Mermaid Wisdom

Seated in a restaurant, across from the golden-haired Mermaid emerging from a red brick wall. A cheeseburger plate placed upon her hands, yet her gaze draws my attention away from what she has been forced to do. Her eyes gaze out the front window where life is happening.

From a child’s imaginings her image first swam forth, free from red brick and red meat. Her hands are separated with palms facing. Her left hand extends outward to say, “Please don’t eat this.”

She is holding something invisible between her palms. She wants me to see what she truly holds. I am too much a man of red meat and red brick, I cannot see. Yet I know, I feel the space between, it invites me. The space is just wide enough for my head between her palms. She wishes to offer a blessing.

A blessing that will send me out into the world to which she gazes, more aware of the air and water that I am, that we share. More alive than the world of steel, concrete, and asphalt I will soon reenter.

I raise my glass of water thanking her for swimming playfully into my psyche and offering her blessing. I will remember.

The Rug Tells All

I'm back from the 2012 International Conference of the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies in New Orleans. Glad they shortened it to JSSS or we would have been smacking each other with plastic name tags all week. Many good presentations and a chance to see old friends and make new. One of my new friends, however, made a comment that I was "obsessed with the carpet" in the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, and she was right.

I have been to many conferences where vital issues of cultural and personal concern were passionately and intelligently expressed only to have the attendees return home, fill up a file folder with the collected "freebies," write the title of the conference on the tab, and then file it next to last year's conference notes. Brilliant and impotent.

Now comes the rug part. There are two identical carpets that cover the lounge within the hotel (a beautiful hotel, I might add - say hello to Janelle in the restaurant). My new friend heard me comment more than once about the carpet. There was a curious lack of an image. The carpet center was a circle with rays flowing out from the center, something like a dart board. Not far from the center and at the top and bottom of the carpet design were two quivers filled with arrows. The one image missing was a bow.

A quiver filled with items honed to a cutting edge, sharpened to pierce the target of their trajectory. Arrows whose very purpose is only fulfilled if shot from a bow to a target. And a target, like a mandala, drawing sight to its center, helping clarify and focus the very spot where the arrow must pierce. But no bow, no bridge to get point A to target B. And it did bother me, this image, for it spoke to all those earlier conferences I mentioned. All those sharp, insightful arrows tucked away in file folders while the world keeps throwing up blood and tear soaked targets crying out to be seen.

It was then that I realized that no matter how many bows (techniques) any conference presents (and this conference offered several), it still takes someone to notch the arrow (psyche/wisdom), draw back the string (soma/sinew), and take aim at the center, the soul of the human cry. I am, we are all, the needed bow.