Category Archives: Soul

Saying goodbye to Missy

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Missy, June 21, 2008 to July 11, 2024. RIP

On July 11, three weeks after her 16th birthday, we took Missy to the vet. Although she had other issues, our biggest concern was her back legs and hips. Walking and balance had grown harder for her since the new year. Joint and pain medications had given her some relief and we hoped the vet could do more. This time Missy stumbled and fell in the vet’s office. I’d brought a video showing how hard it could be for her to cross a room. Our vet watched it and said the problem was neurological, probably a spinal cord issue. She said it would not get better and she couldn’t do anything more. We made the compassionate choice. The hard one.

Missy’s passing was peaceful. We knew we had done the right thing, but there still are no words to describe what it was like to come home to a silent house, to the food bowl, the water dish, the bed, and the blankets that she would never use again. Those who have been through it know what it’s like. This wasn’t our first time, but in some ways it was the hardest.

*****

Missy was seven months old when we adopted her on Valentine’s Day, 2009. Her first owners were going through a divorce. There was shouting, and Missy was left by herself in a crate for long hours each day. During her formative months as a puppy, she never had a chance to bond with other dogs or humans. This deficit would be a problem all her life.

Her owners took her back to the breeder who gave her to nearby church that trained dogs to be companion animals for veterans with PTSD. Mary saw Missy and cuddled her in the church office and told me about the beautiful puppy she’d met who couldn’t stop trembling. On Valentine’s Day, the director of the program told Mary that Missy’s PTSD was worse than that of the veterans and asked if we wanted to adopt her?

Mary called me and I leashed up our other two dogs and brought them over. Missy instantly bonded with them. After watching them play and get to know each other, I picked Missy up. She fit in one hand and wasn’t trembling. I carried her out for a private chat. I asked if she wanted to come home with us and instantly knew the answer. By day’s end, she knew she had a home and a family. During those first few weeks, I felt I had known her in a previous life, something I never experienced with any other animal.

“It’s love, they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.” – from “On Choosing a Dog,” by William Stafford

Holly, our older dog, was slowing down. Missy and Kit, our other rescue, became inseparable – our dynamic duo. Most of the time, Kit was the ringleader and Missy the sidekick.

The happy memories of more than a decade of good health and good times with those two blend together, but many moments stand out, like the day Missy and I got caught in a rain shower during a walk in the park.

Missy and Kit always brought joy to our days, but never more so than during the pandemic shutdown. As often as possible, we’d start each morning with a walk in the park. We came to know other dog walkers and strollers, and sometimes those conversations were the only outside social contacts that day.

Kit had been diagnosed with a heart murmur in 2016. We’d been treating her with an increasing number of meds since then, but it caught up with her in 2021. The day after Christmas, she had a heart attack and died in her sleep the next night. Missy was never the same.

Though we moved her bed down to our room, at night she’d sometimes pace the kitchen where she and Kit had slept. We took her to doggie day care hoping she’d find new canine companionship, but without Kit, she was fearful and bared her teeth when other dogs approached. Sometimes we’d have to hand feed her to get her to eat.

More than any other picture, this image reminds me of that time. Missy appears to be gazing out at a world she does not understand.

In time, Missy settled into her role as top dog, enjoying the extra attention and morning walks and even getting the zoomies now and then, running six or seven laps around the house, something she’d never done in younger days.

She was never big on “traditional” canine pastimes. When she was younger, Kit would fetch a tennis ball until your arm was too tired to throw it, while Missy would wander off, uninterested. She was never a big fan of squeaky toys either, but she would invent her own little games. One such game led to one of my favorite photographs of her.

Last summer, before the trouble with her legs began, she went through a phase of hooking her front legs over the sides of her bed and using her hind legs to drag it out of whichever room it was in and into the hall. We never could figure out why.

Her bed was usually next to ours or in the meditation room where I sit at the end of the day. Missy usually joined me, but that summer she sometimes wouldn’t settle until she’d moved the bed into the hall. One evening she dragged it the wrong way – into a corner. It was hilarious and I made a video and this photograph of her efforts. Then I moved the bed into the clear so she could drag it the rest of the way out of the room.

July 24, 2023

I love this picture. This was not the last time she was playful, but it’s the last photo I have of one of her quirky styles of play. During her last six months, her physical and cognitive problems grew worse. She was less active, but up until the end, I think she felt loved.

