Stormy Weather 10.2.22
A week and lives hijacked by Ian... Variations on the deep dive
Greetings from newShrink, with care and hope for safety of all in path and aftermath of this ravaging hurricane.
As depth psychologist James Hillman said of war, hurricanes drive most everything else off the front page — and from our individual awareness as well.
In the midst of such a catastrophic, far-reaching storm many of us are inundated by real-time pictures, soundbites and stories even while still experiencing them. This can turn all news into the breaking kind — in all worst meanings of the term. The measured and thoughtful analysis of the many complex storm-related stories and issues, so critically needed later for wise future problem-solving and planning, instead becomes knee-jerk reactivity.
Across several states and communities (like mine) not so directly hit by Ian, many also are dealing with emergency-level impacts like power outages and flood damage likely to last long past this weekend.
So today’s narrow focus is a few soul/psychological perspectives, with news images, story and emphasis only as a reference-point.
Over time, in addition to storm news follow-up and commentary, some later editions of newShrink will revisit and further flesh-out items illustrated briefly in last week’s 9.25.22 postcard edition, “A Question of Balance”. Alongside the hurricane this series of three photo-images distills some of these to illustrate some core themes of depth psychology:
🔷 Interplay of (conscious) light and (unconscious, denied or unclaimed) shadow aspects.
🔷 Holding “the both”: Thinking, living through and beyond, the tension between both of these opposites (which are ever-present, whether acknowledged or denied at our peril.) For both individuals and society the transformative result, which Jung termed the transcendent function, is essential for creative problem-solving and psychological maturity.
🔷 Psychological initiations: These are cataclysmic events (like a monster hurricane) or monumental life-changes (like an international or transcontinental migration under duress) so intense they involve or are experienced as a metaphoric, sometimes even literal, process of life-to-death-to-rebirth/renewal/emergence of new life. Such conscious initiation-experiences, too, are markers for psychological maturity and creative solutions for lives and society.
Looking first at the above illustration…
#1. Allure of the Light
Both left and right columns depict in verse and image the sunlit, fun and happily welcoming aspects of two most widely recognized and beloved of iconic American symbols. The worlds and brands of Disney and the Statue of Liberty are each visited annually by millions of all ages — American citizens, immigrants-in-process and tourists from around the world.
At left column are images, characters Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and verse from the signature song of The Walt Disney Company and of Disneyworld in the Orlando heart of currently storm-torn Florida. Also pictured is a wide, vastly popular classic among spring-break destination beaches all along Florida’s coast, this one Daytona.
At right column beneath the Bob Dylan song verse — for me an ironically layered favorite — are images of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Closeups here depict the statue’s original welcoming torch, the color one now on display in the still-new Liberty Island Museum. (It opened in mid-2019, just in time for Covid pandemic-halts on travel and tourism. Visitors are making up for that now.)
The vintage style sepia postcard is a replica of early publicity and fundraising efforts to get the statue built and finished in 1886. A close look shows there are several men standing around the ledge of the statue’s crown. (We’re told two cars can sit on the July 4 Declaration tablets Liberty holds in her left hand.) A lot of us may recall that the oft-quoted Emma Lazarus poetic tribute to the statue was part of the massive PR and fundraising efforts to get the French-created statue built on a base and permanent site. In an interesting news/journalism element of all of this hype and fanfare, Hungarian immigrant newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer ignited the required enthusiasm for massive sums from grass-roots donations. He publicly pledged and carried out the promise to honor every individual donor on the front pages of his nationwide chain of newspapers or its flagship The New York World.
The color photo of the full-sized statue, shot last Saturday, presents the statue in clear-skied, sunsoaked glory. I enjoy the way the small wisp of cloud resembles a puff of white smoke emitted by the crown’s flame. (On a close look here it reminded me of the dramatic “we have a Pope” moments of leadership-transition at the Vatican. For some reason a candle-lighting, wizened man had whispered the phrase in a previous recent dream-snippet!?!)
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Having basked so much in the bright sunlight of Disney, a Florida beach, or a Liberty Island, it can take some pause and intention for our eyes to adjust and see clearly.
