Have you ever fallen in love at first sight? That’s how it was with me. I was knocked out, bowled over, and blown away by the magnificent creatures I saw that day and I’ve been crazy about them ever since.
I spent the first half of my life in a mist, blind to all that is sacred. A spiritual seeker from the age of 17, my ideas about what was sacred came from other people. Only very rarely did I actually experience the sacred. But then I discovered the spiritual meaning in dreams and myths.
This book by a passionate nature-lover is one of my all-time favorites. For me it is about how people who have unduly prolonged the promise of Spring ripen into fully evolved, wildly extravagant lovers of life. I see this as a spiritual task as well as a psychological one.
At bottom, creativity is not a function of our proficiency with the objective logos skills emphasized in most classrooms, but of our ego’s willingness to use these skills in service to our deeply personal mythos realities: things like what feels important, how we yearn to spend our free time, or what brings a deep sense of accomplishment.
The Alpha mare does not command respect because she is youngest, prettiest, most charming, physically strongest, or the stallion’s favorite, but because her age and vast experience have made her confident, mentally strong, and savvy in the ways of survival. The other horses follow her because she makes wise decisions.
You might not think of dreams as having anything to do with spirituality but they absolutely do. Carl Jung demonstrated this with exquisite beauty in his recently published The Red Book in which he recorded some of his most meaningful waking and sleeping dreams.
Of what was I so afraid? To what has my religion had such stern resistance for the past 5,000 years? Simply this: The feminine aspect of the Mystery we call God. The Mystery incarnate in matter.
Surely it goes without saying that girls behave badly too. Snow White’s Evil Stepmother, 101 Dalmations’ Cruella DeVille, and Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest are merely images of self-centered egos with wombs, dresses, and long hair!
For a minority of people, and I am among them, our work, relationships, and religions are not enough. We don’t know why. We didn’t ask to be this way. Some of us don’t notice the disconnect from ourselves until mid-life. Before then we are too busy scrambling in the outer world to hear the inner dissonance.
For me, Avatar is about the difference between the heroic ego that succeeds in its quest because it opens to otherness and change, and the stuck ego that ultimately fails because it refuses to budge.
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