I found out yesterday that my Dad often stops by and reads my blog. (Hi Dad!) This won’t change the way I write or what I write about, but it might give me pause for a minute or two once in a while. Anyway, on to other things.

I am trying really hard to read Jung’s Man and His Symbols, but it isn’t really making a lot of sense. Oh, I am picking up a very profound nugget here and there, but I don’t understand most of it. You see, there are a few things I just can’t get my head wrapped around no matter how hard I try–poetry and philosophy. (Modern art comes in a close third. But I really don’t want to understand it. I guess it’s the arty stuff I don’t get.) But since I want to understand archetypes better, I am struggling through this book a few pages at a time.

Something broke through the fog this morning. Jung says “Archetypes come to life only when one patiently tries to discover why and in what fashion they are meaningful to a living individual.”¹ And suddenly Tarot makes much more sense. I am the sort of reader that wants to read each deck in the way the creator intended. I must understand what each symbol means to them. See the problem? I haven’t been trying to figure out what the symbols mean to me. Each card represents and archetype, and I have been interpreting them in regards as to what they mean to the creator of the deck, not in regards as to what they mean for me. No wonder I often feel like I am fighting the cards.

1. Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 88