Black Ice

the magic of our lives

Hot off the presses from Loud Coffee Press (www.loudcoffeepress.com). Thank you, Loud Coffee!

     The morning is heavy with the sweet smell of the linden tree. The gentle white-haired lady who walks by my porch every day, stops to say she was in a car accident and now finds out her car has been declared a total loss.  She purses her lips, trying to hold back tears as she presses her fist against her solar plexus. But wait, there’s more. Her daughter was fired yesterday. The parks department is being disbanded. The DPW will take it over. “The DPW?” she scoffs in disgust, pressing her delicate, balled-up hand against her ribs again.  I tell her I will pray for her even though I’m not exactly sure what that means. Our grandchildren are growing taller, disappearing into their worlds, leaving cherished traces of history. We teach them how to play cribbage. The lady asks if I am familiar with astrology. “Saturn return,” she says, “is particularly bad for my birth sign.”  On another day, she told me she had studied Jung with Joseph Campbell in the early 60s.  Wouldn’t it be lovely to have another go-around? to sit in that classroom, to drink in the persona, the anima, the shadow, the self, the stars, the moon, the all of it. 

     Saturn is a planet of rules, restrictions, and responsibilities. Time, patience, maturity, karma and hard work.  Saturn return happens every 29.5 years.  I’ll be dead next time. The planets teach life lessons, want us to take things slow.  Drink in the woodstoves and the school plays, the envy and striving, the real estate deals and bankruptcy, the divorce, my one-woman theater plays and risky ventures, the love and sex, the secret yearnings and the macaroni and cheese.  Other years, past lives, racing, racing towards the future.  The thrill of Christmas Eve, the birthing of babies, The BeeGees, Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park, the blueberry pancakes, the warm waves at Horseneck Beach, the old fisherman with the long, aluminum pole, stabbing in circles through the hole in the ice, feeling for the black eels wiggling in the dark mud, the train to Avignon.  Jung’s ancestral memories, not obvious to the eye, a merging of the conscious and the unconscious.

From the full moon in July to the full moon in August, the world is ruled by greenhead flies. Queen Anne’s lace swims white in the meadow. The chaplain sits by my aunt’s bedside for prayer.  She wants to know if I would like her to receive The Anointing of the Sick, which used to be called The Last Rites, which used to be called Extreme Unction. The oil at the end. Sounds like a fine idea.

We sit in the theater.  The storyteller sweeps us up into his old neighborhood, tells of growing up with sisters, serving cheese and crackers at their parents’ cocktail parties, of going to borrow a quart of milk from the neighbor but staying instead for blueberry pancakes, of the doc who parked his car in the old garage with the green tin roof and the girl who lived in the alley – the one who thought she was dumb but got a scholarship and how he thought she was so beautiful.  When he finally got up the courage to kiss her, she smiled and said it’s about time, and how later she died of a heart that suddenly stopped. He closes with the magic of skating at night, on the black ice, with the stars and the moon. Skating, skating, on and on into the night.

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I love to follow the wonderings of the unconscious, the inner connections, the nonsensical leaps, not always easy to follow, not always pretty. We need to acknowledge it all in order to be whole. A few years ago, I put together a video about some Jungian concepts. We are all in a daily struggle to remain honest with ourselves, to discover the fullness and the magic of our lives.

I created this video about some of Jung’s thoughts, with music I wrote for one of American Composers’ ‘calls for scores’- listings for composing opportunities. Love them There’s nothing like a contest! (What would Jung say about that?)