Don preparing to carry Taos drum up a cliff in a bedspreadd. Honoring the Ancestors and Don Sandner: Part Two Don Sandner was a training analyst in our Institute for years. He also worked with a Navaho medicine man for 16 summers, resulting in his book Navaho Symbols of Healing (Hartcourt Brace, 1979; Healing Arts… Read more »
Honoring the Thinning Veil, Glastonbury, 2010 Honoring the Ancestors, Part One Each year the San Francisco Jung Institute celebrates Ancestors’ Day around the time of the Day of the Dead. Analysts, candidates, and interns gather and remember those in our Institute community who have passed the threshold into the Beyond. This last Sunday we especially… Read more »
At the cricket concert Calling Spirit Fox My grandson Wesley is three, and he is so curious! Where is the fox family, he wants to know. We are walking past the culvert that the mother, father, and three kits occupied in June on our way to look at a snake skin I found earlier in… Read more »
Strong Presence of the Elements Spirit Images: Symbolic or Direct Perception? It was as if the air had been sucked out of the room. Our sense of reality was being questioned! We all sat there, both sides, brought up short by the question. Are the figures we meet in the sweat lodge symbolic, or are… Read more »
Veil Mysteries on our ranch. Thinning of the Veil: Remembering the Dead When you look back, you often see what brought you to where you are. There are the mentors and teachers, the happy accidents, the inspirations and intuitions you followed, or not. Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner would say that the dead are also assisting you,… Read more »
Detail of Gaia, Ceramic Piece by Genevieve Haven Blessed Greenness Carl Jung defines the benedicta viriditas, “blessed greenness,” as …the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but… Read more »
My own copy, full of post-it markers. Review: Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing Daphne Miller’s most recent book, Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing (William Morrow, imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2013), opens with a visit to Wendell Berry’s home and his… Read more »
No wonder she was tempted! Demeter’s Grief: Reflections on Our Evolution Yes, she was a great Goddess, that Medium of a tone of consciousness, and boy, was she pissed! Her daughter Persephone had been abducted by Pluto into Hades and the Underworld. In her fury, Demeter stopped everything from growing until she got Persephone back…. Read more »
Donald by one of the corn room’s walls. He is 6’6″! This last weekend Donald and I attended the wedding of Daniele and Jeremy, close friends of our son Jesse and his wife Lisa, at First Light Farm. Jesse planted a corn field for the occasion and hollowed out a “corn… Read more »
Jimalee in action. Jimalee Plank is one of my favorite writers, and she has been one of my greatest influences over the thirty some years we have been in a writing group together. She writes beautiful essays on the environment, on children and families, on the stuff of every day life. I am pleased to… Read more »
© 2025 Patricia Damery.
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