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.)
“Carl Gustav Jung was one of the great doctors of all time and one of the great thinkers of this century. His object always was to help men and women to know themselves, so that by self-knowledge and thoughtful self-use they could lead full, rich, and happy lives.”
Do you ever get that nagging sensation that you forgot something or that something is missing or broken but you don’t know what it is?
These nagging sensations—which have haunted me since
I was a small child—drove me to write Syzygy: Crossing the Bridge to Self and, ultimately, to build this website. But it has, and continues to be, a long and difficult process.
After years of inexplicable anger, I woke up one day and realized I had metaphorically burned down my own home in a fit of rage. And I intuitively knew that the pyromaniac who set the blaze had a bridge to cross, that is, an imperative to understand her incessant penchant for starting fires. Otherwise her efforts would turn to ashes, and like the witches before her, she would be burned at the stake.
The first day of spring 2015—the day I officially made the electronic version of my memoir available online—is most likely within a matter of days, even hours, of my conception 60 years before, which is when I began to write this book. Or it began to write me. I think the two are one. But I do know that I could not not write it. It was my destiny. My vocation. My calling. And I could not escape it.
Sometimes I found writing my memoir comforting, therapeutic, and inspiring. But more often than not, as I chiseled away at the rock, trying to exhume my very soul, my memoir hung over me like the dust in “Pig-Pen’s” cloud.
It was downright embarrassing. I was compelled to say I was writing a book. It was like my identity. And I thought it would be done any day now. But after five, ten, fifteen years, people started to look at me a little funny. What’s worse, when people asked what the book was about I couldn’t even explain it.
In hindsight, I can finally say that it’s a story of a woman in her 40s trying to climb out of an unconscious life. But with no one to mentor her or to honor her feelings or to validate her struggles, she kept falling back into the same pit,
Jung asked Freeman to edit Man & His Symbols so that it would be understood by
people in the marketplace.
Freeman’s interview of Jung in 1959 on Face to Face—and a dream— prompted Jung’s desire to reach the public at large.
John Freeman, in his introduction to Jung’s Man & His Symbols
THE WEBSITE
Memoir, website share Jungian tools to heal psyche
THE MEMOIR
I began writing my memoir the day I was born. Or did it write me?
I initially built this
website as a
marketing tool
to promote my
memoir.
But as if my website was building me instead, an explosion of synchronicities and other experiences compelled me to build one page after another—culminating in the creation of nearly 50 web pages in a matter of weeks.
No doubt, my marketing tool had been hijacked for a higher purpose. It became a platform to document a life seeking authenticity in real time, while introducing, exploring, and experimenting with tools and techniques that if not coined were embraced by Carl Gustav Jung.
Other pages on this website, such as Out of My Mind, will feature creative projects and/or processes. For example, the first installment is the drawing of a mandala, and My Latest Revelation, which documents my aha moments as they occur in real time; then the Power of Thought, which features how I quit smoking; and Good Deeds, which documents inexpensive ways we can begin the unifying process one good deed at a time.
It is an exciting adventure, but becoming conscious also has its share of difficulties. It is not about eliminating our dark side or striving for perfection but about lifting the mask of our persona, seeing for the first time our shadow, our repressed projections, and integrating what was unconscious with what is conscious.
Together, may we find that something we once knew, integrate the polar aspects of our fragmented psyches, become complete with the joy of fully experiencing the reality that we are of divine Nature as the wave is of the ocean and the flame is of the fire. ♂ ♀