If you’ve been following Dreaming Awake for a while you’ll know I’ve been pausing to hibernate over the Winter months. I really appreciated the chance to slow down and turn inwards but now Spring is coming and I’m delighted to be back. In this month’s travels between worlds, I reflect on my descent into the depths over the many Winters of trying and failing to write and how a consultation with the ancient Chinese divination oracle, the I Ching, reflected back to me the wisdom it’s here underground that the seeds of new life are to be found.
Image: Hilma af Klint, Apple Blossoms - from Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life, Tate Books.
The longest Winter.
In the long Winter of a mid-life crisis, I wrote a novel about a tortured artist hexed with a death wish. This novel was to be my opus and how I was going to save myself from oblivion, unlike my heroine. It was an intense, blood-letting process that took me seven years to complete as my mental and physical health continued to deteriorate. Then, when the rejections came rolling in, it felt as if my life had gone up in flames and the fate meant for my heroine had come, instead, for me.
Time passed and, dusting the ashes off, I set about writing again – this time short stories as part of a PhD in Creative Writing. In the interim, I’d had a life-changing encounter with Jungian therapy - an experience which opened my eyes to everything we can’t see except through the mirror world of our dreams, and then only darkly. Inspired by the double life I was living at night, I set out to write tales which might condense this vast dimension inside the four walls of story, a bit like the phone-box-cum-Tardis in Doctor Who. Now, I was certain, this was the thing that was bound to bring publication success. Now, I was definitely sure.
As before, this sequence of stories modelled on the structure of dreams took me seven years to complete. When I handed in my thesis, however, what I actually submitted was not the perfectly polished collection I’d hoped to write but a series of unfinished experiments, which my external examiner (now, friend) likened to an extended period of nigredo - the alchemical stage of blackening, breakdown and decay.
From the outside looking in, all I had to show for this second seven year round were a few bare branches and a thick frost covering the ground. But what was taking place on the inside, mostly unbeknown to me until I was far into this journey, turned out to be a whole other story.
Auspicious to proceed.
If luck doesn’t roll around the first time or even the second, there’s always the third time. So, at the start of this year I bet on the chances and began writing a new book. Not any book I’d planned to write next, the idea for this book snuck in through the back door dressed in disguise as a number of signs, including a conversation with an old friend, a question from a stranger and an eclipse moment in a dream from which I woke with the feeling that the whole thing had been decided and it was my job to simply roll up my sleeves and get on.
Am I afraid? Yes. Do I worry the idea for this new book - a creative conversation with the living, the dead and my many selves - is not a little bit crazy? Yes.
It was while thinking about the future - or not - of this third-time-lucky wild bet of a book that my friend, S, suggested we consult the I Ching - the ancient Chinese divination oracle, also known as The Book of Changes. How the I Ching works, simply put, is that a question is asked of the deep unconscious and guidance is offered in the form of a hexagram - a sacred symbol composed of six broken or solid horizontal lines. For each of the 64 possible combinations of stacked lines that can be derived from throwing coins or sticks or bibliomancy (letting the The Book of Changes fall open at a particular page), there is a corresponding commentary which can often read more like a riddle than a clear answer.
In Jung’s forward to a 1950 translation of The Book of Changes he writes, “The I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results; it does not vaunt itself, nor is it easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits to be discovered. It offers neither facts nor power, but for lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom – if there be such – it seems to be the right book. To one person its spirit appears clear as day; to another, shadowy as twilight; to a third, dark as night.”
So it was that S and I sat down to consult the oracle one Sunday in late January as dusk was starting to fall. When S found the commentary with oracle’s answer to my question, her face broke into a smile. The spirit this time was not shadowy or dark. Spring is coming, S read aloud from the open book in her lap. Auspicious to proceed.
Persephone’s return.
