Know thyself. I had lived a busy life as a teacher and as a school administrator. Raising three children with my wife and doing my part in the community, filled up all of my waking hours. I was a successful teacher, a good father, a dependable member of the community, and somehow I thought I had it all figured out.
However, like almost everyone else, my ego didn’t really have a clue as I made the shift from believing I had my life cased, to waking up in a panic knowing that I really didn’t have a clue. Any and every illusion that I had life under control was swept away as if a tsunami had appeared. Let’s just call it what it was, a midlife crisis.
The attempt to write my way into becoming aware of who I am, to knowing my “self” a bit better started in January of 2009. I began writing a blog called Through A Jungian Lens. It was not my first attempt to try and discover the truth of who I was. I had been writing, burning what I had written, written some more, and discarding those efforts over and over again since 1988, the year my father died. I was 39 years old, at that age when midlife crises usually make an appearance.
I didn’t make any connections with this event and my being plunged into the turmoil of my life. After all, my children were still at home and going to school, I was still teaching and coaching, I was continuing my studies with the idea of becoming an educational psychologist, and I was married to an incredible woman. None of that mattered as far as my inner self was concerned. The command to go on a journey of self discovery surged through every pore of my being – know thyself.
So here I am again, still trying to uncover the hidden answers. What do I say? What do I disclose? What do I omit saying while leaving small signs that hint at what I am thinking? What do I omit without even any crumbs of evidence of what is on my mind? And these are just the conscious aspects of self knowledge in this blog conversation with my “self” that I will share once again, with “others”.
The act of putting words and photos on this blog has both personal and collective unconscious aspects that insinuate themselves within the words and in the choices of photos. It is my belief that in blogging, the shadow, those unknown and hidden parts of who I am, will allow me to catch glimpses of my “inner self.” In a way, isn’t that what we do when we take “Selfies” hoping that somehow we will have a light turn on with of those “ah-ha” responses “I knew that!”?
Unlike, Odysseus, the road forward hasn’t ended up taking me home. Rather, what I now call my home, has changed places a number of times and is likely to change yet again when I least expect it. And now years later from my first blogging attempt, I return to learn and explore about what I will find beneath all the disguises, camouflage, and self-deceits. Over the years since 2009, I thought I had lain it all bare, exposed everything so that I could know myself better, exposed warts and all. I used words, I used nude photography, I used philosophy, psychology and mythology. And yet, here I am, once again at the same spot, feeling compelled to “know myself.”
In the days, weeks, months, and perhaps years to come, I will revisit old posts, and create new posts. I don’t know how, or even if, I will use photos to illustrate my thoughts. I am a photographer and truly believe that photos are powerful. Yet, despite my using words like naturist, naked, nude, exposed, lain bare, etc., I am undecided as to whether my words would be negatively impacted with photos, especially photos which contain nudity.
I do live in North America and the collective consciousness, and collective unconsciousness reacts negatively to nudity when it is nudity is not about sex, selling, and titillation. But that said, I went back into my photo archives to pull this image from Goa, India which was taken in February, 2008. It captured best, perhaps, what I was experiencing when it came to understanding myself and the world around me.
And, for those who have been reading my posts from the past, I want to assure you that I will continue to add new material at a fairly regular level.