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Coming Home to Myself
Daily Reflections for a Woman's Body and Soul
By Marion Woodman, Jill Mellick Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
Copyright © 1998 Marion Woodman and Jill Mellick
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57324-566-1
CHAPTER 1
New Resonances
Marion Woodman
Coming Home to Myself is a surprise child. Born of the insight of my friend and colleague, Jill Mellick, and my growing curiosity as we revisioned my earlier work, this little book has happened. Our editor, Mary Jane Ryan, dared the intuitive leap that is re-birthing my work in a distilled form.
I began writing my journal when I was twelve. I am still writing because I am compelled to find meaning in my experience. In my late teens, I chose to sacrifice my beloved microscope for another kind of poetry, the poetry of word. Still, the scientist in me is always observing with a thinking heart, noting, comparing, articulating.
Twenty years ago, much to my surprise, people were interested in my thesis on eating disorders. Being an addict myself and profoundly introverted, I was fearful of publication. With the encouragement of Inner City Books, the thesis was revised and published as The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter.
Addiction to Perfection was my first attempt at writing a book. It came out of an inner drive to understand the repetitive themes in the dreams of my addicted clients. I put rows of dreams on the floor of my studio, organized and reorganized them by theme. I marveled at the overwhelming power of the unconscious and, at the same time, the intensity of its drive toward healing.
One theme became clear as I began work on The Pregnant Virgin. The way to healing an addiction lies in finding a connection between body and soul. Soul needs body as much as body needs soul. Each is out of context without the other, an abandoned fragment of what it is. A great cherishing mother is often the link that manifests in dreams. Sometimes she appears as a striding Presence in the sky, sometimes as a bigger-than-life cleaning lady or a down-to-earth crone. She has many names: Buffalo Woman, Black Madonna, Isis, Anna, Tara. In the Bible she is called Wisdom, translated from the Greek word, Sophia. Whatever her temporal form, she is divine; she understands our humanity and her love is fierce enough to permeate flesh and bone. Her humor rips away veils of illusion. She is the central figure in Dancing in the Flames, (Shambhala, 1996) which I co-authored with my friend, Elinor Dickson.
As I watched the pregnant virgin coming to consciousness in dreams, I became increasingly alarmed by images of ravaged masculinity, masculinity and femininity both being ravaged by patriarchy. Men and women who have worked hard to find a strong feminine standpoint in Being are now working hard to release a masculinity strong enough to partner the evolving virgin consciousness. This theme began by exploring the tragedy of perfection as Keats' "unravished bride" in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." So the process went on through The Ravaged Bridegroom, Conscious Femininity, and Leaving My Father's House.
One thing has been distilled in my consciousness. By whatever name we call the two magnets that create this balance of energies in our bodies and in our planet— Masculine/Feminine, Shiva/Shakti, Yang/Yin, Spirit/Soul, Transcendence/Immanence, Doing/Being, we are now responsible for making space for the healing of body, soul, and spirit. We are being directed in the evolutionary process by divine guides through our dreams, our symptoms, our planet. New values are emerging—feminine values and masculine values that are free of patriarchal abuse. A totally new harmonic lies ahead in the new millennium.
I write this down not because I am trying to sell my books, but because, as an intuitive, I tend to take too much for granted—I fail to fill in the facts that would make my thinking clear. As my husband says as he walks past my studio door, "You're not a born writer, Marion. Every time I walk by, you're gazing at the trees. You think everything through and then you write down your conclusion. A born writer would keep writing the process down."
He is right. People who are not intuitive become frustrated trying to follow my unstated logic and sensation types throw up their hands or the book in alarm when they feel their body responding but not their mind. I try to put down the facts, but I think in images, so when I try to explain, I end up in another image, which only compounds the difficulty. Moreover, my mind is a tapestry of the many great writers whom I have studied all my life. Their imagery is the warp and woof of my own thinking.
As a professor and practitioner of psychotherapy and the creative arts, Jill has worked from my books for many years. As she says in her introduction, she has taken my books and "has allowed the armature, the bones of the writing to show through the transparent skin of the prose and emphasized the closely interwoven relationships between images or thoughts by reflecting their relationship in their syntax." Her own book, The Natural Artistry of Dreams (Conari Press, 1996), with its wealth of creative ideas for releasing the energy of dream imagery, is a splendid companion text for this book.
Jill in Palo Alto, and I in London, Canada have put my writing under a microscope to look at the fine tuning that has sometimes made meaning difficult. In reshaping it, allowing words more space, more time, more repetitions, we have heard new resonances. We hope you, our readers, will also.
