Journeys of a Pregnant Virgin

It is exactly one month today since I arrived in Zurich. What a rich time it has been. Here are some more beads from the days since I wrote last.

I had a lovely leisurely breakfast with Ursula K-Z in Kusnacht on Thursday. She is also completing Marion's Leadership Training program, and we shared experiences with the Body Soul work over the years, and then she showed me some of her stunning sculptures and paintings. How sweet to sit at her table and talk, with good strong coffee and lovely Swiss breads and cheeses for breakfast, feeling all the while both the excitement of getting to know someone for the first time, and the immediate recognition of a kindred spirit, based on our similar experiences and perceptions in the realm of soul work.

The next day I went back to the Library at the Kusnacht Jung Institute and watched a fascinating video called "Ich Hiess Sabine Spielrein" ("My Name was Sabine Spielrein") which I have long wanted to see and could never find in Vancouver. It concerns one of Jung's more questionable relationships with a woman patient, and was very sensitively and poetically made. From what I know it gave a fair representation of all involved. And to watch it in the actual original Jung Institute and in Swiss-accented German also provided a heightened intensity to my viewing. Jung did speak German after all, and with a Swiss accent, which has a different feeling to it than if I'd watched it with English dubbing or subtitles. I will resist the temptation to go into a discussion of all the intricacies of the story, and simply say that I am glad the personal and ethical boundaries in analytic relationships are more clearly drawn today!

It was a lovely afternoon and afterward I sat in the rose garden and soaked in the sun which I have missed so much. I'd originally registered for a four hour seminar at that time but the four hour lecture leading up to it the previous afternoon was so disorienting that I decided to cancel and do what I wanted to do instead. I'm not sure why that felt like a big step but it did. I was sorry to do it, though, because I'd enjoyed the preparatory reading and was really looking forward to the seminar. But I don't think it has ever happened to me before that as one, two, three hours of lecture went by, I started to feel dizzy as a result of the speaker's abrupt and to me unreasonable digressions and almost standup comic asides. I felt a captive audience to his performance (it surely didn't feel like a lecture) and realized that if I stuck it out for the final hour I might actually feel seasick - so I left during our final break. Good move. I have so appreciated receiving email messages from friends keeping me up to date with their lives, and used the hour to catch up with them.

Yesterday I went out to see my new friends in Forch again (I should have asked if they have any objection to my referring to them by name - I'm sure they won't but I will ask first). I was determined not to stay for five hours this time, but when I said I was very concerned not to tire her out, my analyst friend said not at all and that she doesn't believe in external time restrictions when the conversation is flowing. Which it certainly did again. In fact, perhaps a little too freely on my part after a glass of wine, and afterward my inner critic, ever ready to pounce, tried to give me a hard time - even this morning - but I reminded him that I'd come to Zurich planning to be myself, not trying to be perfect. (Was it Marion, or Marion quoting Jung, who said, "It's so much easier to be better than we are, than to be WHO we are"? Whoever it was, I think it is true.) Again we moved through so many topics of conversation including our common passion for India - although they have both travelled there and I have not - and Indian art and mythology. We drank coffee and ate chocolate and strawberries and cake, and finished up with wine and a lovely dish of pasta. A feast in every way. Another luminescent bead.

Tomorrow I will take a train to Geneva and be met by my friend Susan Tiberghien whom I have not seen since 2000 when we last taught together at the International Women's Writing Guild Conference. With five years to catch up on and many shared interests, I look foward to that too.

It occurs to me that I have not included any more quotes from DIVINE BEAUTY as I earlier promised I would, so perhaps that is a good way to finish up this morning. Here is one that touches my heart (one of many).

"Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness. It suggests a compassion and understanding for all the ambivalent and contradictory dimensions of the human experience and pain. This climate of kindness nurtures the sore landscape of the human heart and urges torn ground to heal and become fecund. Grace is the perennial infusion of springtime into the winter of bleakness....
...In our times it is quite exceptional for a thing simply to be itself. The same is true of people. A slick politics of presentation and deliberateness now dominates most forms of presence and it is actually quite disarming to hear someone speak from their heart with no eye to the best camera angle. Such direct immediacy seems almost innocent and unsophisticated, yet it is so refreshing and real." (p. 238)

Until next time, then.....