It seems to work in a similar way for the psyche.
Inidividually and collectively, with conscious enthusiasm we project so much of our hope, joy, desire for our own sense of magic and specialness onto such symbols and the ideas and experience they represent. Not surprisingly, all of that glaring light creates an enormous blind-spot — unconscious and therefore exponentially more energetic, unmanaged and powerful.
If we’re ever to break and prevent recurring cycles of being blind-sided, “shocked, shocked,” again and again, that pause for intentional, ie. conscious, widening and adjustment of our lenses becomes essential.
# 2. Holding the Both: Toward A Full and Life-Sustaining Picture
The visual above points to this week’s storm news as one of many reality-elements of the inevitable shadow cast by all of that brightness. (Again, this is leaving aside for now examination and discussion of Hurricane Ian, Florida’s devastation and the painful ironies and complexities of politics, business like the insurance industry, socio-economics and climate science.)
From the broader psychological standpoint an important note in thinking about the unconscious shadow: It is not a negative anomaly, something to remove, get rid of, outrun, stifle or “cure” — nor can it be. The unconscious shadow is simply the balancing “rest of the (conscious) story,” the whole picture. It’s that “Other Side of Life,” as the Moody Blues musically put it.
For these reasons it is difficult if not impossible to think or speak long, or much, about present-day Florida without also remembering that this is a state where shadow is pretty much disallowed. Education is increasingly defined by its success in narrowing and shutting out, not widening, the lenses. In this state most vulnerable and dependent on the vitality, beauty and health of its humans’ relationship with the natural-world environment, mere mention or use of specified generic references to environmental science even in recent years have been banned as fireable offense as a matter of public policy advanced by popular elected leaders.
Mother Nature, who surely must dwell in that blind-spot shadow, seems not to be getting — or heeding — the memos.
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We turn now to that other bright icon standing sentry and her Ellis Island counterpoint across an expanse of their New York Harbor. As mentioned briefly following last week’s visit, surprising to me there has been enormous and heartening progress in nuance, depth and quality-scholarship with both sites as entire immersion-experience. This is no longer the boosterish one-dimensional paean to American exceptionalism that many of us may have visited during youthful school years.
#3. From “The Original Torch” to “The Peopling of America”
Continuing from the left-column images already discussed, the stormy-sea image is an official raw crisis-response photo taken during Liberty’s 2012 battering by hurricane/superstorm Sandy. The guided tours and excellent new museum describe and demonstrate some cool 19th century engineering and technical processes ensuring the statue’s durability and beauty. Also woven throughout are the many shadow ironies and moral contradictions from the very debut of this beacon of freedom and equality. For example, women — so essential to the statue’s fundraising efforts — were banned from the 1886 official unveiling ceremonies; boatloads of them supported by labor unions were stopped and arrested. Freed Blacks during this Reconstruction period were excluded, as were Native Americans and other people of color.
Pictured at top center column, it is just a look across the harbor, from the hope and promise of Liberty Island to the required bureaucratic, medical, at times random and cruel realities of rejection or entry through Ellis Island that loomed for the millions of immigrants who had already suffered to arrive in America there.
Titled “Immigrant Processing in New York,” against that backdrop the plaque introduces and provides a picture of those next steps. This sight was powerful in the moment. But it was only after the too-brief Ellis Island visit that came next, while reviewing this photo later that I began to think of this view and the entire Ellis Island experience in terms of the staggering psychological initiation it is. Whole lives, families, ties with nation and culture ended — in a sense, died — in this place and process. For so many — more than 12 million before entry there closed in 1954 — there was also the creation, rebirth of an all-new life, that defines initation experience.
For me over at Ellis Island this idea came to full awareness with the thick registry-list of generic American surnames. (With biographical and geographic records and time, specific registry infomation is also available for those with family members and ancestors who first entered the country there.) But this thick, quite generic list of every possible rendition of last names was a chilling reminder: With the stroke of an editing-abbreviating or typo-tending pen, so many, many of those arrivals lost their names at the very moment they gained their new lives along with new names not chosen or their own.
