Dearest love, I stepped out earlier today to encounter a stranger Fellini-like on a bicycle who said to me as he pedaled slowly by "It's like a day in October." Totally, I replied as I limped along with my handweights. It's been very cold (for June) and gray and rainy. I'm in a fleece, Claire & Gwynnie are soul sisters together on the sofa for warmth, I myself took a longing look at the unlit pellet stove, and I've got a chicken and russets roasting in the oven (smells heavenly just now). I spent a day in my head and then some, but things have very much settled down. Not to get into "forced epiphanies" but truly I learned some lessons - overdue, quite possibly. Good that came of it - very nice email exchanges with the Secret Life of E.D. people, which led me to polish up a review of the novel that I've posted on Amazon. Happy to help the cause, truly. Also, it was good for me to polish up a bit of writing a little more than I do than when I post here. I mean stylistically. I will be less cavalier about content.

This morning after I did some virtual housekeeping, I thought about the exhibit I'd seen at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan, Christmas Week, of Carl Jung's Red Book, his personal "herbarium" (wrong word, I know) or album of his imaginal personal journey. I wrote in my blog at the time that I didn't connect with his images but that I had seen them only an hour previous and that these things have a way of sinking in. I know how clever and flip that sounds. But I actually meant it then. And the thing is that this morning, after this feeling of being invaded and vulnerable I thought of an image from Jung's album that came to me. He's got various archetypal illuminated (a la illuminated manuscript) renderings - starchild, snake, lots and lots of other things (emblematic and mysterious as Tarot cards, in a way) that I don't even remember. What I remembered this morning? A worm. I think it was green (or greenish), short, sort of sluglike, with possibly "facial" features. But in his imagery I understood it not to be a "good" spirit. I looked for an image of Jung's worm online, but couldn't find it. It's funny how it stuck in my memory (and perhaps it's morphed, transmogrified - but it was definitely a worm, as opposed to, say, snake or dragon, of which he also has images) and emerged, meaningfully for me, this morning.

Also I thought of a series of beloved children's books, Green Knowe. There's one where there's an evil interloper who somehow brings on an infestation of snakes onto the property of the ancient manse... I have to dig up the book and look this up... I looked (I must have packed the book when I thought I was leaving) but where is it now... Anyway... those are the images that I think of now, and I, Polish-American through and through, think of the snakes being banished from Ireland.

Lordie.

I do love The Waterboys, though. They are a comfort. (Looking through the KZE playlist. Maybe it wasn't the Waterboys. I don't know what song that was, all about the sea, being at sea, way earlier today, this morning as I drove to my walk). Okay, Persephone, powerful watery forces that be, please consider the lack of a title to this post to be an homage to the wonderful breaking, casting about, watery, oceanic, seabound, lone song I heard this morning.


Kisses, my dearest.