Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

BE STILL, DIVE DEEP. #7 Continuing my personal story and the discovery of the myth that defined my life, we find our little “Paddle to the Sea”  ( a canoe in a childhood story book) out of college and teaching English in Loudoun County, VA.

The years 1965 to 1968 are impossible to define, both culturally and personally, because the events in these years transformed my life in ways that could not be imagined. Just as the chick cannot image how its life will change once it leaves the shell. I was in a shell, to be sure. And my discoveries of Thomas Merton, the diving and surfacing in the great Ocean on my submarine, the Romantics and Transcendentalists in English Literature, and the struggle of philosophers to touch the truth of existence were all my little beak pecking, pecking on this unseen shell that enclosed me.

The first crack came when I met Lee, a new teacher in the high school with me, who was to become my life long friend and my immediate Rasputin to my Czar ego. A great winter blizzard hit the East Coast my first winter in school, and we spent our snow bound days with Lee where he cooked fabulous dinners and expanded our horizons in other tastes, in music and thought. Boundaries to my know world began to fall and I was hit with great existential doubt. Who was I? Was I the “surface skimmer” I thought I was (a reference to what submariners called fleet sailors)? I was overpowered with the heartfelt feeling that I could be anything I wanted, and that my boundaries were only as permanent as the snow drifts closing our front door.

As a  high school teacher I followed the manual, teaching grammar and literature, but I was not creative in my work. It was just a daily struggle to keep from being killed by the 8th grade students I taught. I had no passion, because you cannot have passion unless you can cut the rope. Thanks to Lee I had met Zorba the Greek, the movie and the sound track LP, which I played over and over. “A man must have a little madness to cut the rope,” said the grizzled old guru Zorba. I was the English intellectual, Lee was my Zorba who  taught me to dance.

In my third year, I had transfered to Percilleville to teach 11th grade, I only remember those last months. JFK had been assassinated and Hate Asbury was in full bloom in San Francisco. We made good friends with a new Presbyterian minister, who would later give me a key to my next adventure. Students were dividing into those in rebellion and those who followed the orthodox path.  One student ran away to Hate Asbury and she came back as a Hippy Queen with a shoe box full of pot. Change was rippling in the air like static from a lighting storm. I tried this “magic dragon.”

I still remember my reaction: “Damn, this stuff is good. They are wrong!” All that had been said was false. I had grown up in San Diego going to the reefer movies in downtown theaters that were made in the 30s to scare youth of the dangers of this evil weed. All these movies did was excite youth with the flashes of skin and forbidden sex. But here I was actually smoking the devil’s breath. Another crack in my egg splintered off Zorba.

Then came the break through. A friend gave me a tape of J. Krishnamurti and I listened to it  while going to sleep. I awoke the next morning totally out of my previous personality or Ed identity. The shell could not even be seen because my whole life before I awoke that morning had been a dream. I looked in the morning mirror and laughed in a joyous whoop. I knew who I was looking back at me. It was like discovering one’s long lost twin or one’s long lost home. Energy was rippling through me. There seemed to be no division between me and the external world. The world was in me!

I started doing complicated yoga postures, never having even seen them. I love standing on my head. I went to school and before me in the hall of hurrying kids was eyes, glowing deep eyes, as if I could see their very souls lit up. In class I through the text book in the trash and began to teach spontaneously  the teaching of Krishnamurti. Half the students formed around me down front furiously taking notes, while the other half hung out in the back of the room, looking at me askance. I showed them that everyone could stand on their head, and they did, with the administrators walking by my room looking at me askance.

I had a honda motorcycle and I began riding it fearlessly. The road, the bike and I were one. When I picked up the Bible and read the words of Jesus, I was speaking those words as he spoke them. Time had collapsed. The same with Walt Whitman. I was the Song of Myself. Students began to congregate at my house. I seemed to have cut some rope. Was I mad?

I had too certainties: I knew I was a Son of God, for my Father was the source of me. I felt closer to God than to my self. When I saw a horse for the first time, I was Adam before the fall, before I named it horse. All animals and children were  wondrous beings. I was able to communicate with them from a being space instead of a head space. The whole world was undefined, with extraordinary beauty in the ordinary.

The next certainty was that I wanted to find a master, a teacher who could, well, affirm my enlightenment and assure me that I wasn’t mad. What was I doing to do with this new found energy? I knew I could not teach in Loudoun because what I wanted to teach was awakening and not the accepted grammar of the orthodox life.

