for Elaine and Vic
Sitting on a fallen tree,
two hearts of gold smile at me
and all the world becomes a song,
as love and bird sing all day long.
Hush listen to their hearts a-flutter,
as memory moves to early summer
where May recalls her happy hour,
a dance amid pale yellow flowers!
And as I spy behind the oak
a pen falls from my poet’s cloak,
for never have I seen such love
that sits beside the tall foxglove!
Continue reading
Welcome to the concluding part of my Animus Diet, almost nine hundred nights later. Why nights and not days I hear you ask? Well for the simple reason that dreams have figured so largely on my journey. Why? Because I believe every dream that comes to us, comes in the service of health and wholeness. Be assured my inner man diet will not be ending, that’ll be lifelong I’m sure, nor will I stop adding reflections to my Animus notebook. No, this is more about being a writer and longing to get started on a new project. So I feel the need to draw a line under this one, even though I may follow up with further animus adventures in years to come!
I never knew when I would write the next part of my Animus Diet, I only knew I would. So for all you “Jung Dudes” out there who’ve been following my animus journey here’s my latest instalment. I hope you enjoy! As you know I first started my Jungian “inner man” diet back in January 2016 and here in September 2017, as we approach the autumn equinox, after my six month archetypal tarot journey, it feels just right to gather up my pen once more and co-create with my animus. In this article I’m going to explore more key learning experiences since my initial adventures began 18 months ago, where in Part Two last March I met my mother for the first time in 18 years. The number 18, I realise, is an important number for me and one that reappears towards the end of this article in a truly inspiring “animus” dream.
Twelve weeks ago, around the start of the year, I made a conscious decision to start something completely new in my life, I call it the Animus Diet. Yes, I appreciate that January and dieting tend to go hand-in-hand, however, this was an entirely different kind of diet because there would be no calorie counting or weighing scales involved. Not even a tape measure, as I attempted to slim down my overweight animus, ‘Brutus’ and build up my skinny anima, whom I refer to fondly as ‘Olive Oyl.’ It was only when I discovered the wonderful cartoons at the beginning and at the end of this article that I recognised the characters as archetypes for my inner masculine and feminine aspects. In the first part of this article Journey of Love: The Animus Diet I wrote about my initial thoughts, reflections and changes that I felt I needed to make and I explored a number of suggestions about how to put these in place. This article picks up where week four left off as I continue to explore my inner masculine/feminine imbalance. And so the animus diet continues.