This sort of thing has significance from the soul/psychological standpoint, as some readers may recall from the 7.31.22 edition What’s in a Name? Initiations of all sorts are archetypal, ie. occurring across history, different cultures and geography. Initiations of various sorts often involve or result in a ritual name-change, either ceremonial and by choice, or in ways not voluntary or more violently forced.
Looking once more from the Liberty Island plaque, across the water toward Ellis, it comes to mind how many of us “initiates” have changed (or chosen not to change) surnames, sometimes coerced or by free choice and even multiple times — as with divorce for example, and with marriage. Suddenly this gaze across that wide expanse of water looks and feels like it must have seemed a mighty long aisle!
The Liberty/Ellis Island experience was so powerful I’ll wind up this item with a repeat-excerpt from last week’s section “The Original Torch” highlighting:
“… the powerful one-two punch of the new in 2019 Statue of Liberty museum and the astonishing immersion that is historic Ellis Island. These are visited by ferry quite packed alongside visitors both American and from around the world, with the realities of Ellis appearing just after the inspiring promises of Liberty. This sequence creates a profound embodied experience of imagined historic arrivals. And rewarding as these kinds of tours are both when we are young students and with our kids or grandkids, it is also remarkably moving to do with the luxury of single-minded adult attention.
The next trip on the wish-list here is a full day visit devoted to Ellis Island. Both of these museum/national monuments are well-researched, written and presented with attention to detail and nuance across complex issues. In my view they rank in quality with the excellent Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, the good though less experiential one in Jerusalem and the heart-wrenching Holocaust Children’s Memorial, also in Jerusalem.
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Now, on a lighter closing note of needed respite in this storm-tossed week: About those odd-looking center-column images in the first illustration at the top of today’s post…
#4. Variations on the Deep Dive
The above comments, plus last week’s items and photos, point to the allure and curiosity that expanses of water, their psychological and symbolic effects, and journeys across or through them, have for me.
If you’ve been a newShrink reader awhile, you may recall my affection and fascination with the long, deep-diving loons who winter, nest and train their young in the ways of loons on cool-season waters just outside my writing-space window. When they depart in later spring for cooler northern waters I’m bereft, fearing they are gone forever.
This week in two extraordinary bookend-like sightings, I was graced with solo loon performances at each end of their seasonal migration. First was during last Sunday’s seemingly endless airplane time sitting on the LaGuardia Airport tarmac en route back from New York. The long stop occurred next to one of the area’s bay and tidal river areas. There, a solo loon performed his signature long, deep dives — which I of course appreciated as choreographed just for me!
This NYC common loon (Gavia immer) was most likely the “Spirit of the northern waters, symbol of unspoiled wilderness,” according to www.Dec.NY.Gov/animals.
Then at midmorning thinking-&-writing-time Thursday, appearing just in view outside my window: The first, solo returning loon of the NC lake season! (And my first-ever sighting of the one so early.) Though it’s tempting, I will stop short of suggesting the same NYC loon followed me home…
This guy, too, is most likely common loon (Gavia immer) described on our Charlotte-region NC lakes as: “Winter Resident, Summer Visitor,” according to www.Carolina Bird Club.org.
According to the sites:
Returning to the same breeding ground year after year the common loon [particularly the larger, more dramatically marked male] announces arrival with short displays of head posturing, synchronized swimming… and most of all, those long, deep dives.
Then I was laugh-aloud delighted to find even this very short, more shallow-level video that demonstrates the loons' remarkable underwater swimming.
A couple of thoughts came to mind in reflecting on these guys — first alongside this week’s hurricane preparation and aftermath, and then with those long and grueling human migrations across many miles of often treacherous waters to far from certain landings.
It seems the loons are designed, perhaps have evolved, to dive long and deeply not only in search of food but beneath and beyond the raging tempests.
Perhaps the best, at times even the only, way out or through or past… is deeper.
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And, that is all I have. Please do be careful and safe out there.
Talk to you next week — in calmer waters, I hope.
🦋💙 tish
… 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”
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Last week’s postcard edition 9.25.22