Jill calls our creations "adaptations." I call them "moments." We do not call them poems. We both love poetry and we do not presume. We offer them with Sophia's proverbial grain of salt. Too much of her salt makes her wisdom bitter; just enough brings out the flavor.
A rose is a rose is a rose. By whatever name, we hope the images come home to your hearts in Coming Home to Myself.
CHAPTER 2
Women's Lives, Women's Stories
Jill Mellick
A Mutual Journey
This book was conceived one dawn as I was checking a quote from Marion I was including in a book. There it was: an inner voice declaring, "Someone—sometime—should gather Marion's essential comments into one publication." Women who see me for psychotherapy tell me they often pick up Marion's books and open them anywhere, finding, "by chance," just what they need. I went on looking for the quote. Then I heard another, amused voice: "Well?" I couldn't believe my psyche was planting the seed for a new book before my current one was even published.
I leafed through Addiction to Perfection. Sentences and paragraphs containing strong images leaped out. I typed them out, each image to a page. When I looked at them, they demanded line breaks for better contemplation. The line breaks led to some restructuring of word flow. Quickly, the melody lines I had always heard in Marion's more orchestral prose began to sing a capella.
After I had played with these creations for days, I landed in reality with a spine-bruising thump. What was I doing? And who invited me? Yet the idea wouldn't leave. I found myself quoting lines when I was in session. People remembered them, often whispering them to themselves for days. I decided that, even if I were not the person for this project, it had merit. The next time Marion and I were together, I would show her these adaptations and suggest that someone might do something similar—preferably she, herself, or her husband, Ross, a poet and literary critic.
It seemed inevitable that Marion and I should have explored this idea as we walked through Whole Foods, an excellent food market in my home town of Palo Alto. As we wandered through its rich landscape—pyramids of bell peppers, towers of grains, hills of aromatic breads—we could barely remember what we had come to buy; our excitement about this wild idea was growing. The meeting of body and soul, which lies at the heart of Marion's life and work (and my own), was playing itself out in our simultaneously putting milk in the cart and imagining this book.
Surely this is what women do, how women walk through life, separately and together—never doing one task at a time, never moving in one realm at a time. Rarely is one activity segregated from another; rather each is woven into the complex fabric of daily responsibilities and relationship. The sacred and the heartfelt suffuse the ordinary.
Despite the comfort of putting bread and tea and irises into the cart, I found myself diffident about my possible role. Yet Marion responded with her usual blend of nonjudgment, openness, and discerning curiosity.
After lunch, I showed her the adaptations. What most pleased me was that she recognized her voice and essence in each. I invited her to read them aloud. They sounded like her to each of us. When they didn't, we both heard it and agreed quickly where and how to change it.
Marion refused to do the project herself and dubbed me "it." Her one reservation was my using the word "poetic" about her writing. She thought it sounded grandiose. She had never thought of her writing as "poetic." I disagreed but respected her reservation. I told her I would do the project only if she and Ross were to review each piece.
Over the next year, whenever we could carve out a few hours together, we would rework the latest pieces. Both having had previous lives as high school and college English teachers in Canada and Australia respectively, we found ourselves in happily familiar places—bandying word usage, punctuation, line breaks, puns, consonance, assonance, sustained metaphors, tense changes, alliteration. We trusted and respected each other's views and opinions in this realm, and our forthrightness had only mutuality in its tone. We became servants to the word and were united in that higher purpose. Later, Ross would run his ruthlessly honest, critical eye over each.
I am grateful to Marion for her generosity and for this opportunity to do so many things I love at one time. I am also grateful to Mary Jane Ryan of Conari Press who once again respected my ideas and idiosyncratic ways of realizing them. I am also thankful to Daryl Sharp of Inner City Books and Tami Simon of Sounds True Recordings, who each gave us free and unlimited rights to adapt material. Shambhala Press and Texas A and M University also allowed us free use of a generous amount of material. Dr. Jan Fisher worked with us on impeccable research, manuscript preparation, and cross referencing. My thanks to Stanton Mellick, Ph.D., Karen O'Connor, Ph.D., Paula Reeves, Ph.D., Jeanne Shutes, Ph.D., and Ross Woodman, Ph.D., who each supported aspects of my work in unique ways.
Working with Marion's prose in this way has been a delightful conjunction of passions and disciplines for me. Many of these we share: love of the English language and its literature, particularly poetry, both spoken and read; long histories as writers; long involvement with Jungian theory and practice; passion for essence; and profound and abiding respect for the healing power of metaphor.