In a few weeks the “awakening” became a waxing moon, and its intensity began to fade. I wanted to find the path or the method that would bring it back. She, my muse, my inner self,  left like my beloved saying, “I’ll be back.” I would later learn to call her my Shakti, or creative energy. She has an androgynous aura about her, neither male or female. But she was calling me on a journey to God and to my Self.

We left Northern Virginia when school ended, going to Miami where a principal of a new high school I had met had offered me a job. What he had said was come on down and apply, in a off hand way. But we packed up, motorcycle in our van, and headed over the horizon, following a star we could not see.

Posted under personal story

BE STILL, DIVE DEEP. #7 Continuing my personal story and the discovery of the myth that defined my life, we find our little “Paddle to the Sea” on a submarine, the USS Cubera, where we find our sailor out of the navy, married, and  going to college.

Secure in an apartment within walking distance of Old Dominion (then William and Mary), I began my study of English literature and, as a minor, philosophy. All I remember now is my Shakespeare teacher patting his book of Shakespeare (like my Chief Sonarman patted the sonar equipment) and telling me that all you need in life is Shakespeare and a good bottle of scotch. In later years I stopped reading Shakespeare but it took longer to put down the scotch.

Nothing much happened in those years as Tilly taught in a middle school and I learned how to categorize  the stages of English literature into the appropriate boxes. It wasn’t until I studied the Romantics and the Transcendentalists that something stirred inside, my soul kicking a little as it felt the boundaries of its womb. These poets were speaking to me from inside me, as me.

In Philosophy I was fortunate that there was only one professor, an existentialist (I’ve forgotten his name) who took my mind through the dialectic of Western thought as it struggled to free itself from the  hidden assumptions of what was Truth. I remember the black tub ring around the classroom about one foot high where his heel would rub as he leaned against the wall. He tried to wash our mind’s clean of confusion. I got an A in all his courses.

I remember realizing that the Truth I was looking for could not be discovered by rational thought. Philosophy only made me aware that thinking was just the waves on the Ocean. Something outside the skin of my mind called to me. These courses in both literature and philosophy seemed to be designed to merely measure, from a safe distance, the great waves of human art and thought; I wanted to swim and make my own waves.

During those years I must have read a whole library of philosophy, but these philosophers were not the ship I wanted or needed to take me across. Now after leaving the great ship of institutional religion, I left the great ships of philosophy. The real value in what we learn is to know its limitations.

I now know what attracted me to the Romantics/Transcendentalists and the Existentialists was that I was able to read them from inside them, instead of from the outside as a literary label that was understood only in relationship to the previous label. One listed and learned the qualities of a period; one got out the ruler and measured it. But reading from the inside subjectively was awakening. This was not knowledge of but knowledge as.

I recall one awakening idea during that time. “Why I could be anything I wanted to be,” I realized. I didn’t have to be a teacher if I didn’t want to. I could be a technical writer. But like my wife who was channeled into the only vocation open to those who loved books, I prepared for a teaching career. An institution awaited me. I believed it would give me the credentials I needed.

Kennedy was shot while I was in college. Something was changing. Our big ship of a national myth, a unified collective identity as America, had hit an iceberg.  Or an iceberg hit us.

Posted under personal story

BE STILL, DIVE DEEP. #6 Continuing my personal story and the discovery of the myth that defined my life, we find our little “Paddle to the Sea” on a submarine, the USS Cubera, where we find our sailor contemplating marriage.

I met Tilly in September and by Christmas I proposed. Why do people get married? We never know the full reasons, at least in the beginning. Love is very deep and mysterious. While I was diving deep into the ocean in my submarine, I was only swimming on the surface of my life, and the end of my four year enlistment was approaching and I still had no chart to guide me into the future. Tilly was going to be an English teacher. She grew up in a stable world of small town Virginia and was following the course young women could take in the 50s, teaching. Hey, I could do that too, I thought.

I began going to Blackstone on weekends and discovered a world I had never known before. “You mean you still know the kids you went to kindergarten with?” I asked incredulously. A rootless person, I couldn’t believe roots when I saw them. But I liked the feeling of the earth. I suppose Tilly liked the feeling of the ocean and the call of the whales.  At any rate, after going to Florida to meet my parents at Easter, she said yes and we were married at the Baptist Church in Blackstone. I remember complaining because I had to pay for two ministers, her family minister and the current one. I have little memory of this wedding. I do know my father was my best man.

