A note about changes to Depth Writing With Dr Rachel
Thank you for joining me into the depths - it’s great to have you here. As Depth Writing With Dr Rachel grows and evolves, I want to let you know about some changes which will mean that from now on you’ll receive two regular monthly posts instead one. You’ll continue to receive a dispatch from my travels between worlds on the first Friday of every month. Plus you’ll also receive a separate post with depth writing prompts on the third Friday of the month along with information about how to join the monthly depth writing pod (You can also find more about the April 21st pod here).
Read on or listen to the audio to explore:
Carl Jung’s five categories of re-birth
Individuation and the process of psychic growth
The importance of rooting ourselves in the soil of psyche
‘Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys. Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet clear of the grave’ ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tombs in bloom
In the small Victorian graveyard half-swallowed by woodland on the edge of my town, the dead have been coming back to life, as if in response to a silent alarm ringing deep below ground.
With the return of longer days after the darkness of Winter, weavers and soldiers, artisans and traders, husbands and wives, daughters and sons have been blooming from the wombs of each tomb, their old worn out bones, resurrected as daffodils.
The Earth laughing in flowers, they toss their golden heads, heralding Persephone’s return from her holiday underground in the dark realms of Hades.
On my walks along the muddy path that winds between the stone cradles hewn from the carboniferous rock up on the moors, the dancing daffodils have been bringing home to me the great mystery of life after death, which we meet not only in nature and the myth of Persephone but in the many re-births of Buddha, the Christian resurrection story and almost all religions and ancient wisdom traditions.
By magical means
Carl Jung identified five different categories of re-birth: metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls), reincarnation, resurrection, transformational rites and rituals such as the Mass and the many re-births we may experience throughout our lives, which he says, ‘suggests the idea of renovation, renewal, or even of improvement brought about by magical means.’
For Jung, the idea that we can be re-born many times is inextricable from the process of psychic growth he calls individuation. According to Jung, individuation happens unconsciously everywhere all of the time throughout nature and describes the way cells divide, seeds become flowers and acorns grow into oaks.
Conscious individuation, on the other hand, takes place when we root ourselves in the soil of psyche. It is through planting ourselves in the earth of this self-healing, vivifying life force that we flower inwardly, often from the dark matter of our suffering and pain.
Heads must roll
As the natural world also teaches: for there to be Spring, first must come Winter. For there to be flowers, first must come death and decay. For there to be ‘improvement by magical means’, first heads must roll. As the dark goddess Kali and her mundamala or garland of skulls (each one representing the many deaths the ego must go through in order to grow) knows.
But who wants to die? Why risk the ferocity of devouring Kali when we could all stay at home with a nice cup of tea?
If there’s a part of us who stridently resists nature’s call to wake up and smell the Kali, the eternal self that’s the part of us who dreams has no such qualms. Very often it’s in this moonlit realm that we find ourselves exactly where we don’t want to go. As I experienced at the start of the year when I dreamt I was standing on the porch of a summer house, whose terracotta roof, large chimney and stone patio was recognisable to me as the traditional casas saloias of rural Portugal.
Beyond the patio, the view opened onto a vast plain. On the distant horizon dark clouds ominously gathered. I barely had time to run for cover before the impending storm untethered its rage, felling a large tree and sending it flying towards me. I woke trembling with the destructive charge of the storm’s rage. My first thought was not again. And then, oh god, what storm now?
Leaving the summer house
I was still in the dark as to the deeper meaning of the dream when, a month later, I came across a poem by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke whose every line seemed to mirror it straight back to me like a reverse prophesy and which went like this;
You are not surprised at the force of the storm –
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward.
I read on, astonished by the quiet but insistent voice that seemed to be addressing me from the mists of some distant faraway nearby on the other side of all the deaths I haven’t yet died. ‘You know,’ this voice whispered, the ‘he’ inside the storm. And not only that, this great force is the direction of travel; the place, unbeknown to my dream ego, that I’m mysteriously moving - or perhaps being moved - toward. The voice continued:
Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
As onto a vast plain…
These lines of Rilke’s called to mind the summer house of all the stories and habits that, over the years, I’ve built to protect myself from uncertainty, chaos and the ‘vast plain’ out there - all the aspirational furnishings I’ve filled it with; all the rooms made of plans, wall-papered with long ‘to do’ lists and all the care I’ve given to the appearance of this house so it does a good job of looking acceptable to others and keeping the wilderness out.
The sky that remains
According to Jung, however, we fulfil our destiny, flower and become reborn as we really are is by moving out of our ego-centric summer houses and risking going it alone. The counter-intuitive wisdom seems to be that it’s only by leaving the houses we build to keep our small selves safe that we make space for the bigger life that’s softly calling us towards it.
As Rilke’s poem suggests, it’s out here in the wilderness beyond our self-constructed concepts that we encounter the wildness at our centre that asks nothing of us - except that we surrender. Which is, as another famous poet once said, nothing less than everything. As Rilke’s poem reminds us;
… Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
On being earth now
Back on my Spring walks through the graveyard, I’ve been reflecting on what re-birth means, not just to me, but globally in a time of chaos and collapse. In particular, I’ve been thinking of the marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson’s 1962 book ‘Silent Spring’, in which she critiques the ecological degradation that can be traced back to the ‘boastful boys, proud of the earth which is not theirs’ of Emerson’s poem.
And hard, too, not to think of the future town Carson imagines, where everything is silent and the earth no longer laughs in flowers, alongside all the ways her dystopian fable has now come true. What does re-birth look like, I’ve been wondering, in an age of mass extinction, escalating global violence and real silent Springs?
For Jung, righting world means first righting ourselves. I took this pearl with me on a walk up one of the steep wooded hills cresting high above the dark trough of my valley. I thought again of the ‘he’ in Rilke’s poem and wondered if this great force might not also be a ‘she’ in the form of Psyche, goddess of soul, who represents the eternal cycle of death and re-birth and the totality of everything we are, above and below ground, beyond space and time.
At the top of the hill, I found a solitary silver birch and lay on the ground beneath it. From my damp bed of leaf litter and moss, I gazed up at the mosaic of sky through its lattice of empty branches as the sun crossed my palms with its gold and an early bee buzzed in my ear. I don’t know exactly how long I’d been lying there when I felt myself begin to well up with tears - of sadness and grief, tenderness and hope all mixed together where some bright green spear was piercing right through the earth of me.
Let’s discuss in the comments below
What does re-birth mean to you?
How can we understand re-birth in times of great chaos?
What do you do to keep yourself earthed?
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