online: 30 october 2011 modified: 29 october, 6, 7 november 2011 29 october 2011 end of autumn
edge of city forest
...fern is already brown and much of it has collapsed... trees are becoming yellow... the westerly wind is cool while the sky is cloudy... and as i sit here (at the edge of the forest) i feel my body adapting to the end of warm days and to the beginning of winter...
...but the world of thought is undiminished... could be provoked into thinking of things not visible, or heard, or touched or smelled or apprehended through other senses... for instance the senses of body position and movement...
...i breathe in deeply... and look up at a helicopter... while thinking of C G Jung and his observation of spontaneous recovery from psychic disorder... not by direct struggle against difficulties but simply by ceasing to worry and by rising above troubles and accepting them as facts of existence... to be perceived as secondary to a more comprehensive mentality... or soul...
*see quotation below
...which brings me to think of my own difficulties... for instance how to proceed with the education of everyone...
...observing now the decaying ferns and leaves before me not so much as the end of warmth and as descent into cold but as the complete cycle of seasons.... for which each natural plant or animal seems to be prepared and able to survive... though without conscious plan or foresight...
...i thought i heard a church clock strike amidst the confused and quiet sounds of distant traffic...
...a cold gust of wind causes branches to sway and myself to stretch and to shudder a bit while the air keeps passing in and out of my nose and throat to participate in the unsensed chemistry of breathing and transforming of gases...
...elementary as these remarks may be they signal something miraculous... the presence and thought of bodymind... and... and... of things as yet unnamed...
*...a former patient of C G Jung wrote to him as follows:
Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality - taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be - by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they over-powered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow that are forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to!
[from The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese Book of Life, translated and explained by Richard Wilhelm with a foreword and commentary by C G Jung, and part of the Chinese meditation text The Book of Consciousness and Life with a foreword by Salome Wilhelm, both texts translated from the German by Cary F Baynes, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, new, revised and augmented edition 1962, pages 126-127.]
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