Looking back I can best describe my journey as going from one whale to another, from one world to another as if these worlds were swallowing me up. There was the whale of my parents in which my childhood was swallowed, the I was swallowed by the Navy and it became my enclosure. My chief sonarman tried to get me to reenlist and stay in the whale; patting the gear, he would say you take care of the gear and it will take care of you. Sailors were walking around with short timer chains on their belt, little bathtub chains they clipped off as they passed another month or year to retirement an escape from the whale. I didn’t want that. Yet, I was very eager to be swallowed by marriage.

It looked like clear sailing. I would extend a year to help Tilly finish Longwood, then she would teach in Norfolk while I attended the then College of William & Mary Extension, which became while I was there Old Dominion University. I would get a degree in English and teach. It seemed very clear then.

We all have our primary mantras, the prayer or words that are our defining commandment. The mantra Tilly grew up with in Blackstone was “What will people think?” It’s variant is “What would Jesus think if you did that?”  I had my own mantra: Don’t dive too deep. Stay in the fleet.

Posted under personal story

BE STILL, DIVE DEEP # 5. Continuing my personal story and the discovery of the myth that defined my life, we find our little “Paddle to the Sea” on a submarine, the USS Cubera.

I became aware dimly while in the Navy that I was afraid of women, not women per se, but any sexual encounter with a woman. I am reminded of George Castanza in Sienfeld  who, on a date and is asked to come up for a coffee, says he doesn’t drink coffee at night. I had several encounters like that where the female was there an inviting, but I refused to go to her bed. Oh, that’s what Zorba the Greek said was the greatest sin: if a woman asks you to her bed and you do not go…..I did not go.

I was cut in two. My identity seemed to be tightly contained in a non-sexual space and not even the faintest whiff of perfume was allowed to enter. Looking back on this from my understanding of depth psychology of Jung and Joseph Campbell, the call I was not able to hear (but I did hear it) was the call of the siren or female archetype that  calls the male out of his safe childhood womb. She, whoever she was, was on the other side of the threshold of my consciousness, and I did not, I was not ready to go. But I was going to meet her, for she was the portal to my whole and integrated self.

Here is a good example of how this push pull of attraction and denial worked. I was on guard duty along the base fence in Sonar School in San Diego, and in a pay phone was a phone number. I called it. A woman answered. I made arrangements to meet her. She drove me round town. We talked. I blew my nose in the Kleenix on the front seat. She took me home. I was totally unconscious that there was anything strange about this.

At any rate, in the third year of my four year enlistment (to find myself), I met Tilly, a Blackstone Longwood College student at work for the summer at Va. Beach. She felt like my ocean and I felt no boundaries with her, and like my submarine I was free to sail above and below the surface. Our meeting was interesting because I had a blind date with another college student, a daughter of a tobacco farmer, and she would not leave the safety of the fire on the beach. Tilly’s date was late, so we met and walked, and I was able to see her a few times before she went back to school. She was in a “Oh what the hell, it’s the last of my summer,” when she found herself dating a sailor.

My long stretch in dry dock was over. My sub was launched. I felt the a current of my life move and the wind was at my back. This ocean was going to be my home.  This picture was taken before I met Tilly (on the left). As you can see the hopelessness in my face (center) next to my date.

Looking back on my life, I feel that I’m still in my submarine diving deeper into the ocean of my being. Sonar signals are affected by temperature layers in the ocean, and a sub can hide beneath a change in water temperature and the searching sonar from a destroyer will be deflected. One’s life is like that. One must go through layers of mythic images, archetypes of the deep, in order to fully integrate one ocean potential.

Posted under personal story

Be Still; Dive Deep #4. Continuing my personal story and the discovery of the myth that defined my life, we find our little “Paddle to the Sea” on a submarine, the USS Cubera, where he discovered the writing of Thomas Merton in his first book, the autobiographical Seven Story Mountain. As I write these words here I realize that the seven stories he was referring to were the seven chakras of the Yogic psychic centers that correspond to centers in the spinal column.

When one dives deep into TM’s biography, which is his writings, one walks with him to the source of the religious heart, the mystical knowledge of God, which he found to be the source of all religions. in the attic of every religion there sits those who want more than relationship with God—they see the end of relationship or separation from God. But this is really a search for the end of one’s own separation from experience. From being outside of life looking in, as I experienced as a youth, and which drove me to find a way out of this estrangement from my Self.

