Archive for the ‘light show’ tag
A Winter Dawn in Saskatchewan
I took this photo looking out of my dining room window to the south-east. The skies at dawn and at sunset are typically spectacular. With a lack of hills or mountains or forests, the rising and setting sun find little to block the light show. I love these light shows as they are magical. They talk to me of myths, of human stories that transcend time and place. They are visions of a dream world made concrete. At moments like these, I feel present with the “little people” that live within my psyche.
A bit of explanation is needed here. “Little people” is a term given by CGJ to the archetypes, the cast of characters that are bigger than the costumes they wear in dreams and in our heads, yet so small as to defy ever being seen directly – “little people.” Hillman has a curious way of talking about these “little people.” Listen:
In Jungian practice the words Shadow, Self, Ego, Anima, and the like refer to the structural components of the personality. These basic structures are always imagined to be partial personalities, and the interplay between them is imagined more as in fiction than in physics. Rather than a field of forces, we are each a field of internal personal relationships, an interior commune, a body politic. Psychodynamics becomes psychodramatics; our life is less the result of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios. (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975, p. 22)
These “little people” are the archetypes. As I read these words of Hillman, I realized that this explains why I am different from others who shared similar socio-economic backgrounds, the same type of dysfunctional family. It explains why my brother just fifteen months younger who grew up in the same house with the same lived experiences is so different from me. We lived different inner stories and became significantly different people. Knowing this, there is no place for blame on others for how my life has turned out, for my own “stuff” that has negatively spilt out on others. I do not need to forgive others as they were also lost in their own psychodramas, their personal myths on stage with powerful archetypes.
