In five days, I will pack up our old 2006 Toyota Camry, our road trip car, and drive through the dark, early morning air to rural West Virginia, where I will participate in my first-ever guided Wilderness Vision Fast. In this case, it will be an eight-day excursion of severance, ordeal, and return – multiple days with little food, and direct solo experience in the wild. For years, I have felt this itch, this powerful longing to be alone, to allow the wild to reflect to me precisely what I am – and where I’m being guided to go. The timing couldn’t be any better.
I’ve spent the last three and a half months manically building a new company and coaching my oldest son’s 10U travel baseball team. It’s been a whirlwind of busy days and nights – pitch decks, branding, website building, strategizing, practices, games, dealing with sports parents, umpires, pitch counts, and more. I have been torn and stretched and bulldozed to my capacities – all while feeling like my soul has no time to breathe – to sit, as I am this Sunday night, in my office chair. I look across my dimly lit room to my “soul shelves,” – my bookshelves full of Jung, masculine psychology books, alchemy, William Stafford poetry, and more. When I look over to these shelves, I remember – “I’m not alive unless I’m slow.” I am meant for quiet, for reflection, for deep, inexhaustible introspection and wonder. This is who I am – a warrior lover of the instinctual inner forest.
Ever since I accepted the notion that a filmmaker may not be the archetype or role that best aligns with my identity as a human being, I have felt some fear and compulsivity around frantically attempting to fit the essence of what I am trying to live through me into a collectively sanctioned vehicle. I’ve been trying to fit this deep, earthy, sensual, creative, loving man that I am into a symbolic car that is passable to everyone else. An entrepreneur, a singer, a baseball coach, a dad, a husband, a Jungian coach, a writer, a – on, and on, and on - the search goes on to try and find the right vehicle.
But these are mostly ego games. Even after years of Jungian analysis, and knowing that my ego complex does not determine my task of individuation, I still find myself searching for a way to channel all this fiery energy. I feel inexplicably torn on my cross of earthly, domestic, conventional duties – and a call from some other place – to be a voice that speaks from the other side. Why do they feel so opposed, these two sides – the translator of messages and visions from the unconscious realm, and the suburban baseball coach that still has to clean my boy’s pee off the toilet seats every morning?
Which direction do I go? I am reminded of a passage from Eugene Monick’s book Castration and Male Rage – The Phallic Wound. Monick states:
“At mid-life, pressure builds in a man to accomplish a task which seems to be contradictory to his earlier efforts at phallic attainment. Wholeness is the issue here, a new and strangely unseltting definitition of masculinity.”
Monick continues––
“Individuation for a man has to do with his willingness to embrace in himself what, from a partriarchal perspective, seems like weakness and castration. To the patriarchal mentality, it is castration. To an evolved phallic mentality, it is not. It is recognition that pahllos, while undisputbaly the male god, is not the only god of the universe. Properly understood, the emergence of the feminine in the man at this stage is a comfortable relaxation of hard pressed effort. Jung’s vision of what the inner marriage means for a man necessarily involves an intact masculine pahllic grid engaging a feminine personality, the anima, in oneself.”
A little over six months ago, I had the following dream:
I am looking at an older, unfamiliar white man - behind him is the natural world. He says something like: "You are of this kind of snake." It had the letter A in it. I somehow knew that this snake being within myself was of great power. Right after he said that, it is as if he activated the snake power in me. The vision of him became a bit blurry, it shook, and it was tense - but then I felt this sense of power, vitality, great ease and joy.
Next, I am still in the state of fun, play, ease, and joy, and I'm in some kind of square in the middle of a town, with a park in the center. I am on roller skates - and I come up upon this pretty woman - maybe Latina, definitely of another race - and there is an immediate ease with her - like I've known her forever. For a moment, I see from outside myself, and this little dance of how the me/not me approached her - she's also on roller skates. There was an immediate connection and bodily form of dance between me/not me and her. I tell her, "you know what - you are unbelievably beautiful." I kiss her and she smiles.
Then - I'm in what feels like my house/apartment near this city square - and this woman is with me. We go into the bathroom and I'm trying to help her see in there. There are a ton of light switches on the wall but I can't figure out which light will turn things on. I tell her that she'll have to use the little light that's already there.
