many outcrops of rock hidden in the darkness. Stepping forward was tentative not knowing what would be encountered. In many ways, this is the journey one takes into the under/innerworld of one’s ‘self’.

Often with the advent of midlife, one is forced to come to terms with the realisation that life must be more than what one has encountered. There must be a deeper aspect, something that gives meaning. It can’t all be about the stuff we collect or the status or sense of presence we craft in our collective encounters. One feels an emptiness, a darkness, a cavern. For those willing and able to risk the unknown, it is the time to find a guide in order to make the descent become about discovery rather than of self-destruction. It is too easy to get lost in the underworld.