Through a Jungian Lens

This will be the last of the badland photo series that I will post here for the present.  I particularly enjoyed this photo with its folds and shadows and crevices that hint at something much bigger.  It is all in one’s point of view, I admit.  That said, that is particularly what this blog site is about – photos viewed through a Jungian Lens.

This blog site is a map through the razor’s edge between my conscious state of awareness and the personal and collective shadow.  Since I can’t truly speak of unconsciousness, simply because it is unconsciousness, I can balance on the edges of it, perhaps catching fleeting ghostly images, such as one finds in one’s dreams.  Photography then becomes a form of active imagination, a tool to approach those edges of unconsciousness.  Every so often, I sense an “ah-ha” moment where something has shifted from unconscious to consciousness, something that was ready to be noticed.  All of this is directed towards meaning, creating and finding meaning in my life.

Daryl Sharp, a Canadian Jungian analyst, publisher and author talks about how the search for meaning becomes an imperative vocation in the second half of life:

Simply and naturally, by the virtue of the work on yourself, you are a magnet for those whose souls long for life.  Granted, this is not your problem, but you do have to own up to the person you’ve become.  Who you are, whether you will or no, has an inductive effect on others.  To my mind this is all to the good, for if enough individuals become more conscious, why then the collective will too and life on this earth will go on. (Sharp, Who Am I, Really?, 1995, p. 66)

And this in part explains why this blog is open for others to read, for you to read.  Perhaps my struggles, my thinking out loud, my questions; perhaps all of this is some way effects you in a positive way.

This photo is yet another scene from the front of my house looking south in the late afternoon.  There is a sense of foreboding as though the coming night will bring storms, spiritual and spacial.  I have only three more photos left to place in the second SoFoBoMo book (this one didn’t make the cut) and ten pages of writing.  With today’s weather, the work will progress rapidly.  Today’s entry highlights the twelfth of the seventeen stages, the Refusal of Return.

Wounds become sacred

Dreams become familiar friends

Return becomes a threat

Lessons have been learned.  The journey, a search for meaning has resulted in healing one’s soul and discovering the worth of one’s self.  One knows that there is much yet to discover, however there is a well-earned hope that what yet remains to be discovered is there for discovering.  One has found meaning.  Even the pain and suffering that has wounded the self from childhood to the present state has been graced with meaning and purpose.  One discovers, not a victim, but a hero in answering the call to this journey.

Daryl Sharp commented about this journey, the search for wholeness and meaning and those who have dared this journey by saying that those:

… who have heard the call to an individual life, are the chosen ones.  Under cover and by devious paths they set forth to their destruction or salvation, seeking by direct experience of the eternal roots.  Following the lure of the restless objective psyche, they find themselves alone in the wilderness.  Will they save their souls, become personalities?  Will they individuate?  Discover who they are, really? (Sharp, Who Am I Really?, p. 134, 1995.)

To have dared this journey has been rewarded with the greatest of all boons.  Now what?

The next step along the journey is to step back into the world taking the treasure back into one’s community so as to effect change in the consciousness of the collective.

What?  Leave this wonderland for the drab world that had so wounded?