Seeking My Myth

By GrahamLewis · Dec 1, 2017 ·
  1. [​IMG]I did some writing today, but not as much as I would have liked, and wanted to quit. I decided that rather than fight it, I would go with the flow, so to speak, and see not what I wanted to make myself do, but what I wanted to do. It's a dangerous route, I know, because it's so easy to use it as an excuse to do avoid doing what needs to be done. To do nothing.

    But maybe that was what I wanted to do. As I walked into the garage, to go drive out and do an unnecessary errand, I for some reason thought about an iron wedge that I have out there, for the purpose of splitting wood. I hadn't used it in years and part of my errand was to buy some firewood for the fireplace. I remembered I had some wood out back that I had kept piled up but never used, and decided to split some wood and see how it worked. I did, the wood split wonderfully, and it's burning nicely as I write.

    I thought about how I had spent the last hour, and recalled something about Jung, how when he got blocked once he set about playing with stone, gathering rocks and building with them, until he was able to get past it. I googled that idea, and found that he had written about it in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. I remembered I had the book, buried in my collection, and I found it after some searching. It had a bookmark in it, an old airline tickt stub, marking that section of the book. (That's a nice bit of synchronicity, this swirl of Jung and my old library, but that's a different issue).

    As Jung writes, first, he asked himself, "what is your myth-the myth by which you live?" And he found no answer but an irresistible urge to gather and build with stones, as he had when a child. "I was on the way to discovering my own myth. For the building game was only a beginning. It released a stream of fantasies which I later carefully wrote down."

    My point is not that I am or ever will be the visionary Jung was, but that I have reached a point in my life at which I have no choice left but to look within, and see what is really there, and hope that I can fashion some sort of meaning from it. Splitting wood was what I wanted to do, even though it has no "real" value in the world, but doing so inspired this blog entry, so that's something.

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