The loneliness and estrangement of my youth was not just that of a teenager who doesn’t fit in, or a son who can’t relate to his “always as sea” father. This is the estrangement of man who existentially  feels somehow split off from the fullness of life’s experience. This should be different, this could be better, this should not be this way, is the nagging reflection that haunts every moment. Who is this constant critic? Can no one rid me of him?

Merton was driven by the same existential agony. So he left the world in order to pursue his search for the answer. I found myself  in a sort of monastery: on the bridge of a submarine rising and falling in the troughs of the dark and formidable ocean, or with a sounding Oooogah and the slamming of hatches, gliding downward beneath the turbulent waves to the  still peace at 300 feet, where one could hear whales and porpoise call each other in a world completely unknown to the surface skimmers (which is what we call regular sailors.).

I heard in Thomas Merton what Jack London heard in his book the Call of the Wild. What called this promising intellectual, this future college professor, to leave the world and take a vow of silence and complete obedience to his monastery abbott and his Church?

Whales whistled to me in the depth of my being. But there were sudden churnings of fast paced screws coming in with a sharp ping ping of his searching sonar fingers that probed the ocean for our little steel canoe. “Destroyer at 220,” is would call to the conning tower, and the sub’s nose would point down and the coffee cup would slide on its shelf. At rest in my bunk over the forward torpedo’s, just a few steps from my sonar shack, I could put my hands on the sweating steel skin of my “tomb” and imagine the great ocean just two inches away.

“Rig for silent running,” came the call from the conning tower, and everyone not at their stations would get in their bunks. All movement stopped. Dishes were kept still in the galley. No one dared drop anything. You could hear the still hull creak as it contracted under the great weight of the sea. Condensation began to drip from the overhead. Outside our skin you could hear the rushing screws of the hunter passing by, it’s underwater radar hitting the hull and bouncing back to some sonarman in its sonar shack who is reporting your exact position to the racks of depth charges waiting on its fan tail.

While the depth charges were just small  charges used in our war games, I could imagine what it was like in WWII when the hunt was real and many of these boats never saw the surface of the ocean again.

The imagery of these years spent on the Cubera stay with me, but now they have become metaphors for the Silent Service I now belong to as a meditator. Instead of Ooooogah, I sound OOOOOOmmm, and dive beneath the surface noise of my mind. Here I daily  make contact with the Ocean of Being and follow the call of the whales and Thomas Merton, who first awakened me to the eternal  stillness that holds you and me.

Posted under personal story

Be Still, Dive Deep. #3. My first act of rebellion that I can remember was as a high school senior when asked what religion I belonged to I said agnostic. While I grew up being sent to Sunday School, the primary church service in my home was Happy Hour and the evening news. But when I choose to attend the University of Virginia to study medicine, I was a conformist, for I thought that was a proper vocation to choose, one that would surely please my father. So with one hand I rejected one father and embraced another. I wanted out of one beaver pond, but wanted to stay in another.

At the University of Virginia my lack of direction and passion opened up a bottle of solace, and I spent most of my first semester with my head in a trash can, and my roommate, who went on to Annapolis and a naval career, shaking his head and muttering, “Conley, you will never succeed.”  Although I didn’t realize it, that seemed fine with me, for I dropped out of the University in the second semester when my grades were so low I couldn’t retrieve them. I would join the navy to find myself, I thought. I had to get out of this beaver pond.

This was 1955 and Rebel without a Cause, and in the background on the dirt roads of the culture were the rumblings of the agnostics like Jack Karuoack and Alan Ginsberg, and the beatniks who would later be called Hippies. I went home my parents new home in Jacksonville, as my father had just retired, to work and get enough pocket money to hitch-hike across the country, and, my plan was, when the money ran out, join the navy in San Diego. I would get into submarines. At that time the journals of the WWII submarines in the pacific were popular, and I wanted to belong to a branch of the service where rank was not important. All for one and one for all was the motto of the silent service.

What was my field of action? What was my purpose? I didn’t know. I don’t remember reading much in high school, but I did start reading philosophical works to find the answers to these questions. The myth of my life to this point has been of an outside looking in. I remember vividly my mornings at school (don’t remember which one) where in the dead time before the bell rang I would go from room to room pretending to be looking for someone, so I wouldn’t have to stand alone in the halls. Being trapped outside and wanting to be in was my defining myth. I was even outside of conventional religion. Outside of those following in the footsteps of their father.

