Journeys of a Pregnant Virgin

It's Monday and Steve and I are having a lazy afternoon while the laundry gets done. He has attended several lectures with me - on Alchemy, and on the relationship between Depth Psychology and indigeneous healing practices among the Xhosa people in South Africa - and enjoyed them considerably. And I have enjoyed our being students together, as if we were attending university in our twenties. We both feel on holiday at the moment, and that, despite the fact that he arrived from Leipzig with a very bad back and could not move without pain for the first few days. That did not leave us with a lot of choices about things to do, but on Saturday he began to feel better and yesterday there was a marked improvement.

We did manage a visit to the Cafe Spruengli, Zurich's most famous pastry cafe, and enjoyed the low key European elegance of the place, as well as excellent vanilla ice cream and mango sorbet (Steve), and wonderful coffee and pastry (me). We also had a very pleasant lunch with three other students one day, and spent the afternoon walking and talking with Marc who was visiting from Oregon with the thought of training as an analyst himself.

On Saturday afternoon we took the train, actually two, to Einsiedeln, home of the magnificent Benedictine Abbey and the Black Madonna, which Steve had not seen. It was a very hot day (I'm not complaining!) and the cool interior of the Church, golden and bejewelled with Baroque frescoes, and the quiet reverential chanting of the monks at Vespers were a lovely counterpoint to the intense, bright, tourist-filled sunshine outside. As we sat in the small chapel at the back of the Church in which the Black Madonna is held, I watched as a tiny little black child in bright pink sundress and diminuitive sandals, got up to leave with her clearly adoptive (and adoring) white parents. As she turned to the back, the little one intently offered her tiny hand to one of three nuns sitting in the row behind her, then to the second, and finally to the third one, each of them beaming with pleasure at the sweetness of this unexpected leavetaking. I wondered what prompted the little girl, a year and a half old at most, to do this, and with such seriousness on her little face, as if this was of utmost importance to her. Afterward we sat in an outdoor restaurant right in front of the Abbey, and ate Swiss specialties, including Rosti, which turns out to be a large variation of a potato pancake, tasty but very filling.

Yesterday afternoon we took the tram out to Forch again and visited with my new friends there. This time I took the meal and we drank wine and feasted and had a good and rousing discussion as usual but with the added element of the masculine this time.

It's strange to think that tomorrow is already the halfway mark of Steve's time with me in Zurich. (One day I would like to understand better how it is that I am always so aware of time, to the point where I hardly need a watch. I'm not sure whether it "means anything" in particular, but I have noticed that I have an almost visceral relationship with time, in that I feel my relationship to it very concretely, whereas I am hopeless when it comes to reading maps or finding my way around a new environment where it helps to have a good sense of spatial relatedness. I am always gratefully surprised when street signs actually correspond to the map in my hand, as if by magic.) There are still so many things I want to show Steve in Zurich, and to explore with him for the first time, and the days are flying by. Of course, if, as I suspect, I will return in the fall, there will be other opportunities, but I don't take anything for granted, and I think he too is finding my nest on the Zurichberg a very cozy little home away from home.

So that's all for now, I think.