Walkabout 11.13.22
G’day, from nearer than the Outback!
(I’m off to short girl-time and granddaughter Miz E. My Mac is in the shop for service and a new battery, so this edition from tablet and phone is brief as well.)
Next newShrink will have various takes on this week’s remarkable midterm election results — both practical implications and surprising ineffable elements. From a depth-psychology standpoint of soul I’m noticing intriguing patterns and shifts, perhaps some archetypal ones, among both leaders and the led.
About “Walkabout”
In the title-term Walkabout’s original-ritual form — not derogatory general slang — the initiation practice by aboriginal Australians is a form of tapping the wisdom and creativity of dreaming while awake. That’s similar to Jung’s active imagination, useful in therapy and in life.
Today’s mostly visual postcard is a preview-slice of the planned dark-season newShrink look at many facets of our sleep-deprived American way of life, including:
🔷 Sleep from historic, biological, cultural, lifestyle, health and clinical-psychological dimensions; and
🔷 Significance of dreaming and dream-quality sleep from the depth-psychology perspectives of Jung, archetypal psychology, various religious traditions and indigenous cultures.
The selected Australian aboriginal art pieces illustrated above depict a way of living in conscious relationship with the unconscious called the Dreamtime or The Dreaming.
Along with artwork this website has some interesting material on “Understanding Aboriginal Dreamings.”
In this area I appreciate the preface to an article “Tending the Dream is Tending the World,” by Dr. Stephen Aizenstat, depth psychologist whose Dreamtending program combines Jungian, archetypal and nature-engaged eco-psychologies. Now chancellor emeritus of Pacifica Graduate Institute, Steve was a Pacifica founder and served for decades as the institute’s president. Of Dreamtending, he says:
To develop a respectful and sustaining relationship with our dreams, we must return to a more “indigenous” sensibility, one that is informed by the psyche of nature—an awareness that our own essential psychological spontaneities are rooted most deeply in the psyche of the natural world. We are born out of the rhythms of nature, and to ignore these rhythms is, ultimately, to deny our psychic inheritance.
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I’ll leave you with a couple of images suggesting the long-and-winding-road of Walkabout.
And, that is all I have! Talk to you soon.
🦋💙 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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