If I were to name one awakening of my passion in high school it was when my 11th grade English teacher held up my autobiography as an example of what other students should aspire to. Writing….who would have thought. I didn’t.

Hitch-hiking across the country, going up to NY then across to Oregon and down the coast highway to San Diego was my first great adventure. I had stuck out my thumb and let the winds of fate pick me up. I lost my virginity in a Nevada whore house, thanks to a guy that picked me up, kissed a cousin in Pocatello, Idaho, where my father’s family was, and got drunk in Portland Oregon with a University buddy. Then the navy became my home. I signed up to be a sonarman and applied to submarine school in New London, Connecticut.

I joined the submarine service before the first Nuclear submarine, so the fleet was still of WWII vintage. My boat, the USS Cubera based in Norfolk, was commissioned in 1945. As a sonarman I was charged with listening, headphones pressed to my ears, for the sound of surface ships, some even 50 miles away. I could tell by the rhythm, pitch, and speed of the screw its direction and type, whether prey or foe.

Now my Paddle to the Sea was a submersible  and for three and a half years the Cubera was my home, by beaver pond where my chief sonarman wanted me to make the navy my permanent house. When I left after five years, he patted my sonar gear, saying, “You take care of this gear and it will take care of you. You can retire in 20 years and sit back and drink beer and pump gas.”

But a voice was calling me. His name was Thomas Merton.

Posted under personal story

Be Still, Dive Deep #2. When does a life journey start? My earliest memory is of a book my mother gave me when I was four: Paddle to the Sea, which is about a Canadian indian boy who makes a canoe and sets it down on a snow topped hill, so that when the snow melts in the spring, it begins a journey to the sea. After years of overcoming obstacles it reaches the ocean and gets  picked up in a fishing net, ending up in England where it becomes a newspaper story. The Indian boy, now a man, reads the story and  smiles, knowing that this wooden canoe, this story, this journey was written by him, and that it was true.

This book, written by Holling Clancy Holling (is that his real name? Holling Holling?), is still in my possession, and I added some words to each trial of the little canoe that reflected rapids and dams in my own life.  We all have our story that is our recipe of life. All we have to do is add the tastes, and the smells, and the feel of the food to give our myth its flesh and blood.

The snow capped mountain upon which I was placed was a navy couple in the middle of the depression, 1936, and my mother would spend those four years before WWII taking me with her to see her navy husband at the ports where his destroyer docked. One of my favorite pictures was them at a NY restaurant. Those were good days, my mom says, but when WWIi came, the world was different ,and she nor I saw him again, except for a few times in San Diego where we then lived. Freud would have a good time with this, I suppose, for all I remember of my father was this guy in a white uniform who took my mother aware from me.

Nor did he know what to do with me or how a father should relate to his little son, since he was raised by his grandmother in Idaho when his father, a poor silver miner in Colorado, was unable to take care of him. The first ice I felt in my life was this separation from my father, and the first sun was my mother’s love. And my life has been measured out by the contrast and play between this melting and freezing. The gravity that pulled my canoe down that mountain stream  was my search for the missing father and the secret passage all sons need in order to find the sea.

Our life reveals itself to us as we melt the time that covers it. My first memories of the ground that lay beneath the snow was when my father finally got shore duty in New Jersey, and I was in one area for four good years, but even then my parents moved after the second year to another town and school. I lived with my bags packed and wishing for friends I could have made. In Madison and Milburn, from 7th to 10th grade, I got several good tastes of life. I learned to smoke and drink from cigarettes and alcohol I took from my father’s stash. Well, the drinking was just once when I took a canteen full of his booze to a church party. I think I remember the minister bringing me home where I fell in the front door with the minsters saying, “I think Ed’s drunk.” I had spent the part with my head in the toilet. I can almost feel my father shaking his head.

I also got a good taste of prejudice, shame and guilt. I was asked to go to a dance with a 9th grade girl, my first dance. I was very shy with girls. But when my father learned she was Italian, put out the order on the ship’s loudspeaker. “You’re not going to any dance with a Wop.” So I told her I couldn’t go and her girlfriend spit on me. I can reach up now and still find something to wipe off my face.

