a meditation on weeding

 

 

As trite as it may be to use gardening as a metaphor for living, I find myself while on my knees in my garden pulling out weeds doing just that.

The dictionary defines a weed as “a valueless plant growing wild, especially one that grows on cultivated land… any undesirable or troublesome plant…that grows profusely where it is not wanted.”

What makes a plant or a thought or a behavior desirable? And what does weeding out what is troublesome entail?

I follow the word cultivate — to till, to refine, to promote growth and nurture — from the root kwel: to revolve, move around, dwell; to the Latin colere, to cultivate, inhabit, to the Greek and Sanskrit, circle, wheel. Which takes me to a garden or a life that is worked and cared for. Carl Jung wrote that the circle and the wheel were symbols for the transcendent Self, what he also called “the ordering principle.” Which brings us around to a cultivated consciousness.

Jung spoke of differentiated feeling, a fine-tuned judgment call that translates into living one’s values.

When is a weed a wildflower? Desirable. Or an invasive strangling vine? Unwanted. How much is in the eyes of the beholder?

How do we weed out our demons? And we all have them. Things we work on.

It’s those “weeds” with the roots that go so far down and back, that return year after year, which insist that we go deeper into our selves into the untilled ground of our being, that ask more from us and lead us back to our humanity.

However we make room for and express our uniqueness, however wild or staid, let us treasure the flowers.

 

Shades of Crazy

 

“And you know that she’s half crazy and that’s why you want to be there,” has always been my favorite line from Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne.

In An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, inside Styron’s Darkness Visible, threaded through many of Kim Chernin’s autobiographical books — one of my favorites A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow — not to mention Carl Jung’s The Red Book, the psychological sufferings of the authors are revealed. What kind of writer dares to shine a light into the darker corners of what we call crazy and brave the critques that come from owning that personal space?

Inside the frame of mental illness, between the covers of the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that tome of dis/ease that is constantly updated with its differential diagnoses and complications, we find every hue of madness. Neuroscience and psychopharmacology have great merit, and a medical model can offer hope to those who suffer from intolerable affect which may perpetuate trauma or usurp the life force in futility. But we must take care around the dangers of drawing lines between us and them.

Which relates to why it takes courage to own and share the darker, wilder shades of our lives.

Creative fire, spiritual descent and opening, and hard-won lessons in love travel through the door of madness. Jung stressed consciousness, and he introduced the method that he named active imagination, a conscious effort by the ego (our oh so limited consciousness and sense of ourselves) to engage and relate to the mysterious realm of the unconscious. More than a conversation with demons or dream figures or painting a scene that illuminates other worlds, active imagination, also named by Jung the transcendent function, holds the tension of crazy and sane. It bears it. Works it. Owns it.