Her vet sent a nice note that said, “You gave her a great life.” We always did the best that we could for her.

*****

“I wondered if God might have an easier time using animals to communicate who God is, since they do not seem as devious and willful as we are.” – Fr. Richard Rohr

What is your quest?

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Monty Python fans will recognize my title as a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a hilarious movie which is available on Netflix. Hero tales sometimes include riddles that must be solved or questions that must be answered in order to proceed. In Monty Python’s take on the Arthurian legend, the questions are: “What is your name? What is your quest? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

On a more serious note…

The idea I want to discuss is that each soul comes into this world with with a purpose which is forgotten at birth and must be remembered for that life to be successful. This is an ancient notion that has appeared in written and oral form for millennia. We find the theme, with variations, in such places as “The Myth of Er” in Plato’s Republic, in The Silver Chair, one of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Tales, and in James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, the only one of his many books that became a bestseller.

The idea of such personal destinies came to mind recently as I watched a video by Michael Meade, a storyteller, mythologist, and former colleague of Hillman. He retold an African tale about souls in the Otherworld watching events on earth. When they are drawn to a particular place, situation, or family, they travel with a personal spirit guide to the place of birth. The guide is born with them, as an inner guardian, who will help that soul remember why it chose to be born, as it always forgets when it enters a womb.

In The Soul’s Code, Hillman proposes an “acorn theory” of human development, which he explains is more like a myth than a psychological axiom. As an acorn contains the pattern for the oak tree it will become if circumstances permit, so a child comes into this world with a destiny or “sense of fate.”

It’s important to note that in the first chapter of The Soul’s Code, Hillman explicitly says the book is not addressing questions of “the meaning of life…or a philosophy of religious faith…But it does speak to the feelings that there is a reason my unique person is here and that there are things I must attend to beyond the daily round.”

In an interview first published in 1998 and republished after his death in 2011, Hillman said of his acorn theory, “The same myth can be found in the kabbalah. The Mormons have it. The West Africans have it. The Hindus and the Buddhists have it in different ways — they tie it more to reincarnation and karma, but you still come into the world with a particular destiny. Native Americans have it very strongly. So all these cultures all over the world have this basic understanding of human existence. Only American psychology doesn’t have it.”

Hillman gives several examples of the difference between his “acorn theory” and the psychological theory of “compensation.” He mentions Manolete (1917-1947), a famous Spanish bullfighter who, as a child, was frail, shy, and “clung so tightly to his mothers apron strings” that even his sisters teased him. Traditional psychological theory would posit that he chose a macho profession to compensate for being a mama’s boy. Hillman turns that argument around. What if a dim awareness of his destiny was present during Manolete’s childhood (his acorn years)? No little boy could handle the intimation of facing charging, thousand pound bulls, so of course he stayed close to his mother!

Hillman never pretends to have a complete set of answers, especially to troubling questions like the origin of “bad seeds,” like Hitler, Manson, or serial killers. Hillman is also cautious of any formulation that would single out kids who are “troublemakers,” noting that Truman Capote was viewed as an “impossible child.”

Meade and Hillman are both concerned with how “ordinary” people find their inner calling, those of us who don’t begin to play the piano or chess at the age of four. Hillman said the “first step is to realize that each of us has such a thing [as a calling]. He then suggests we review our lives, looking especially at “coincidences” or “some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life.”

One lifelong thread for me began in childhood, though I would only begin to understand its import years later.

I spent my first nine years in a semi-rural area, with trees to climb, woods to explore, and apples to snitch from the orchard of a farmer who lived over the hill. When my family moved to a quarter acre lot in a suburban California, it often felt claustrophobic. One late afternoon, after everyone had gone home, some impulse led me back to the schoolyard. I lay on my back in the grass of a baseball field and gazed into the clear sky. I don’t know how long I was there, but I didn’t want to get up. When I did, I experienced a refreshing sense of spaciousness and peace.

Several times over the years, at critical moments, I found that same peace and renewal in gazing into the sky, but it was only during the last decade that I learned from a Tibetan lama that sky gazing is a classic meditation practice, often used to teach students “the nature of mind” (clear, like the sky, and unaffected by passing “mental events,” just as the sky is not affected by clouds, rain, or smoke). Such practices became central during the second half of my life.

