It was a rough winter. Loved ones and friends experienced a similar season. Extraordinarily bad experiences of the sort that happen once - maybe twice - in a whole lifetime, showed up serially and simultaneously in several lives. What felt personal was reflected globally. The tragedy mask booted the comedy mask, which took off on a sabbatical to Far-Off Lands. Or maybe Traverse City. It's nice there in winter. Greyscale is my normal state, but this was beyond that and deeper. Dark and low. I wrote about being The Reluctant Molt, discovering that everything I knew about me and my methodologies was neither true nor helpful. I read a Deepak Chopra book about synchronicity and being open to messages. And I looked up my archetype. I chose carefully, looking for a .edu site which might mean postgraduate work on Jungian stuff. I answered the questions honestly without trying to outsmart the test hoping to achieve a particular result. I clicked submit. And there arose on the screen, in enormous black type THE DESTROYER. I went ziggity boom, adrenaline sluicing around, and then melted into a puddle in my desk chair. This cannot be! I'm a nice person, maybe The Artist, or The Trickster, but never The Destroyer. I recovered my drippy self, decided to read what that means before investing in a buckled sweater with arms that tie in the back. Not everyone meets The Destroyer in a lifetime, but it's not terrible, if you need to face a dragon. Which I did and do. The cycle of all life is birth/death/rebirth. The Destroyer shows up to knock around old ideas that don't suit, to clean house with a blowtorch, and to rattle the bars on whatever cage is keeping you from being your best self. I claimed to dear Beckie one time that I was a rebel. When she stopped laughing, she tapped her fingers on the table as she said, "A rebel. Who obeys [tap] each and [tap] every [tap] rule." I demurred. "Okay, I'm a rebel wannabe." The cool thing about confronting the dragon/destroyer is that once the beast is living with me, there's a chance I am free to be the rebel I see myself as. It's never too late to quo all over the status. And I've got The Destroyer hanging out in my artist's dungeon. Flame on, baby!
Thursday, April 14, 2011
The Destroyer Makes Itself at Home
It was a rough winter. Loved ones and friends experienced a similar season. Extraordinarily bad experiences of the sort that happen once - maybe twice - in a whole lifetime, showed up serially and simultaneously in several lives. What felt personal was reflected globally. The tragedy mask booted the comedy mask, which took off on a sabbatical to Far-Off Lands. Or maybe Traverse City. It's nice there in winter. Greyscale is my normal state, but this was beyond that and deeper. Dark and low. I wrote about being The Reluctant Molt, discovering that everything I knew about me and my methodologies was neither true nor helpful. I read a Deepak Chopra book about synchronicity and being open to messages. And I looked up my archetype. I chose carefully, looking for a .edu site which might mean postgraduate work on Jungian stuff. I answered the questions honestly without trying to outsmart the test hoping to achieve a particular result. I clicked submit. And there arose on the screen, in enormous black type THE DESTROYER. I went ziggity boom, adrenaline sluicing around, and then melted into a puddle in my desk chair. This cannot be! I'm a nice person, maybe The Artist, or The Trickster, but never The Destroyer. I recovered my drippy self, decided to read what that means before investing in a buckled sweater with arms that tie in the back. Not everyone meets The Destroyer in a lifetime, but it's not terrible, if you need to face a dragon. Which I did and do. The cycle of all life is birth/death/rebirth. The Destroyer shows up to knock around old ideas that don't suit, to clean house with a blowtorch, and to rattle the bars on whatever cage is keeping you from being your best self. I claimed to dear Beckie one time that I was a rebel. When she stopped laughing, she tapped her fingers on the table as she said, "A rebel. Who obeys [tap] each and [tap] every [tap] rule." I demurred. "Okay, I'm a rebel wannabe." The cool thing about confronting the dragon/destroyer is that once the beast is living with me, there's a chance I am free to be the rebel I see myself as. It's never too late to quo all over the status. And I've got The Destroyer hanging out in my artist's dungeon. Flame on, baby!
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Isn't it fun to rattle the bars on whatever cage that keeps you from being your best self? It's funny how things like "The Destroyer" in Jungian Archetypes and "Death" in the Tarot deck are really not what you initially think they are...transition, shaking up the establishment, being a rebel...it's a natural restlessness that people either face and accept or ignore and remain miserable... sure beats being stuck on survive!
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