Thomas Moore's "Care Of The Soul" (c.1992) was probably the only NYTimes best seller that I have ever read. Some people consider it new agey, but I think that is beside the point. Paraphrasing and quoting in spots: Part II is entitled "Care of the Soul in Everyday Life". Chapter II under that is sub-titled "The Myth of Family and Childhood." At the start, Moore quotes William Blake: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time". You know this is not going to be about another silly love song by The Beatles. He says that soul feeds on the concrete vernacular of the particular. Details, quirks, infinite variety of life. Since the family is loaded with major and minor crises, characters, success, failure, ups and downs of health, it is the primary source of nourishment to the soul. Many of us reading this were born in the golden age of the family. If we could only return to that, eh? Was it really that golden? Let's face it, families of any era are both good and bad. We're big on dysfunctional now. No friggin' family is perfect and most have serious problems. It's John Waters not Ozzie and Harriet Nelson or Leave It To Beaver and Butthead. Romantics and simplistic sentimentality have no place here. The pathological family is not something to be fixed and cured, as therapists like to say. It is the family events that have affected us deeply that need some reflection. The soul enters life through cracks in the smoothly functioning fantasy family. The family is a microcosm of society and also recapitulates the mythic origin of humanity by being close to the earth. Families filled with ordinary human foibles soiled by Dys-Dis (mythical underworld). If we whitewash it and don't connect with this mystery, we lose the soulfulness that family has to offer us. Family is most truly family in its complexity, its failures, weaknesses, beauty, horror. Facade of happy, so normal vs. behind-the-scenes craziness and abuse. TV sit-coms of sweet successful families followed by the news at 11. Did he really stab her 38 times with a butcher's knife that he had just used to carve the turkey? I recall an aunt saying that she was going to throw herself in the river. She never did of course, but the dramatic threat was intensified by running screaming through streets in the direction of the river. I remember my father crying in a contorted almost fetal postion on the couch crying in relief after the histrionics had ended for the day. Then, all was well again. I also remember my uncle at a wedding reception in this same aunt's backyard in summer. He was happily drunk and had removed his shirt. He liked beer a lot and there was plenty of canvas. The comic Ruth Buzzi then drew a face on his bare chest with magic marker. You know where the two eyes were. He loved it as did she and we all laughed from our bellies. A gambler uncle at a crap game in White Rock told of a band of masked men who raided the place and took the cash along with all the men's pants.
Family is to individual as origins of human life is to human race. The family history provides a matrix of images that saturate an individual all through adult life. People are too damned literal. Family stories and character can be transformed into myth through repeated tellings. The true story tellers are few and far between. We are all the poorer for it. By not honoring our stories and running away from the dark side, we feel trapped by seemingly inescapable family bullshit. Whether we know it or not, our ideas about the family are rooted in the ways we imagine the family.
Father, Da, Dad, Daddy, Papa
"We are all looking for a Father", said a poet once. The personal father has a lot to do with how we father our own soul. Today we have replaced secret wisdom with information. Information doesn't evoke fatherhood and initiation. It evokes power and control. What helps author our own lives? Becoming intimately acquainted with one's own life and casting out upon its waters are a good start. In part, we are always on the sea. It's then we see that reason, ideology and opinion are not all they are cracked up to be. The sea is fate, unknown and unexpected.
Mother, Mama, Mom, Mommy...
"O Singer of Persephone!
In the dim meadows desolate
Dost thou remember Sicily?"