Each of these pieces has been created from Marion's writing and talks. Criteria for selection are intuitive: the call of an image, the strength of a metaphor, the power of a tale or observation.
In the process, I felt more like an ocean swimmer than a writer. I delighted in being sustained by the larger oceanic flow of Marion's writing and then in feeling an image, a metaphor, swell like a wave, which I rode to shore until it reabsorbed itself into greater tidal directions.
If I caught the wave too late, I lost elevation and thrust from the metaphor; if I caught it too early, I wasted energy splashing around and was unprepared to cleanly ride the wave. If I abandoned the wave too early, I lost the benefit of being carried to clear shallows of consciousness; if I hung on too long, I beached my awareness where it could no longer move easily and all I could see was the metaphor being sucked back to sea.
Once the image came into focus, the form shaped itself, claiming its authority over me. I have added no ideas—to which the quickest scan of the original will attest. Rather, mine has been a quiet exercise in distilling essence. With Marion's encouragement, I have let explicatory material fall quietly away; then, with literary devices such as meter, repetition, and parallel construction, and by emphasizing through syntax relationships between images or thoughts, I have tried to reveal the armature, the shining bones of the writing.
When I reread narratives from Marion's personal life, quietly woven into the larger flow of her prose, I was startled. I was further startled when I reread sections that Marion flagged for me—stories and dreams she was now ready to identify as her own (Katherine's story in The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter, for example). As I lifted them from their explanatory and discursive contexts, their starkness stunned me. How did I miss their unflinching honesty before?
At first, I felt intrusive highlighting these stories as independent entities. My reaction seemed odd, given that they had been read or heard by thousands. I even felt odd showing them to Marion. I felt as though I had been reading her personal journals without permission. When we did sit down together to read these narratives—each with its umbilical cord to the book cut and tied—my experience was confirmed indirectly; Marion was silent and still, as though once more absorbing into heart and body her original experience.
Reviewing them quietly together, making small changes here and there, we spoke sporadically. I did mention how strongly working with these stories affected me, how I needed to work slowly with each until my heart could accommodate its impact. I said little else; the narratives were their own commentary.
Marion did ask one question, half to herself: "I wonder why people sentimentalize my writing. These stories aren't sweet, Jill."
I ventured a recent understanding. "You provide a gentler, larger context in which to hold more shocking material. You soften the impact. You make it easier for us to digest. Even when you talk, you balance a terrible story with humor. I'm not being as protective here. These stories: when they're removed from their context, they are stark, they are from the bone, they are shocking." I paused briefly. "Is this acceptable to you?"
Marion also waited a little. I could almost see her listening to her bones to hear whether they resonated with the bones of the narratives. Then she answered, "This is the way they are for me. This is what happened, Jill. No, I don't want to soften them. The Crone tells life as it is."
Many of the other stories belong to Marion's friends and to some who have been in Jungian analysis with her. There is no sentimentality here, just silent receptivity, nonjudgmental observation, and fierce, tender honesty. Marion also makes clear that while we might hold another's pain with a loving heart, we cannot remove it. Our souls must heal and grow in their own time. These stories remind us to receive nonjudgmentally both our own and others' unveiled moments of light and darkness. They remind us of the ways in which we each struggle with demons and dance with angels.
Marion is happiest when she knows that her writing has proven to be a helpful departure point for our own journeys, considerations, and insights, independent of hers. We encourage you to use this book in just that way.
I hope I have done my dear and respected friend's imagery justice by catching more waves than I have lost and by lightly riding their graceful, spiraling forms home, only to begin the journey again.
Growing Things In Darkness and in Light
Rare is the woman or man who arrives in adulthood unscathed by the vicissitudes of Western contemporary culture. Most of us have developed creative adaptations to make up for the fact that our movement, both inner and outer, is frequently impeded by old injuries that flare up.
These pages gently, fiercely bring us into the presence of some possible truths about the adaptations we have made as women. They invite us to be courageous enough to see—without collapsing—what we have fled from seeing in ourselves and others. As women seeking to grow into psychological and spiritual maturity, we need to acknowledge the subtle and not so subtle spiritual, cultural, emotional and physical damage we have experienced and to consciously choose new adaptations.
Healing does not mean wallowing in or identifying with injury. Nor does it mean defensive inaction. It means having the courage to see, acknowledge, grieve, and repair the holes ourselves (with, if we are fortunate, loving help from others). It means moving on, patches and all.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Coming Home to Myself by Marion Woodman, Jill Mellick. Copyright © 1998 Marion Woodman and Jill Mellick. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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