I wanted to start by thanking each of you for all the thought-provoking material you've provided this week.  I really wish we had an entire semester to let this stuff simmer and sink in.  This post is in response to general thoughts that arose during the readings, but also in response to some other members’ posts that sparked connections for me to other things I've read and witnessed in practice.  

In my therapy practice, I often work with teenagers.  In sessions, teens often tell me how “crazy” their generation is.  When I challenge this, asking whether they believe that most every generation sees themselves as “wild” and different from those before, they are adamant that this is not the case.  I always thought that was interesting, but wonder if there’s any truth to it.  

But consider the pop culture phrase “YOLO,” or rather, what it has come to imply.  Have you heard kids say this?  Although on the surface it means something similar to “Carpe Diem,” the way it has come to be used tends to have more of a sense of flippancy, impulsive hedonism, or brushing off consequences or responsibility.  Not that teenagers haven’t always been known for doing crazy things, but the feel of this to me seems to be pointing more to a lack of hope, or perhaps just uncertainty in approaching how one might impact a world that seems overwhelmed with issues caused by those who've come before.

There’s a fabulous book by James Hillman called The Soul’s Code.  He used this idea in it that has lingered with me for years:

 “Hope enters history, and our psychology, as trust in continuity fades.

 Our main myth is apocalyptic, as the Revelation of St. John, the last book of our bible, says, and      our children today live among and act out images of catastrophe.  Of course suicide among              children shows a startling rise.  How troubling it must be for a child to tie its star to a collapsing    structure of depletion, extinction, and loss that cannot be repaired by bonding people together in    satisfying human relationships.  It’s all beyond people, says the myth.”

Isn’t that a striking image?  I imagine that child’s experience of reaching up, standing on tip-toes, to place his fragile heart, faith, and open-minded dreams on to a structure that is teetering … and perhaps on to a structure that he can sense is untrusted by adults as well.

This is one reason why I’m intrigued to know where this class might go in suggesting reasons that the old, apocalyptic myth is ready to move forward into an opening/rebirth myth.  Perhaps what these kids are reflecting in my practice is, though, that the old myth isdry and doesn't contain the collective soul any longer.  Perhaps the feeling of hopelessness is due to the fact that the old structure has become brittle and is ready to give way to a new one.   

I’ll leave you with an image that contains that myth for me.  About 10 years ago, I kept having dreams that I was trying to fly to heaven.  One time, I made it there, but all that was there were a bunch of upside-down trees.  This made no sense to me until a few years later, I stumbled upon the fact that this is a fairly widely used symbol in mystic traditions.  The tree is a symbol for the interconnection between heaven and earth, with its roots in the sky and branches and leaves stretching downward.  To me, it is about embodiment rather than separation, a nudge to become heaven on earth rather than looking for it elsewhere.  

And I think that’s partially where the myth might need to go, in my mind.  In the direction of embodiment, of connection and wholeness, and in making the choice to create beauty and peace wherever we might be, here and now.

Hollis, J. (1996).  The soul’s code: In search of character and calling.  Random House: New York.