Harvest

 

 

Yesterday I published my memoir IN THE TRACKS OF THE UNSEEN: MEMOIRS OF A JUNGIAN PSYCHOANALST. It is available on Amazon.com. It’s hard to describe what it means to me. More than that, it’s hard to feel into this season of harvesting after some forty years of trying to write a book and twenty some years of writing it, not without interruptions but with the constancy of purpose to tell my story. 

And the door I chose was the one without gate-keepers, the one that brings to mind the sounds of Jimmy Cliff singing “You can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try, try and try.” The rejection slips from years back do not need to stop you. I chose the door that said, “Yes you can!”

For me self-publishing is the perfect choice because it is in the tracks of self, of my self, of the Self, that I have journeyed.

To birth this book on the cusp of Halloween feels timely.

I write in Chapter Three about the town where I grew up.

Wethersfield was an historical landmark. After ridding its territory of Native Americans, this then lily white town became known in part for its witch trials and the execution of three witches.

 

Sadly witch-hunts are not only a thing of the past.

I have found that when you live life as close as you can to the course of truth you may touch down on mysteries that unsettle the status quo. Halloween bows to the pagan, to the Celtic harvest festivals, to the hallowed darkness and the liminal edge between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness.

In Chapter Thirteen of my memoir, as a twenty-seven-year-old single mom I introduce my first Jungian analyst.

I transferred from the bus to the subway and got off in Central Square. Climbing the littered smelly stairway up to Mass Ave, I looked up into a brilliant blue sky. I couldn’t say she reminded me of anyone I’d ever met, barely remembering what was said; but then the way she said, “She had the right name,” when I’d told her about Delores dying came back to me—that and a certain sadness in her eyes that I saw once I’d stopped crying. As I turned toward Myles’s new school, I remembered how she’d concluded that my fear of life was robbing me of the energy and motivation that I needed to move forward, the way she laid that summation down like a gauntlet.

Myles was waiting for me with a picture he’d drawn of his family.

“There’s Whitey,” he said, pointing to a sketchy circle with ears and a tail. That was another thing that had made Daveda sad, the story about Blackie….

“Can we get a pumpkin?” Myles said, kicking a path through the leaves that buried the sidewalk.

“They’re cheaper at the Stop and Shop.”

“Come on, Mommy, pleeeease.” He stretched the word out to just before it became annoying. I had sixteen dollars left from tips. His hand closed around mine as we neared the curb.

We stood on the corner in front of the market. “How about this one?” I reached for a small round one from the orange row lined up against the cracked foundation.

“How ‘bout this one,” he said, almost doubling its size.

“Look at that sky,” I said as we came out of the store, running my fingertips through his soft full Afro, his small arms wrapped around the dented oblong shape.

I had told Daveda that Myles was my lifeline and my teacher. "Quite a big job for such a little guy," she'd said.