My father’s grandfather came over from Ireland, and the Irish were considered one step above dogs, so that dog-eat-dog mentality must have been passed down, because nothing makes you feel higher than making someone lower. Being in the navy where rank is everything was where he had worked very hard to be, getting a scholarship to college and then an appointment to the Naval Academy. He pulled himself out of the dirt. The gold he mined was to be worn on his arms and hat as a naval officer.

When he retired in 1955, after being passed over for advancement, he was a very bitter and angry man. At any rate, I didn’t want to be like my father, so when I joined the navy it was as an enlisted man. And yet, what I wanted most in life was to be like my father, separate yet accepted. I wanted him to hug me as me, without any ranking. This was the ice I had to melt with the sun I was driven to find.

Posted under personal story

At the age of 75 I am distinctly aware of my personal myth that has shaped my life. I feel it as a shifting trade wind shapes the path of a sailing ship crossing the ocean: the ship goes this way and that tacking with the wind but maintains a specific course although at no one time is the ship pointing in the true direction of that course. This morning I decided to share my discovery of my personal myth with you because you also have a personal myth that shapes your life, but it is often unknown while in the course of it, and this unknowing can often make you feel that you have no myth and no meaning in your life. “What am I doing? What is my purpose? Who am I?” This is the call for our myth to appear.

Your myth is what pulls you, gives you your passion, and makes you do what others thinks is crazy. Your myth can drive you mad and it can support you when the world becomes mad—and it often is. You can fight your myth or you can give into it. Your myth calls you out of yourself. She or he can come to you in the personifications of relationship and in circumstance—even God will appear to you dressed in the clothes of your myth. Following Joseph Campbell’s outline of the Call to Adventure in his seminal work Hero with a Thousand Faces, the mythic path in our life has a universal outline that can be found in all the  religions, myths, tales, and personal biographies of man from the first Shaman of the Neolithic hunting tribes of primeval man. Campbell calls it the monomyth, the archetypal story that springs from the collective unconscious. I write this to help you become sensitive to this story, your own story of you.

Campbell says it best: “The basic story of the hero journey involves giving  up where you are,  going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.” The first stage is leaving your “home town” (environment) because it is too repressive or maybe a call to adventure, an alluring temptation draws you out. Or the call may come when something has been taken away and  you go in quest of it into some realm of adventure. I’m reminded of a young person I knew looking for her missing birth  father. But always the realm of adventure is of unknown forces and unknown powers that are hidden or trapped in the unconscious. The heroic field is littered with demons, monsters, and great battles, but in modern life, it might be the boss who abruptly fires you. Campbell drives this point home again and again: all our old myths and symbols are dead, so we have to discover them anew in our own personal history. We must awaken our creative imagination to hear the ancient call of the wild.

Campbell also says that one may refuse the call, where the summons is heard but for some reason or another not heeded. When this happens your life looses its energy, its passion, and you feel that you are is just going through the motions of life, living out some  role assigned by others. I have felt this hollowness and it has been the will to escape this suffering that has evoked my myth. In Buddhist philosophy, this is the Wheel of Samsara or life as birth and death, a life without taste, a wasteland, as T.S. Elliott wrote.

The title of these series is Be Still, Dive Deep from my three years on an old diesel submarine from 1958-61, the USS Cubera. Here is a picture of us doing a battle surface (by accident). Like a frog, a submarine is at home above the surface and also below the surface of the water. My  tour of duty in this undersea craft has been a great metaphor for my life’s myth. There I am right behind that sonar dome you see protruding like a tumor from beneath the bow. My job was to listen through sonar gear to find our targets and avoid the sub hunters who roamed like wolves in search of their prey.

Posted under General Observations

When my wife returned from her week at the beach on an island near Charleston, SC, she brought little gifts for family members. Mine was a frog she thought related meditation and breathing. I thought it was okay, but excited I was not. But I put it on my shelf by my computer, and this morning in my readings of Josehp Campbell the first words I laid my eyes on was his interpretation of  ”The Frog Prince,” the very first story in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. My eyes opened. Ah, my frog!

Here is the story in brief: A little girl is playing with her golden ball (symbolic of her  incorruptible soul and all her potentiality) She loses the ball in a spring near the edge of the forest where she likes to play (symbolic of abyss in Germany).The ball goes down in the pond and all her potential being is swallowed by the underworld or unconscious.

