Letter to Jim: Four Poems of Water and Soul

Abstract

This letter to the author’s Jungian therapist discusses the process by which therapy and the practice of writing align in a mysterious connection between upwelling unconscious and the divine interaction with human creativity. The attendant four poems investigate the haunted spaces of the psyche where self-hatred and physical harm jostle with the insistences of soul. The frame of depth work, a writing practice, and thousands of hours spent physically engaged with the world’s waters were combined to create a wide and ongoing inquiry into the nature of the writer’s inner life and the invisible archetypal pressures that bear down on awareness. The resulting letter and poetry show a developed sense of the mysterious connection of things seen and unseen, and relatedness with an invisible, instructive framework that allows the writer to live within body, and express via word. The final judgment is that the author writes herself into being each day; that practice keeps her wide and sensitive, supple and alive.