When we met on Sunday to discuss our text, I wanted to draw us toward specific passages to explore just a small slice of all this book has to offer. I also wanted to finally share a numinous experience I had—easily one of the most significant of my life—related to our book’s co-author, Elinor Dickson.
As always, I felt so moved by what unfolded in our 90 minutes together as we explored topics like synchronicity, the fear of magical thinking, and the relationship between psyche and matter, all against the backdrop of this specific, extremely precarious, uncertain moment in time.
Thank you to all who attended, and sincere regrets to our friends in Europe, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere for whom the later hour made attendance impossible. I felt your absence!
Here’s what unfolded:
I shared a very sacred, personal experience from December. So much talk of synchronicity lately!
I introduced a little background on co-author Elinor Dickson, with whom we’re meeting on June 1st.
Then I read aloud three passages from the book and invited people to journal for 10 minutes on any of those specific themes:
The Horned God as a support to modern masculinity — quote on pg.107-108
Metaphor and its link for healing between body and psyche — quote on pg.171
The “magical” thinking of our ancestors and our need to reclaim that way of being — quote on pg. 222
After space for personal reflection, individuals shared what those passages stirred up, and the sharing was, as always, remarkably enlivening.
One beautiful human shared a small piece of this Ursula K. Le Guin quote, which I promptly looked up and now will paste on my wall.
“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality.”
Another soul, who had worked with Marion Woodman for a long time, shared her critical differentiation between “Fantasy” and “Imagination.”
Later, I encountered this piece by Turkish author Elif Shafak, which felt like a powerful amplification of just what we’d discussed.
I was young back then, and I somehow could not explain to her, or even to myself, that I did not much like that term: “magical realism”.
… In truth, life was full of magic, poetry, enchantment and beauty that could spring up in the most unexpected moments and places. And life was also laced with inequality, division, othering, prejudice, hatred. And all these things could happen side by side, in the same city, on the same street, even inside the mind of the same person.
A couple of the books that were mentioned (and one more I’m adding):
Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics by Stephon Alexander
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
James by Percival Everett
Please join us for our author conversation with Elinor Dickson on June 1st! If you were already registered for today, the same link applies to this gathering. If you haven’t yet registered, you can do so here.
If you’re interested in continuing to explore this book in small group discussions, drop a note in the comments below. I’m gathering names.
Paid subscribers have access here to the full video, plus the posts and discussion for our slow read, all past workshop recordings, and the many upcoming gatherings.
If you’re drawn to participate but finances prohibit a paid subscription, please reply to this email or send me a note at satyadoylebyock[@]substack.com. I don’t ask for any explanation, just your honesty. All emails go directly to me.