Oscar Wilde "Theocritis: a Villanelle
Mother, the word itself is very powerful. The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone told of a mythic family so highly revered it was ritualized in the Eleusinian mysteries. Sometimes one discovers soul and the underworld against one's will. That pesky will to power, where there is no love. The dark depths are always alluring. Ask any Goth, alcoholic or drug addict. You might get lucky and find a Goth who is an alcoholic and a drunk. Saves time. Narcissistic lures vs. familiar wholesome values. Affectionate caring and bitter emotional pain. Madonna and mater dolorosa. We are drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives and give us depth and character. What the hell are we doing here if this wasn't so? Rather than endure these potentially transformative phenomena, people go shopping or take another hit of St. John's Wort. For all you Martini drinkers, here's where the pomegranate comes in. In the Greek myth, mother Demeter goes from mortal nanny to revered goddess and asks that a temple be built to her. In her sorrow for her lost daughter, she also refuses the fields to bear fruit. This is serious stuff, since you know what happens if we get no fruit. No more martinis. Zeus arbitrates with Hades through Hermes about Demeter's daughter, Persephone. Hades relents and sends the daughter back to her mother, but not before putting a pomegranate seed in her mouth ensuring that Persephone must spend one-third of her life with him and the rest with her mother. Interesting that we sleep one third of lives more or less. A close death just occurred two weeks ago. We have never bought pomegranates this often up until a few weeks ago. I have been juicing them for Kathy to make vodka martinis. I made one last night. I name each one differently. The next one will be called the Demeter or Persephone-Kore martini. The myth can be a meditation on death itself, one's own brush with death or the death of someone close. The profound maternal affirmation of life allows such deaths to affect us, wonder at the mysteries of the underworld and send us back into life transformed. The pomegranate seed is the seed of life-from-death. The fruit looks sunny deep red on the outside and yet has a vast interior of dark black Hades seeds (arils, I've since from POM). Hermes, the quicksilver messenger/ arbitrator, is vital for our ability to see through ("Hermeneutics" the art of reading our experiences for their poetry) our self-destructiveness, depression, flirtation with danger, addictions. Initiation, death, survival, resurrection. Just a few weeks ago we had the pleasure of meeting some fine people at Barbone for dinner. Subsequent to that there was a passing mention of this myth and Zoloft. At that time, I did not know of the tragic death of a person close to one of the persons we met at Barbone and of the imminent death of my aunt.
The Child is Father of the Man
A poet wrote : "The words are wild".
For Christians, there's no better time of the year to write about the child born under lowly conditions exposed to fate. However, mythology from many cultures contains this motif. The Christians do not have eminent domain. Childhood and children have undergone some significant changes, not all good and healthy. We now see children in high heels and makeup, on anti-depressants, in porn and on and on. The child is a dual symbol of power and weakness. Revered to the point of nausea and abused horrendously. Something's wrong with our images of the child or how we perceive those images. Grow up already! You are acting very immature. The inferior child, as something to be rid of or grow out of. Small, inadequate, unknowing, the child contains something of soulful import. The more we deny it, the more childishness we betray. Our society finds it difficult to accept the exuberant spontaneous joy of childhood. We pay lip service to the child, but this country ranks low on the list of how well nations take care of their children. The year of the child, childcare, advanced childcare, afterschool care, pre-teen groups... Progress says that we are more intelligent and developed than our ancestors. In turn, adults are more intelligent than children. Our values are infected with this denigration of the humility of childhood.
"Primitive man is no puzzle to himself. The question "What is man?" is the question that man has always kept until last. Primitive man has so much psyche outside his conscious mind that the experience of something psychic outside him is far more familiar to him than to us. Consciousness hedged about by psychic powers, sustained or threatened or deluded by them, is the age-old experience of mankind. This experience has been projected itself into the archetype of the child, which expresses man's wholeness. The 'child' is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning, and the triumphal end. The 'eternal child' in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, a divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the ulimate worth or worthlessness of a personality."---CG Jung
We drove to Saratoga Springs yesterday. The Northway was heavy with weekend warriors on the asphalt path. The farmer's market
in Saratoga Springs is one of the best in the area. 
The produce is beginning to blossom with more than just lettuce and greens. 
Just lettuce and greens is what I would wish for in the middle of January. 
The track will open shortly and the smell of horses is in the charged air. In fact, when we return from a day trip there, our allergies go haywire. Literally. 
For where there are some of the most polished thoroughbred horses on the planet, there is a lot of hay. "And they're off!" is upon us. As a friend is fond of saying, "winter begins at the finish of the first race."
