Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Why the sea?

Is a body of water the unconscious?

What do you think?

I've found in my life that I simply cannot feel at peace if I don't live near to a large body of salt water, like the Ocean. I've lived most of my life on Puget Sound and that seems to be as far as I can get from the Ocean. I've lived inland several times, even once or twice in the desert, which I loved.

But in the end, I found I really couldn't live in the interior of a continent. I lived in Illinois for a while. I hated it. Flat ground forever, wind picks up momentum and you get winds that you can lean into at a ridiculous angle without falling down.

Spokane Washington, has "75 lakes within a 25 mile radius". I thought if I heard that again, after four years, I drown myself in one of them. I've been a SCUBA diver since 1970, and fresh water dives tend to be lame.

According to Jung (Carl Gustav), this is the "collective unconscious", where the archetypes of our culture reside, typically represented by lakes or other bodies of water in our mythologies, or in some cases a fluid container of some sort.

So is that what it is? I need to be near my collective unconscious? Maybe.

Weird.

But I do love the life here, beach life even more so. Life near the ocean, or in my case, the Sound, the living creatures in the water, the incredible sunsets, the fresh air, the all around magnificent visions.

Awesome. Simply, awesome.

Tomorrow: Vanishing Point

2 comments:

  1. ah, didn't jung also take into account that it has to be your language...like if you have a sense of falling in a dream, it means something in a certain way...different than the next person's dream of falling....not exactly "collective"?
    i think you just really like Nature
    sue(FB)

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  2. :) Yes, I do. And you are right, about your comment on Jung.

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