I want to talk about books. Not just any old books – I mean the books that either sit on your shelves, unloved and unread, or the books that you keep for years after you’ve first read them, waiting to be called to them once more.
One of the books that had languished unread on my shelves for some time was Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I bought it years ago when it was the tome du jour, but never felt sufficiently engaged to read it.
It was only when an acquaintance quoted a passage from the book which resonated with me that I remembered I had a yellowing copy at home and felt moved to start turning its pages. It’s quite a heavy read, so I must confess that I still haven’t finished it, but I love the fact that these volumes often wait patiently for you to be ready to receive their wisdom.
I was drawn back to another book this week – one that I first read probably 30 years ago, judging by the comments I had written in its margins. The Pregnant Virgin: a Process of Psychological Transformation, by Marion Woodman, is a slim but powerful volume inspired by Jungian psychology about the struggle to become conscious and our relationship with the inner virgin – forever open to new life, new possibilities, our unique truth.
It explores a process of change akin to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, focusing on the periods in the chrysalis when life as we have known it is over and we are no longer who we were – but we don’t know who we may become.
Many passages have resonated with me in this book in terms of the current narrative I’m inhabiting but I’ll mention just one here: the concept of temenos. This is a Greek word meaning sacred space or precinct, which is used by Jungian analysts to represent the privacy of the relationship between analyst and analysand.
But there’s also an inner temenos – a safe, protected psychological space deep within us where soul-making takes place. It is this temenos that I’m being called to connect with at the moment.
As I go through that sometimes painful process, I find the words of Rainer Maria Rilke reassuring: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. .. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
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