#4 of 30 – Today is…

A series of blog posts derived from randomly chosen words as titles.

Today is…

unfolding exactly as it should, so said the new age mystic who really had no clue what the day was going to bring. Instead, she was staring into a large crystal bowl which she had just sat in the same room as. That room was in a centre in Santa Barbara, California. She was there today, and she couldn’t have known that it was the same place that I went to with June back in 2015.

We were on our honeymoon and booked in to this spiritual holistic centre for a massage treatment followed by an hour’s session with sound therapy. We lay on the floor in a large wooden room and the guy who was running the session began to ‘play’ large crystal bowls. When I say large, I mean they were massive – as big as a coffee table. They created vibrating sound waves, and as he played each one the sound waves began to bounce off of each other. It was incredible – I could feel the sound waves going through my body. That was quite a day.

That wasn’t today. Today is… a Sunday (maybe different from the day this comes out!) Today is … a time for a memory of these singing bowls, that place, of the Mission which stood at the top of the hill in Santa Barbara and was one of a trail of Missions all the way from the Mexican border up to San Francisco. These missions were the remnants of the Catholic conquering of the West Coast.

Oh, and you see, earlier this week I was online looking at more research and content about James Hillman. He was the founder of the Archetypal School of Psychologists. And this was the routes from which my PhD thesis grew – ‘Working with Archetypes(2004)’ (an edition of two copies – one on my bookshelf and the other in a university library). Hillman died back in 2011 having produced a prolific and diverse archive of writings which brought his focus on the imagistic to so many academic disciplines.

I found this quote on the website that is the base for his archive:

Throughout his work, Hillman criticized the literal, materialistic, and reductive perspectives that often dominate the psychological and cultural arenas. He insisted on giving psyche its rightful place in psychology and culture, fundamentally through imagination, metaphor, art, and myth. That act he called soul-making, a term borrowed from Keats.

That description resonated with me – I captured it in my notebook, wanting to use it again. it describes the absolute essence of what I am obsessed with, the need to create connections, to find the thread that runs through all things – and to lift away from the mundane and literal to the metaphorical to make life as rich as it can be.

And from today then, a true understanding that when we search around and find peculiar synchronicities – that will be time when we should make it our calling to follow them, to their natural path and destinies.

The quote above, is from the Pacifica Graduate Institute which is where Hillman’s archive is kept. And that institute is in Santa Barbara. Time to plan a return. To answer the key question: when we called at a quiet cafe on a rooftop in an academic institute was that the Pacifica Graduate Institute or do we still need to find that place. The search is on…