Even though interpreting one’s dreams can be quite a thankless task, I’ve got a feeling this dream radically encapsulates what Monick was getting at in the quotes as mentioned above. For a man at mid-life to embrace and let go of the patriarchal castration sensation of letting go to the inner-feminine, he must first have a solid, intact masculine grid. In the dream, an older white man (an initiating wise old man), standing in front of the woods, mentions that I am of “this kind of snake.” Serpents/snakes have long been associated with instinctual, masculine fertility, generativity, wisdom, and healing. The fact that I, the dream ego, immediately knew this snake was of great power is also revealing. That I am “of this kind of snake” suggests a lineage, a passing down of instinctual masculinity. My vision in the dream, after this feeling of activation took place, got blurry and tense. In my research of snakes shedding their skin, and what happens to their vision, I found: “A clear layer of skin called the ‘eye cap’ covers their eyes, and this layer sheds along with the rest of their skin. Just before shedding, this eye cap becomes milky or cloudy due to a lubricant secreted beneath it, making the snake's vision blurry.”
So, the process of this “snake activation,” or shedding of my patriarchal skin, allows, just like snakes shedding, nature to run its natural course – and a new path, a new skin to emerge, a second skin. “The vision of him became a bit blurry, it shook, and it was tense - but then I felt this sense of power, vitality, great ease
, and joy.” Letting go to nature, the Archetypal Self within, leads first to great tension, and dis-ease, and then to a feeling of power, vitality, great ease and joy.”
Next in the dream, I am on roller skates near a city square. Now, to pause for a moment. Roller skates are round, and on older roller skates, like the ones in the dream, there are four wheels. The number four is commonly associated with wholeness, and the fact that the wheels are also circles makes something fascinating about reaching wholeness. Instead of walking or running on a flat surface, the wheels of wholeness touching the ground create this feeling of ease and joy. The city square – often found at a city or town center – also sings shades of a mandala – the sacred circle of wholeness. Almost immediately, I step into the dream and see a beautiful Latina woman (an Anima figure), holding hands with me/not me, in a dance of embodiment and roller skating. There’s an ease and flow to the relationship. I know her, but I don’t – and I kiss her. There’s not a feeling of lust, but of familiarity, and richness of Eros - of relatedness.
I let this woman into my house or apartment, and she needs to use the restroom. The restroom, symbolically, is a place of flushing, water flow, letting go of what’s not required, and many other things. It is a center in the home, we could say, of psychological and libidinal energy flow. As soon as I get her in the bathroom, I see there are a ton of light switches on the wall – and I can’t get any of them to work. I’m trying to shine a non-natural light so the inner woman can see. Another way to say that is: I’m trying to illuminate her path to see with the lights of the Apollonian, ego, everyday world. I’m trying to illuminate her right away, as opposed to letting her see with the light that is already there. In other words, perhaps she didn’t wish to be brought into the light, but rather to enter the space and be present in the area where energy transfer occurs within the house.
This makes me wonder about the way the Anima, the inner feminine, perceives. How does the woman in me see – and why the bathroom? In the bathroom, you often let go of what’s no longer needed- and flush it away. The body retains what it wishes to keep and discards the rest.
This is about embodiment, the senses, and great ease, joy, playfulness, and vitality coming through not the intellect, not projecting manufactured, ego light onto the inner woman, or projecting her into the light of the outer world–but allowing her to see with the light that’s already coming in through the window (the sensory inputs built into the body).
So what’s the narrative here of this dream – what is it laying out? That by me accepting the tenseness of letting go to the second skin of the ancestral masculine snake - the masculine grid is entirely in place – and can therefore receive the great power and incredible ease and joy of a more whole way of living – and by doing so, allow the Anima to see a way to live through the senses and bodily experience of living. That the power, strength, and wisdom endowed through the lineage of masculinity find a way to dance, skate, and live harmoniously by relating collaboratively with the sensorial experience of the outer world. The wild, undomesticated, fiery man in me finds a way to exist and thrive with bodily, sensorial happenings of the everyday world. Another way to consider it is that the birthright and endowment of masculinity finds a home in the body, and can now properly allow its great energies to live through the body in a way that is creative, free, joyful, vital, and non-threatening. That which is other in me doesn’t have to be split off, compulsively discharged, shamed, projected, etc – it can live in the vessel of my flesh and bones. The ancestral, hidden underworld energies find a home and creative union in the physical environment.
As this vision quest approaches, I must consider that more phallic attainment—more success, accolades, and striving — are perhaps not the proper new vehicle in which to ride. After a separate snake dream, my Jungian analyst said, “What would it mean to have faith in the snake?” What would it mean to have faith that there is a great force of nature that is working its way through me, one that I don’t have a choice in? Let the previous skin go, and enter and accept the process of molting.
This post is a mark of that commitment to letting nature take its course on me, so that I can die without dying.
As always, thank you for reading.
Sources: Castration and Male Rage: The Phallic Wound by Eugene Monick (Inner City Books)
beautiful.