Mar 19, 2020
The word plague derives from the Latin plangere, “to strike the breast as if in lamentation.” The novel coronavirus has visited loss, fear and hardship on many. Nature in her destructive mode can radically disrupt cultural creations and norms and show us how fragile they – and we -- are.
We may also find new sources of sustenance within. Dreams, bodywork, and the imaginal realm can help us access a new attitude: a reorientation of purpose, meaning, and consciousness.
“The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.”
C.G. Jung, CW 18, Para. 1400.
Dream
The landscape is a lush, deep forest. In the foreground is what appears to be a bush, a brightly colored bush that looks like something out of science fiction as it is unique to the shrubbery around it. In fact, the neon-colored blossoms on the shrub are the club-shaped viral spike peplomers of a virus and I immediately know this 'bush' to be an image of a coronavirus. A female deer is peacefully munching on these 'blossoms' one by one. I take the image of the deer eating the blossoms of the virus bush to represent how the wonders of the natural world can be an antidote to the pandemics of our time.