For both Hillman and Meade, the royal road to understanding and finding our deeper purpose is imagination, and with it, the willingness to listen to the “small” thoughts or impulses we often ignore. Like Joseph Campbell and the first generation Jungians before them, they both look to traditional stories, legends, and myths as means to unlock clues that are hidden within.

Finding our authentic selves, for our own good and the good of a world in transition is a key theme on Michael Meade’s website, Mosaic Voices, where he regularly presents writings, online workshops and podcasts that discuss this and related topics. (He’s presenting a free talk tomorrow, July 13, with a video available afterward – I have no personal stake in this, other than interest).

The consequences of ignoring inner promptings to discover our own authenticity can be devastating. In 1998 Hillman said:

“I think our entire civilization exemplifies that danger. People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix…They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world.”

If this observation, made 25 years ago was relevant then, how much more it is now!!

Reflections on Soul and Soul Loss

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Down the Rabbit Hole by Kbetart, CC BY NC-ND 2.0

One morning in the fall of 2021, as Mary and I walked the dogs in a nearby park, we turned a corner, and at the other end of a parking lot, saw several police cruisers pulled up next to a pickup truck with a camper shell. The area was cordoned off with caution tape. The pickup was there almost every morning, so although we had never seen or spoken to the owner, we assumed it was one of the homeless men who spend their nights in the park. We chose another path to continue our walk, and I remember thinking that it seemed like a lot of police to bust a guy for sleeping in his car.

The next day we learned the man had hanged himself from the tree next to his truck.

It’s impossible to grasp the full extent of suffering and the death toll of the pandemic years, and just as the world did after the 1918-19 pandemic, we seem hell bent on trying to act like things are back to normal, but out of all the statistical and personal losses, this man’s death continues to haunt me. Potentially, there was help nearby if he had been able to reach out. There’s a megachurch, with various outreach programs, visible from the place where he died. A twelve-step group met several days a week that year in the park near the spot where he parked. Other homeless people sometimes gathered in the evenings for company or to share a pizza, but this man he never seemed to have joined them.

Most of us know what it’s like to get stuck in a dark place, where there doesn’t seem to be any way out. Most of us might also agree that the culture, the nation, the world are in a parallel state. In earlier times, in shamanic cultures, “soul loss” was the diagnosis for conditions we now call Anxiety Disorders, Dissociative Disorders, PTSD, and in general, the feeling of being “outside oneself,” “beside oneself,” or “not all there.”

But what kind of soul is it that can be lost and found? This has been a world-wide concern of shamans, spiritual seekers, and poets for millennia and has resurfaced for modern psychotherapists like Carl Jung and James Hillman.

Soul eludes precise definition, though I suspect everyone has a sense of it. Somehow it relates to depth, to intensity, to vibrant experience. Contact with soul, for an individual or a group, involves a sense of connection to an inner wisdom, an inner compass, like touching “the still point in the turning world,” to borrow Eliot’s phrase. To be out of contact with soul was reflected in a line from Yeats, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

At the end of 2016, a lot of people in the Bay Area were upset by the election of Donald Trump. I was invited to a two day soul-retrieval ceremony in the Bon Tradition of Tibet, which dates back thousands of years and has shamanic roots. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a contemporary Bon meditation master, wrote that “In the context of the Bon soul-retrieval practice, the soul…is understood as the balance of the subtle energies and related qualities of the five elements: earth, water, fire, air, and space.”

At the end of the second day, the presiding lama performed a traditional test of this ceremony’s success. The result was about 50% effective, and that’s what it felt like subjectively – nothing had really changed. I found the result disappointing though not surprising. The ceremony grew from indigenous roots, among a people who shared the same consensus reality, a condition that no longer exists in America, where it feels like our 20th worldview is gone and the future is not yet in sight. Also, regardless of our conscious beliefs, at deeper levels, we are steeped in the imagery of our native culture, and other iconography, no matter how attractive, remains more distant. As Garrison Keeler once quipped, “In Minnesota, even the atheists are Lutherans because it’s a Lutheran God they don’t believe in.”

Joseph Campbell wrote extensively of the Grail Legends, which became popular in Europe during the liminal time between the dissolution of the medieval world and the emergence of the Renaissance. The mysterious Grail, which could heal individuals, the kingdom, and the land, was something mystical, sometimes imagined as the cup of the last supper, and at other times, as a stone, like the philosopher’s stone of alchemy. A key feature for Campbell was that every seeker of the Grail had to enter the wilderness alone.

