Greetings, with a Sunday morning newShrink about as mixed as these title-image metaphors.
Since Friday morning the writing process got a necessary change of scene, setting and attention-span. About 36 hours in waiting mode, I’ve again had my poor mom in hospital, admitted with two infections that had quite leveled her. By late Saturday she was getting stronger, and it seems likely she can return to her community early in the week.
With newShrink, by midweek content was clear and well under way. Saturday morning’s celestial solar event offered fiery photo visual — even a hint of musical! — effects and contrast.
News-side spotlights have been on unfolding tragedy in Israel. Alarmingly the U.S. Congress in unprecedented chaos is ill-equipped to lead diplomatic and wise strategic military responses to such dire international threats. Some headlines on these stories are highlighted below.
From depth/soul psychology and mental-health dimensions the planned “Keep Walking” reflections were to be a significant portion of today’s edition. That’s thanks in part to great variety of shared ideas, insights, humor, personal rituals, milestones, regimens and inspirations from a lot of you on this deceptively simple topic.
Given that response and for time and space the piece merits, I’ve decided to save it for an edition soon and a less distracted, reflective state of mind at writing-time. Meanwhile I’ll value hearing more from any of you in response to this from 9.24.23 (Happy 🍁 Fall):
“Keep walking…”
Setting aside for a moment the exercise/health and getting us from one place to the other factors, there’s a magic-lightning bolt something in the process of walking, itself (illustration at bottom right.)
Walking is a profoundly psychological, intellectual, creative, and sometimes spiritual process.Thinkers and writers across millennia have studied and described its beneficial effects such as: thinking for problem-solving, writing, the most emotionally intimate of conversation, alignment of our neurological functions in the brain through bilateral motion, the normalizing re-regulation of reactivity following trauma… to name just a few.
All of this speaks to recent and ongoing newShrink focus on interiority, how we come to know and navigate our own felt-experience, inner life.
The coming feature has updates and variations on my own new “seize the daylight at both ends” effort to add near-daily walking ritual to dreamwork and exercise-runs. I’ll love hearing from any of you on these practices. I would value hearing your experiences with more intentional rituals of walking-conversation (the kind that’s not just yacking with your mom, taking care of business or errands).
Of particular interest are what can be a sweet-spot: “VW’s” in the coined shorthand of my bicoastal classmates and friendships. That can be with people who never meet in person. It simply stands for virtual walks, regular periodic walking-talks usually best with good ear-buds and phones. (Among other curiosities: Do these for you differ from video calling with Zoom, Facetime et. al still ubiquitous in the post-pandemic, and if so how?)
Meanwhile, here is a long-favorite 2014 article I’ll be mentioning from The New Yorker. Why Walking Helps Us Think. If you have access behind the paywall, it is packed with a lot of linked gems: For instance, the article’s lede and above pictured hand-scribbled map of Dublin, and incidentally the major plot-lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses… by Vladimir Nabokov at his eloquent crustiest. (A bit more about that map is in today’s closing below.) Also linked is a new-to-me 1990 collection of what apparently are curated Nabokov-isms, Strong Opinions. I may need to have it, if only for the title and cover drawing.
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As for that title image pictured at center above, as described impeding events temporarily blocked much of today’s content-focus.
Similarly eclipse is defined most basically as light of the sun temporarily obscured in shadow by its own light-reflecting moon. (In depth-psychological terms this kind of language is the point signaling Jungians to begin salivating.)
Rings of fire
#1. Annular Eclipse Visible in Western U.S. Saturday morning
The Saturday ring-of-fire solar eclipse wasn’t visible in my part of the country, and that’s disappointing. Along with the Jungian and archetypal imagery I rather prefer its dramatic visual contrasts to total eclipse. The nickname phrase alone evokes immediate musical association that often demands a revisit with the pounding Johnny Cash/June Carter classic song. (Here also on the Saturday event, from Smithsonian Magazine.)
Now, for anyone who prefers to look forward to flying “your Learjet to Nova Scotia” a la Carly Simon next spring, the total solar eclipse is April 8, 2024. This and other links have maps of the anticipated Mexico-to-Maine U.S. swath of full visibility.
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(Looking at the Israeli flag pictured at top left…)
# 2. “[T]here are moments in this life…when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world. The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend…”
(From political historian Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American, October 10, 2023.
…So began President Joe Biden’s speech today about the attacks in Israel at “[t]he bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas—a group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.”
“This was an act of sheer evil,” Biden said.
This and several other HCR posts also provide thorough looks at the unprecedented turbulent week in the U.S House of Representatives with Republican leadership in free-fall. Though led by Democrats the Senate has its own problems preparing for international military crisis. Under that chamber’s rules a lone Senator, Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), is able to hold 301 much-needed general and admiral positions vacant — based on an individual policy whim not shared by a majority of American voters even in his own party.
Call for comments on Heather Cox Richardson: If you have read her newly released book, I’d value your thoughts. A brief NYT interview this week captures a “why focus on history” theme I’ll surely be referencing often, and I haven’t yet read her book.
About Israel, here are just a couple of voices and viewpoints from the many this week.
