Our April 2012 eNewsletter is now available. Click here to read!

“I have wanted, also, to keep in our minds the common language about the ‘good’ earth’s shadows: soil and dirt; fears of being buried alive; quicksand, sinkholes, and dust bowls; earthquakes and avalanches; dust to dust… the unfathomable autonomous depths. Of these shadows, the figure of Mother Earth herself is the deepest. As Sam Gill contends, the collapsing of many female goddess figures into a single goddess named Earth Mother ‘at least for North America would seem to be historically and ethnographically an error….’  My main aim is to draw us away from imagining the earth as a good mother, passive, nurturing, and supportive, and to recognize the idea of earth to be a complex phenomenon requiring efforts of thoughts and imagination.” (James Hillman, Mythic Figures, pp. 308-319)

Opus Archives and Research Center:  2012 Peace and Reconciliation Travel Grants

Opus is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2012 Peace and Reconciliation Travel Grants. These three doctoral students are in the Depth Psychology with Emphasis in Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, and Ecopsychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Lizzie Rodrigues who will be traveling to Rwanda to study an approach to peace and reconciliation called Healing and Re-Building Our Communities. It is offered through the African Great Lakes Initiative.  She will then be bringing this work home to Santa Barbara and sharing it with mediators.

Linda Ravenswood will be traveling throughout California with Social and Environmental Justice Advocate and Community Theatre Leader, Kristina Wong. With others they will  create a theatre action piece reflecting on aspects of social and environmental justice work with The Environmental Justice League’s 2012 Summer Program for Reconciliation Through Arts project.

Liz MacLeod will be an intern at the Kerulos Center’s Aves Sagradas (Sacred Birds) Sanctuary in Costa Rica. The sanctuary rescues parrots suffering as a result of the pet trade while partnering with indigenous peoples in the region.

Please consider making a donation to this travel fund so that students working in the field of peace and reconciliation at any accredited graduate school can apply next year for the same opportunity. Contact Dr. Safron Rossi, Executive Director – sr@opusarchives.org or (805) 969-5750.

“Māyā is the world of that rippling pond we spoke of, the fractured, sparkling image of reality that is no reality but only its broken surface…. It is when the inner light—the ultimate light that is no light, that is—Brahman-ātman—comes into manifestation that this māyā veil is passed. I once saw a kitten that found itself reflected in a mirror… and thought it was another…. It went at it and at it—and then, suddenly, it got past the mirror and there was no other animal there…. It had lost its object; it didn’t even think of itself really as a subject. And I thought, Well, good gosh, this is an image of māyā exactly.” (Campbell, Myths of Light, pp. 48-49).

“Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.”

From Henry David Thoreau, (1862) “Walking”.

In celebration of James Hillman’s birthday, here are a few of his own words:

“The great men of the past were living realities…because they personified soul’s needs for spiritual ancestors, ideal types, internal guides and mentors who can share our lives with us and inspire them beyond our personal narrowness”  (Re-Visioning Psychology 198).

Read about James’ life  and his archival collection at Opus Archives.

Also check out our latest eNewsletter to see photographs of the exhibit we curated for the Hillman Tribute weekend co-hosted with Pacifica Graduate Institute in March.

Our April 2012 eNewsletter is now available. Click here to read.

Last week Bonnie Bright, founder of Depth Psychology Alliance, and I spoke about Opus, the brilliant scholars whose archives we care for, and the treasures and unexpected finds that await the researcher. You can listen to the 3o minute interview here – The Living Archives: Stories from Opus Archives & Research Center.

Enjoy!

“One must remember the central truth…about Easter and Passover. We are all called out of the house of bondage…in the way in which the moon throws off its shadow to emerge anew, in the way that life throws off the shadow of death…. Easter and Passover make us experience in ourselves a call out of bondage. There are no horizons in space, and there can be no horizons in our own experience…. Easter and Passover offer the perfect symbols because they mean that we are called to a new life.” (Campbell, Thou Art That, pp. 103-104)

“Feminine consciousness is concerned with process. It sees the goal as the journey itself and recognizes that the goal is consciousness of the journey. Being in consciousness of Becoming. To see the goal as the process itself is bringing to the masculine beam of light a ‘dome of many-colored glass’ which refracts that beam, and, like a prism, makes it many-faceted, every facet being a mirror of the center, the center being in every facet” (Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin 169).

Wholeo Dome