He who looks outside, dreams; he who looks inside, awakens.

C.G. Jung ___________________________________________________________   (35) Inner and Outer Windows   Before each of the surgeries, I found myself singing the words from a Carole King song, Sometimes I wonder if I am ever going to make it home again.  Each time I lay in the hospital, all I wanted to do was to make it home to my own bed and to look out the window again. In May, even though the Alaskan landscape outside the bedroom window was beginning to turn green, I found that my view of the external world was blocked by the anxieties and images that filled my internal world. During the previous six months, I had felt more fatigued and been more passive than ever before in my life; lying in bed was the only thing I looked forward to every day. When my sister saw this drawing, she feared that I was lying in a coffin, preparing for death. Stan Marlan, the alchemical Jungian analyst I mentioned earlier, looked at the image and saw the Black Sun, an archetypal symbol of darkness and transformation. When I look at the drawing now, I understand that I had been in the midst of a psychological solar eclipse.   March 20, 2007