“Haunted Wood” by Arthur Rackham. Public Domain

In the Grail stories, a single hero (in some versions, Galahad, in others, Parsifal) finds the sacred object which redeems the kingdom and the king. No single hero or culture or nation can solve the issues as complex as those which confront the entire planet during our time of cultural dissolution. Solutions that seemed to work in the past are the very source of the problems that face us now.

Like it or not, every individual now living has the choice of clinging to nostalgic fantasies of an imagined idillic past, or of looking within to see what our individual soul and the soul of the world need from us now. The time of the winter solstice and the New Year is conducive to such reflections. “Peace and an hour’s time” are needed for creativity, according to photographer, Edward Weston, though he admitted that neither are easy to attain. How to get there is worth reflection as the new year dawns, and worth considering in the new year at greater length here.

Meanwhile I wish you all Happy New Year, with peace and time to enjoy it.

The Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens

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Path through the Woodland Garden

“For me beauty is the primary proof of the existence of God. Beauty is sublime, transcendent, and fulfilling. It takes us to the very edge of our capacity for knowledge…The world considered without its beauty is a world perceived without its God.” – Thomas Moore

“You must protest, you must protest, it is your diamond duty; ah but in such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty.” – Phil Ochs

James Hillman often railed against psychology’s “medicinal complex.” He looked to Greece and the Renaissance for inspiration as he championed a psychology of soul, image, and eros, in which “the primary value is beauty,” (A Blue Fire). A lack of beauty is pathological, he said, both in the lives of individuals and cultures. I thought of this often during this seemingly unending summer, with its record heat, smoke from another disastrous fire season, and a resurgent pandemic, set against a backdrop of too much traffic, too many angry drivers, and too many miles of billboards and decaying strip malls. For those, and other reasons, in mid-September, we set out for the coast, which we hadn’t visited since 2018.

Begonia Pavillion

Two days before we left, the temperature hit 106, so the 60 degree days alone would have made the trip worthwhile, but there was more than just a preview of fall in Fort Bragg, where we hadn’t stayed before. There were independent restaurants, coffee shops, a marine museum and the Skunk Train terminal, in the “downtown” area along the coastal highway. A few blocks away, wide streets and and quiet neighborhoods invited evening walks in glow of the coastal evening light. But the real surprise and most inspiring feature of the trip was the Mendocino County Botanical Gardens, just a few miles south of Fort Bragg www.gardenbythe sea.org.

We spent portions of two days at the gardens, which was only enough time to begin to explore, but that didn’t really matter. When a place mirrors the landscape of the soul, feeling like home on a deep level, it’s enough to just be there, and rest, and pay attention, letting the sense of presence arise.

“The flowers had the look of flowers that are looked at.” – T.S. Eliot

In the Dahlia Garden

Multiple paths meander through multiple groves, gardens, and open spaces, opening onto new vistas a every turn. Huge old trees bend and twist as if synchronized to the smaller plants that surround the trunks.

I’ve always enjoyed Japanese gardens, which blend the natural world with design and draw us into stillness. Here, there’s a wildness at the center of the garden designs, like an echo of the wildness of the ocean. The result is to draw us into wonder.

Memorial benches border the paths, with small plaques given by families of people who loved or supported or worked on these gardens. What a wonderful tribute that seems as one sits, surrounded by the beauty of the place they helped to create!

“The soul is born in beauty and feeds on beauty, requires beauty for its life.” – James Hillman

It rained the second day we went to the gardens, but everyone there seemed to enjoy it, both those who live on the coast and those, like us, visiting from inland. The clouds and rain added an extra shimmer to the foliage.

These gardens are an inspiring place to visit if you get a chance to visit the Mendocino coast. They brought to mind at least one similar feature near home that I haven’t explored in some time, and must get back to. Tt was also rewarding to pot several of the succulents we brought home. Just a small thing, but nothing that feeds the soul is ever too small.

Remembering My Mother

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My mother and father, New Years Eve in Chicago, probably 12/31/1946

Forty-five years ago, at the start of the week before Mother’s day, my mother, June Patricia Mussell, spent a happy morning starting a new watercolor in the orchard in Saratoga where West Valley College now stands. She returned home around noon, happy with the start of her new painting.