When that happens, the power that’s down there calls up the little dragon who is the threshold guardian: an ugly little frog, a kind of fairy-tale dragon. She has lost her soul and she starts to weep. This is a depression, a loss of energy and joy in life, something essential has slipped out.

The little frog , the inhabitant of the underworld, says, “What’s the matter, little girl?” She tells him of the ball and he graciously says he will get it for her, but there must be an exchange. He rejects all her offers and says ,”I want to eat with you at the table and I want to be with you as your playmate and I want to sleep with you in your bed.” Underestimating the frog, she says she would do that.

The frog gets the ball and the girl takes off skipping back to her castle, the frog crying “Wait for me.” But at dinner with King Daddy and Queen Mother, the frog shows up. His daughter tells him what happened and the wise King asks if she promised anything. The little girl reluctantly sets up a place for the frog at the table, and when she goes to bed the frog followers. The story has two endings here; one, she kisses the frog and he turns into a prince; the second, which Campbell likes, she picks him up and throws him against the wall, and the frog cracks open and out steps this beautiful prince. But the story does not end there.

We discover that the prince too was in trouble, cursed and transformed into a frog by a hag. Now, that’s the littel boy who hasn’t dared to move on into adulthood, and she’s the little girl who’s at the brink of adulthood, and both of them have been refusing it, but each now helps the other out of the neurotic stasis. Of course, they immediately fall in love, swapping anima for animus (Carl Jung’s male and female archetypes). But the story does not end here.

A royal coach comes to their door, for it turns out that he is indeed a prince, and the coach has come to take them back to his kingdom, which has been in desolation from the time of his transformation to a frog. (This is the wasteland motif that was a central image in the Grail romances of the Middle Ages. The king is the heart of the land, and while he is incomplete, the land lies devastated.)

As they ride along there is a bang, and the coachman say that ever since the prince has been gone there have been four  bands of iron around his heart. Then there are three more bangs. The heart of the coachman begins beating properly again. (The coachman is symbolic of the land.)

The young hero had failed in his duty by refusing the call to adventure, which is the integration of his psyche. He had gone down into the otherworld against his will, but down in the otherworld, he found his little bride. So all is well.

So there you have it. When you are depressed and lose you energy and love of life, ask a frog to fetch the soul you have lost in the well of the unconscious. You cannot change your situation unless you break the rules. You have to kiss the frog. Do the unthinkable. Risk ridicule. and believe in magic once again.

Oh, and when you wife or husband gives you gift, take a second look. It just might be a golden ball.

This picture was taken a few years ago in the first summer of my backyard Buddha pond, where a frog mysteriously appears—I had no frogs in my pond—and took up residence in the bowl of my garden Buddha. He would sit there as I approached, sitting as still as the Buddha, almost as if he wanted me to kiss him.

Posted under General Observations

Letter to a young mother who has a new baby but no job and can’t make her car payment.

Yes, you have your beautiful baby. Take refuge in that feeling, take refuge in this new being, because she is both a baby with her own life and, symbolically, she is also you. On that level she is your potential, your new being. You are always giving birth to yourself, creating yourself anew. The obstacles  you are currently experiencing are nothing but the womb of your birth, and the current pain nothing but your labor.

So live in the present, deal with the present, enjoy the present— you can even enjoy the pain when you know it is bring your something wonderful—but keep one foot in the timeless being that you already are and where before you were born. Despair is just the feeling of the late term: “Will this baby ever be born? ”

The universe responds: Yes, it will. Nothing can stop your ongoing birth—except your disbelief in it. You are both the womb and the baby, and the womb (your circumstances, your world) is nourishing you in its own way and providing what you need through this invisible umbilical cord. That cord is your sense of Being, that indestructible wordless  sense that defies reason by saying you are okay. This deep interior peace cannot be disturbed by the surface waves of the world, just as the baby in your womb cannot be disturbed when you walk.

There is great peace in the womb, but thunder is hounding the distance, and the sleeper knows it’s birth is coming. The earth begins to shake, something pulls you like a rip tide, and  darkness  spits you out into the light, into a new womb/world, a  new birth and a new name. Take delight in the birthing process, because you can never hold a growing baby still in time, and you can never hold yourself in one moment….so let go and  breathe. Theses troubles will pass.

See your circumstances, these obstacles, in the larger frame, and where there were locked doors you will find the passage and the doorway to the sun. Where there was despair, you will find joy. Find the joy and the money will take care of itself. Joy is your wealth.

Posted under General Observations