Major Israeli newspaper blames Benjamin Netanyahu in scathing attack (Newsweek commentary)
N.C. Rabbis on Israel attacks: This is our 9/11 (Op-ed in The Charlotte Observer)
This piece describes the horrifically symbolic timing of the Hamas attack on Jewish holy day Yom Kippur (and during Muslim Ramadan.) It was also the 50th anniversary (plus one day) of the pivotal October 1973 Yom Kippur War .
This unearthed a powerful, long-forgotten personal association from that time. Spring and summer 1973 I happened to be one of those American students backpacking in Europe, Greece and Israel at absurdly cheap travel and lodging rates. In mid-July I’d been touring and visiting in Israel with my Jewish college- and travel- friend who had spent the prior summer working on a kibbutz there. At the end of that month, to make connections for flying home we’d had to spend the night at the Israeli El Al Airlines gate of the Athens, Greece airport. A week later came news of that airport area as target of attack: Arabs Kill 3 and Wound 55 In Athens Airport Lounge (The New York Times, August 6, 1973).
From psychological perspective it’s a useful reminder of just how physical, embodied these minds, memories, psyches of ours are.
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Which brings me to this excellent, thorough (and disturbingly important) ProPublica piece spotted and shared by reader-friend Linda Bird. It’s good follow to the recent (10.1.23 Mood Indigo Charleston) historic focus on the new International African American Museum (IAAM) there. I’ll be thinking and saying more about this piece later with more time space and bandwidth.
For now will just note that my hives-reaction to this journey is less and less surprising.
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#3. Activists Have Long Called for Charleston to Confront Its Racial History. Tourists Are Now Expecting It.
Surging interest from visitors is contributing to a more honest telling of the city’s role in the American slave trade. But tensions are flaring as South Carolina lawmakers restrict race-based teachings.
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Now I’ll leave you with some closing images of walking ahead…
Please be aware that zooming to expand or focus Nabokov’s hand-scribbled map of Dublin and the plots of Ulysses at top left will not make it more clear or legible. That’s pretty much the case with the one in the New Yorker link, too. What draws me to the map and the creatively funny way he used it is the way it’s like those indigo-dyed, coded-quilt-”maps” used for essential communication by enslaved people. (Described and illustrated in 10.1.23 newShrink “Mood Indigo Charleston.”)
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As for the dark-red cordovan leather bootie-type-shoes striding across center column to top right:
Some longtime readers may recall my rather intensely, um, sole-ful affinity for the rarely spotted (therefore valued, if not coveted) shoe that is perfectly me. When it does happen it’s often in aromatic leather, even more alluring in my kind of dark-red cordovan.
Now, I was in no way shopping or thinking about shoes. Nor have any appeared around content amid all recent focus, reading, pictures, writing about walking-related themes. During recent weeks’ quick passes through social media on mind-candy breaks, at least 4 or 5 times I had blown past a photo ad of the shoes. Not a difficult call. I pretty much never open ads through social media platform instead of directly to vendor website, even with things I may want to buy. I also know this to be a pricey shoe website to browse when I really don’t need new shoes or boots. (Oh, and by the way, lest we should miss the subliminal cues, these $250 bootie-shoes from Taos brand are named “Craves.”)
But then, fleeting memory of the picture caught me during hospital-room writing time Saturday, mom asleep in nearby sickbed. With constant interruptions and random noises, using that time working with images vs words was less distracting. And bam: Recalling the shoe photo, I searched and browsed just to see it again!
This scene brought a big young-childhood memory whoosh, again of beloved maternal grandfather. This time it’s his weekly Saturday-night ritual, with which I got to help. Without fail he polished shoes for Sunday church — also for weeks when he was skipping church.
So his shoes were pretty much always well-tended and gleaming. Still today, one of my favorite aromas, along with leather, is shoe polish. It seems maybe Sunday-morning newShrink is like my shoe-polishing, Sunday School-lesson-prep ritual tribute to him!
My thing for those “Crave"-type shoes seems also to have started young, and with him. At 4 or 5 I was among the generation of children intentionally exposed in order to increase immunity to childhood diseases like measles and chicken pox. I was thus confined and sick with one of them when he drove over to see and ask me personally what I wanted for a sick-present. I immediately said: “you-shoes.”
He promptly drove out to Belk’s and returned with my gift. They were the dark-red cordovan leather Stride-Rites of my 4- or 5-year-old dreams. From that time there are family photos of me miserably covered with chicken pox or measles, wearing PJs and the shiny dark-red cordovan leather shoes.
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From depth psychology perspectives, you may think of ways red shoes show up symbolically in movies, theater and literature — a lot of them superficial and (unconscious) stereotypical rather than (conscious) archetype. The very best psychological take I know on the classic fairytale is in the book pictured at bottom center: Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ 1992 Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. I highly recommend it for men, women and non-binary people alike. It is a rare and accessible resource for developing healthy, conscious psychological masculinity and femininity. I’ve just noticed it’s enjoyed a bit of a resurgence and retakes on its ideas in recent years. I’ll likely be writing more about it.
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Finally at right are the Stonemarker monument and road signs, turning-points for my “seize-the-daylight” ritual walks and runs around sunrise and sunset golden-hours. Walking On will explain the monument’s “Meck Neck” and other quirky elements.
Meanwhile as they say, "see you in church”… (out on the virtual road, that is.)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”