According to my father, they had a nice dinner that evening, and fell into reminiscing about the life they had shared together. That night, just after 11:00, she collapsed on the bathroom floor. At age 52, she had suffered a massive stroke. A few days later, on May 7, two or three days before Mother’s Day, with no chance that she would regain consciousness, my father requested she be taken off life support, and she was gone. I was in Phoenix and flew home the next day.

Here are a few things that have recently come to mind about my mother these 45 years since the day of her passing. She had a lifelong love of art, nature, and literature. Hers was an imaginative nature, one that could turn even seeming mundane events into adventures. She had a spiritual  hunger too – both my parents did, but hers, I think was compelling, a driving force in her life. After I left home, we’d scoop each other on books worth reading. When I discovered  Lord of the Rings, I sent her a paperback set, and she fell in love with Tolkien too.

Not all of her attributes were beneficial, either to her or those around her. She was a lifelong worrier, resulting more than anything else, I believe, from the death of her father as the result of a freak accident, when she was only seven. She spent most of her life with an eye toward where the next blow was going to fall. That was a trait that I picked up, and still have to work to resist.

Like everyone else, at times, I had stormy relations with both of my parents. They’re gone now, and I’ve come to see them simply as fine people with flaws, like everyone else, who did the very best they knew how for my sister and me. In some cases, they didn’t even recognize the power of the gifts they gave. Here is one example that is worth telling in detail: Continue reading →

James Hillman – on Changing the Object of our Desire

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Watching this video in which Hillman so clearly shines a light on the core issues of so many of our current crises, it is hard to realize he left us 2011. It makes what so often passes for journalism and analysis of events seem trivial…

Soul Notes 5: From a Nobel Laureate in Literature

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Olga Tokarczuk Nobel Prize Lecture, Dec. 7, 2019

Olga Tokarczuk, born January 29, 1962 in Sulechów, Poland, won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. She received her prize this year, and yesterday, delivered her Nobel Lecture in Stockholm.

All who have been following these Soul Notes will appreciate what she has to say, for her eye and heart register mysteries in places and situations we often take for granted. In tuning the radio in her childhood home, she says, “I believed that through this radio different solar systems and galaxies were speaking to me, crackling and warbling and sending me important information, and yet I was unable to decipher it.”

She tells how an old photograph of her mother led her to find find within herself, “something once known as a soul, thereby furnishing me with the world’s greatest tender narrator.” Later she she says more about what she means by tenderness. “Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time.”

I was especially struck by this passage in which she captures the difficulty of trying to describe today’s world and possible futures with an earlier era’s language and imagery, which are proving inadequate to the task:

“Today our problem lies—it seems—in the fact that we do not yet have ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now, for the ultra-rapid transformations of today’s world. We lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables. Yet we do see frequent attempts to harness rusty, anachronistic narratives that cannot fit the future to imaginaries of the future, no doubt on the assumption that an old something is better than a new nothing, or trying in this way to deal with the limitations of our own horizons. In a word, we lack new ways of telling the story of the world.”

Phrased in that manner, the simple effort to imagine and speak of where we find ourselves today becomes a soul issue. As her mother told her, just as we often miss things that are gone, it’s possible to miss things that haven’t arrived yet.

This is a dense lecture, filled with wise observation and speculation, that I expect to read again and again.

Soul Notes #3: A Dog’s Life

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Seven years ago today, we lost Holly, our second dog. She was 16 1/2, which objectively, is a good long life, but when it’s your dog, it’s never long enough. She was about two in this picture. At that time, I’d get up around 5:30, do some stretches, and spend about 20 minutes in the meditation room before getting breakfast for myself and the dogs.

One morning I found Holly sitting in my chair, gazing at the altar. She looked over her shoulder at me, with a “Yes, may I help you?” expression before turning back to her object of contemplation. I thought of the incident this year, when a Tibetan lama mentioned an old saying that many dogs will be reborn as humans, and a lot of humans will be dogs in their next life. It all has to do with having a good heart…

One other notable thing about Holly was her love of water. One time Mary and I were walking her by a stream in Yosemite, talking as she stopped for a drink. After a splash we looked down to see her paddling about with delight.

On her first visit to the ocean, she insisted on playing tag with the waves and letting them win:

Mary and Holly, Bandon, OR, ca. 2000

In honor of Holly, here is an article I posted in 2013, called Dreaming With Animals. The pictures and text are just the barest glimpse of how deeply intwined with Soul the animals are, all the more so now that most of them have been banished from our lives.