Alison

Promise only that your life

be lived in service

to what you have forever loved,

what the world

with its blind tea and cakes

has eroded but not broken,

that years have challenged

but not forgotten.

For time is a maid with a golden ball,

spinning widdershins:

catch as catch can.

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As a young adult in the early 70s, I was dogged by a hunger to make sense of life that my academic preparation had not satisfied. I would scour the shelves of Banyen Books in Vancouver looking for answers, while already suspecting it was the question that mattered. When I stumbled upon the gem entitled Knowing Woman by Irene Claremont de Castillejo, an Italian analyst, I found a framework into which the question fit. Devouring the books further along that shelf gave me a language and a perspective I have used ever since: that of analytical, or Jungian, psychology.

Shortly afterwards, while teaching in the hinterland of BC, I made friends who taught me how to meditate. Tibetan Buddhism made instant sense. I was again enchanted. Here was another way of accessing wisdom that made psychological sense. How, I wondered, did these two technologies of the sacred – Eastern and Western, parallel and opposite – intertwine in my being? It was certain that together they tethered my roaming curiosity. For they both rely on the exercise of imagination to point to the same essential, indefinable substrate of existence that has sustained me through the intervening years. Both offer the possibility of accessing a larger field of awareness than ego consciousness permits, without forsaking the ground of everyday life.

Curious to learn more about how to live out these Big Ideas, I headed southwards and eastwards to study Contemplative and Buddhist Psychology. I ended up in the kitchen of a Jungian therapist who hired me as an intern and work therapist in her residential treatment centre. That was analysis in action. And there I began the process of analysis myself.

Back in BC, I returned to Public Education and spent the rest of my working life as a teacher of English and French Immersion and as a counsellor to students K – 12. Along the way I also worked with parents, families, adult learners, cognitively-impaired learners, tree planters, meditators and job-seekers. I’ve sustained a love of writing, publishing my own chapbook of poetry and editing several other books for friends. I raised my family and learned to grow food in the Gulf Islands, where I have made my home for the last forty years.

Facing retirement, I decided to return to the analyst’s office, and from there to pursue my long-dormant interest in training as an analyst. Tending to soul and cultivating pathways for the flow of energy and wisdom into ordinary lives is my best response to the sorrows and perils of the world. Since 2011, I have been studying at ISAPZürich, the International School of Analytical Psychology in Switzerland, where I am now a Diploma Candidate, working under supervision. The study of soul gives my curiosity a very large pasture in which to roam and play.

First find the appropriate offering,

something you have grown attached to,

like a favoured son

or a mantle

worn so close

it seems to fall

into a true shape of yourself:

it is a question of how badly you crave

what is missing.

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