Through a Jungian Lens

I took another photo of the full moon late yesterday evening.  I went through a full range of settings in hopes of getting an image that I would actually like because of the weak light situation of late evening before darkness fully sets in.  The photo reminded me of a song I used to sing, one made popular by Cat Stevens:

Moon Shadow - Cat Stevens

I’m being followed by a moon shadow
moon shadow-moon shadow
leaping and hopping on a moon shadow
moon shadow-moon shadow
and if I ever lose my hands
lose my plough, lose my land
oh, if I ever lose my hands
oh, well…
I won’t have to work no more
and if I ever lose my eyes
If my colours all run dry
yes, if I ever lose my eyes
oh well …
I won’t have to cry no more.
. . .
and if I ever lose my legs
I won’t moan and I won’t beg
oh if I ever lose my legs
oh well…
I won’t have to walk no more
And if I ever lose my mouth
all my teeth, north and south
yes, if I ever lose my mouth
oh well…
I won’t have to talk
…
Did it take long to find me
I ask the faithful light
Ooh did it take long to find me
And are you going to stay the night . . .
moon shadow – moon shadow

The moon does have shadows as well as reflected light.  I know because my camera tells me this.  And when I think of the moon as the feminine aspect of self, I think of both light and shadows, just as the sun as the masculine aspect of self is all about light and shadows.  Listening to the song, I think somehow of St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) and his song of joy to the night, and the light of the night.  To me, this signifies a holy union of light and shadow, of soul and spirit, of masculine and feminine – all the polarities that exist within the self, those polarities that cause us so much grief and pain and suffering.  C.G. Jung had it right when he counselled to hold the tension of the opposites until a new path emerged, one that didn’t lead to either pole, but to a state of being in which both are held with dignity.

A male Magnificent Cormorant sits on a mast of a small fishing boat called the Black Christ (Cristo Negro) in the harbour of Rio Lagartos, Yucatan, Mexico as evening gets ready to settle in.  It’s a photo I took at the end of January of this year.

I struggled for quite some time today trying to find the words that I wanted to put here.  A search through a number of volumes of Jung’s works didn’t yield anything that resonated.  And so, I decided to simply speak as it “felt” for me.  In the end, that is all any of us can ever do. the closest any of us can ever come to what might pass as the truth of who we are.

Black is about shadow, that much resonates loud and clear.  However, all that is black isn’t evil.  That is the hard part to get past sometimes.  For the owner of this boat, obviously, the use of the word Christ is all about hope.  So, why not have the two combine?  This is where I jump from the scene of the photo to my personal realm of the underworld/inner-world.

Going through midlife, it is only when I dared to look at the edges of shadow country, staring into the fearsome blackness within that I finally began to sense hope, sense that I would emerge from that inner journey better than when I began that journey.  The darkness and shadows yielded treasures about self, about personal strength and even validation of my “self.”  Like the fisherman heading out into the ocean for the rich yields of the sea, I headed deep within the darkness, blind for the most part because of the darkness.  I fought those sea monsters that assailed my sense of fear, my sense of inferiority and somehow, like the fisherman, found myself back in port, back in the outer world of consciousness.  The journey had rewarded me with a bit more awareness of self and of the nature of the unconscious – a rich treasure.  But more importantly, it renewed hope in something bigger than my ego.  This is the promise of the Christ symbol.

There is hope if one does not fear the darkness so much that one flees from it.  Rather, think of how San Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross) embraced the dark night and found love, love that burned with its own light, a love that touched Christ.  To embrace this, one must go under, one must sacrifice the “what is” for “what could be.”  Or as I read in Jung’s works somewhere in words similar to these, “the good is the enemy of the better.”

I took this photo last night just after 10:00pm.  I watched as the growing moon grow larger in the western sky as it made its descent toward the sea.  As it got closer, the usual white began to change to a light golden yellow and then as captured in this photo, a burnished red gold as though a crescent as one would expect to find at the end of a staff of some deity out of our Greek or Egyptian past.  At that moment I wished I had a better camera so as to be able to capture the light on the gentle waves of the sea.  It wasn’t much longer and the moon had disappeared into the depths of the sea without making a ripple to mark her disappearance.

I have begun to put together an e-book called SWAMPLANDS: DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL using MS Word which I will save as a PDF and then possibly publish it through an e-book service called ISSUU.  The book is based on photographs taken in the salt marsh swamplands just minutes away from my villa.  Besides the normal commentary that I typically place with photos, I am including St. John of the Cross’ poem, Dark Night of the Soul, both in its original Spanish and translated English.  This book is a test run for a second book I will be creating before June 30th as part of SoFoBoMo.  SoFoBoMo is short for Solo Photo Book Month.