In the steep-sided West Yorkshire valley that’s witness to my every season, everything is trembling with anticipation. The catkins are shaking their tails on the alder, the buds are awakening on the horse chestnut and beech and bright constellations of crocuses and snowdrops are leaving a trail of purple and white in and around the woods where Persephone, the Greek goddess of Spring, is clawing her way back up through the soft earth after her sojourn below ground over Winter.
The story goes that Persephone doesn’t go willingly into the underworld but is snatched by Hades, who then makes her his bride. Persephone’s mother, Demeter, meanwhile, is so wracked by grief she decrees that nothing will grow until her daughter is returned. After much divine wrangling, Hades eventually agrees to release his Queen. But since during her time underground Persephone has eaten the seeds of a pomegranate (the fruit of the underworld symbolising the cycle of death and re-birth alongside the unbreakable bonds of marriage), it means she must to return to Hades every Autumn and Winter.
According to the founder of archetypal psychology, James Hillman, the underworld doesn’t so much represent an absence of life, however, as the dark inner life of the soul. Here in Hades, says Hillman, “There is no end to depth, and all things become soul. The basic elements of things compose and decompose, generate and degenerate in soul, the first and last term of our moving world…To know the psyche at its basic depths… one must go into the underworld.”
As violent as Hades’ abduction of Persephone seems, it’s through this descent that she is transformed from Demeter’s daughter to Queen. It’s only after Persephone has undergone this profound initiation into the secret, hidden life of the soul that she is truly able to blossom as one of the most powerful feminine deities in the Greek pantheon.
The way up is down.
In my long Winter underground, I was often haunted by the fear I was wasting my time and that whatever I wrote was doomed to fail. But despite my free-fall into the depths – or, perhaps more accurately, because of it – I started to hear another voice quietly insisting that I couldn’t not write. And if I couldn’t not write, then writing perfect prose no longer mattered so much. Getting published no longer mattered so much. How I was doing compared to others mattered not one little bit.
What did matter was not the outcome or endpoint but the writing process itself. Here, in Winter, I wrote through myself towards my naked self, my skeleton self, my well-rotted self. And just when I thought I couldn’t fall apart anymore, the soft earth of my deepest self.
In the underworld, I learned that as I write, so I am being written. As I rot, so I am ripening.
Now, as I sit at my desk looking out through the window at the early Spring sun catching the wings of the crows on the rooftops, turning them iridescent, what I most feel about this book is the urge to care for it. I sense it has a life and needs of its own and that my part in this pact (for a pact is what it seems to be) is to carefully tend this living thing that’s been planted in me. But as to what this book will be, exactly, I know there’s only one way to find out…
If you enjoyed ‘Spring is coming’, do heart, comment & share as this greatly helps others to find it. Thank you x
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Upcoming talks, workshops & retreats
11/03: The way of imagination - online talk on Jung & nature
What can we learn from Jungian psychology about our one-ness with nature and how can writing open us up to the Earth’s imagination?
08/04: The psychology of Carl Jung with Seed Talks - London + livestream
Come and explore how Carl Jung re-frames therapy as a form spiritual growth & more
14/04: Spring online depth writing workshop
Explore the seasons & cycles of your self experience with writing & imagination
Join a Spring depth writing workshop to reflect on the cycles of your self-experience through the symbolism of Spring and the season’s associations with renewal and new life.
30/09 - 04/10 Fire Your Wild Imagination Portugal depth writing retreat. Rooms from 550 Euros.
Expand your sense of possibility with a transformative writing practice in the cork woods of Alentejo, South Portugal.
I really love leading this annual Fire Your Wild Imagination depth writing retreat in the beautiful cork woods of rural Portugal. The five days will be a chance to explore this vast inner superpower through a holistic creative practice underpinned by Jungian psychology that uses writing and imagination to tap into the unseen and untether creativity with me at the dreamy rustic family estate of Monte da Japonica.
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Such a wonderful piece of writing from the soul! Your Springtime is on its way!
I love this piece. I am also an artist and for me art is something that can’t not be done. It is an imperative for me as it feeds my soul.