MEMOIR LOGO CONCEPT: The aleph and a Sufi mystic inspired my creation and design of the syzygy logo, which I initially based on the symbolism of the yin and yang.
But the concept expanded when I first saw the aleph in Judith Cornell’s
Mandala Healing Kit, My inexplicable attraction to it led me to incorporate it into my logo before I knew what it meant.
I later read that the “Aleph (the first letter of the sacred Hebrew alphabet) embodies the primordial, divine potential of the universe. ... Aleph contains all the universe’s potential and all of its emptiness simultaneously. Aleph represents a dynamic process of movement from unity to diversity and back to unity,” Jennifer Judelsohn, Songs of Creation.
And the mystic poet Rumi inspired me to use the fire and water concept after I read The Question. Here is an excerpt:
“The presence is there in front of me. A fire on the left, a lovely stream on the right.
One group walks toward the fire, into the fire. Another toward the sweet flowing water.
No one knows which are blessed and which are not.
Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream.
A head goes under water, and that head pokes out of the fire.”
LOGO ART: Cropped fire and water images from Free Images.
LOTUS LOGO: In spiritual and religious literature, “the lotus is a symbol for the macrocosm and the microcosm, the universe and man. The lotus represents the divinity of the cosmos as well as the divinity of man.
The lotus is the center of the infinite, omnipresent consciousness which connects with the consciousness of the universe. Through the intuition, one of man’s divine gifts, the spiritual student can see the infinite, omnipresent consciousness as the lotus flower within himself.”
LOTUS ART: Courtesy
Homestead, my website service provider. (Temporary art while I design of my own lotus logo.)
TO DOWNLOAD FREE SAMPLE CHAPTER OF SYZYGY:
THE MEMOIR
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THE MEMOIR
CROSSING THE BRIDGE TO SELF
THE WEBSITE
THE MEMOIR
NEW!
While the memoir excavates the debris of a past life (a kind of therapeutic process of sorting and sifting and cleansing), the journey continues on this website to rebuild, replant, and rewire. Like a reality television show, this website chronicles a life now in progress. Sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes clawing its way out of an abyss of abuse and addiction, sometimes bold enough to descend into the belly of the beast, it’s a life that seeks Truth yet hides from it.
Some days—as my life develops in a dark room of its own making—I cringe at the sight of me. Other days, I marvel. It’s both work and play. It is digging and burying, finding and losing, hurting and healing, loving and hating. It is dying and being reborn.
Documenting this process of Self-discovery, which Jung coined “individuation,” this website explores avenues for expansion, such as memoir writing, active imagination, alchemy, archetypes, astrology, dream analysis, psychoanalysis, I Ching, mandalas, psychological types, and shadow work.
It was just a fluke, or was it, when I discovered Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols in my last semester of college, which mesmerized me at first sight when I opened it to the first page of part 1, to the entrance of an Egyptian tomb bearing the title, “Approaching the Unconscious,” an enchantment I may have missed if I hadn’t maxed out on English credits. And I’m sure I glowed in the dark when I read Edward C. Whitmont’s The Symbolic Quest. How I marveled at the revelation that symbols have the power to describe the unknown. (Click mandala to see an example of how I depicted an image on my mental landscape, which my words failed to aptly describe.) My journey had begun in the womb, but I didn’t know I was on a quest for healing and transformation until I took that philosophy class.
Further research after college led me to the evocative, passionate, and profoundly insightful works of internationally acclaimed Jungian analysts Marion Woodman and Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Dr. Woodman and Dr. Pinkola Estés explore the human psyche through dream analysis, storytelling, myths, metaphor, and archetypes with wit and might and delicious imagery. During their journeys as authors and lecturers—among many other major accomplishments—they have produced an amazing body of work with many common motifs, such as connecting body and spirit, balancing feminine and masculine energy, transforming the nitty-gritty to the divine, and descending into the depths of our physical bodies and our unconscious psyches to reveal the Self, to awaken it, and to break free from addiction and abuse so that we might embrace the unlived life.
With these motifs as backdrops to my journey, I jumped for joy, that is until I arrived at the entrance of the tomb and experienced in the flesh the descent into the belly of the beast, which I can only compare to an enduring image of my son, which he inserted into my psyche as a toddler the morning I checked on him from my bedroom window and saw him in the yard below cramming his chubby little arm into a rotten tree stump, like reaching into the belly of the beast, scooping up fistfuls of red ants, and laughing hysterically as they swarmed his body.
Hello? I’d rather die than let life swarm all over me. No way was I ready to dwell in my fright and panic and stinging flesh and tortured laughter. Not that I recall thinking about it consciously, but the comfort and enjoyment and excitement of food, alcohol, cigarettes, television, and video games, served as both my cloak and my dagger. Marion Woodman said she suspects that that’s what a lot of addictions are about: “The fat body that
Website continues memoir’s journey to Self
Through the process of painting this little car, I learned something from my mother, something about myself, something amazing about faith and creativity. As part of her journey and mine, Chapter 32, “Growing Pains,” is devoted to the pain and joy that went into the painting of this cover art.
acts as protection for the terrified soul is both an armor against the world and it’s a protection for what’s inside.” While drifting in and out of consciousness since my early twenties, despite myself I managed to compile hundreds upon hundreds of pages of text, documenting everything from my childhood memories in short stories to keeping daily journals of my adulthood to writing down and analyzing my dreams to endlessly drafting Syzygy: Crossing the Bridge to Self, all the while unwittingly creating a backup of my life.
Episodic and spontaneous, my writings seemed at times aimless. I kept forgetting where I was going! Mostly just bare bones, the skeleton of my life hid under my bed, often haunting me, discouraging me, and mocking my so-called destiny to one day publish a roadmap to my authenticity, a roadmap that I hoped might one day help others like me to find their way.
But now, nearly 20 years after I began tapping the keyboard, it’s all starting to make sense as I edit, rewrite, fill in the blanks, and edit some more, adding flesh and blood and skin and guts to those otherwise bereft bones.
To organize my metamorphosis from egg to humanoid, I’ve divided the bulk of my work into nine parts and further subdivided those parts into 34 chapters. I introduce each part with a quote, mostly from Marion Woodman, and each chapter with excerpts from my dream journal or excerpts from fairytales, songs, or poems.
In addition to the works of Marion Woodman and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Storks, and a song I learned at summer camp, “I Found a Peanut,” and Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” to name just a few, each, in their own voice, spoke to me as I drew parallels from their work to my life.
These quotes and excerpts connected my seemingly petty little individual experiences to the great big amazing experiences of all mankind. They exemplified how archetypal images throughout world literature were sometimes spitting images of what I perceived as my itty-bitty thoughts, my dreams, my fears, my hopes. Oftentimes they attempted to awaken me, to guide me, or to warn me. But best of all, they told me I was not alone. ♂ ♀
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