Thursday, December 9, 2010

The End/Beginning

 "We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology." -Jung

 
And here we are at the end of the class and semester. And after the rebirth of the year, we will begin another. It seems appropriate, seeing as of today I have completed another year of this voyage termed life. Another birthday where a chapter closes and a new one begins. It also seems apt that it comes in the "dead" of winter.
This ritual "death" of a class is less than a month away from the spring renewal. The cycle begins again, just as any other cycle. Except now, we are equipped with a knowledge of our origins and myths.

As I wrote and digested Henderson, I really came away thinking how closely intertwined the beginnings and the ends really are. Death is not a reason for mourning but rather a step in the cycle. How a body is in life, affected by the elements, the natural, the tasks it undergoes, the house it lives in; so it is the same in death. As I work in my nursing home, we have one of the most fatal months that I remember, losing five of my friends to old age.
Within me lives the memory of those who passed. Their myth, intertwined with my own. Their origins becoming a part of mine. 

And the cycle renews. I am greeted with the news just a week and a half ago of a birth in the family. Even my daughter finds power in these origins. She constantly wants to "visit the old people" and sits on my lap content to listen to the stories of Ovid and others for hours, even though her 3 year old mind struggles to comprehend them. "Why does it turn to gold?" "Echo, echo, echo!" she says. The recapitulation comes full circle as Henderson's did when he took the lion cub and befriended the infant on the plane. Could this possibly be "for the first time"?

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