We Are the Light(7)

I do have money.

The life insurance company accepted Darcy’s death certificate, which Jill sent them, and so they paid out on the small policy. And Isaiah arranged for me to be on paid leave, so I still have health insurance and a biweekly paycheck, which Jill keeps track of for me. I find it hard to believe it’s a matter of money, but I’d be willing to accept an increase regarding your hourly fee. You’ll eventually need an income again, right? I am happy to give you what money I have. Just name a price and I’ll have Jill write a check. Even if it’s just letters and no face-to-face meetings. A phone call down the line, to break the ice. And then who knows?

Darcy says I should keep sending these letters regardless of whether you write back. She says it’s the writing that helps me most and that no one is forcing you to read them. That my envelopes might sit on your kitchen table for weeks or months until one day psyche will command you to open and read. Then perhaps you’ll be moved to restart my analysis. And we won’t have to make up for all the lost time because we’ll have a handy detailed record of everything that’s been happening to me right here in black and white.

I have mixed shaky feelings lately.

Again, I don’t want to shame you, but the lack of a reply—especially after all the hard emotional work I’ve already stuffed into envelopes—has touched my father complex a bit and has me worried about my abandonment issues creeping back into my primary operating system. I’ve been trying to bring that to consciousness and be aware of it, like you always say.

It’s like when Freud rejected Jung and then Jung had that breakdown where he slept with a loaded pistol next to his bed just in case he needed to exit the planet.

You’d want to be Jung and not Freud, I realize, so maybe that’s a bad analogy.

But regardless of all that, this is the last time I’m going to begin a letter with a hedge or an apology. It should be clear by now that I feel conflicted about writing you, even though I also feel one hundred percent compelled at the same time. “Karl needs you!” psyche continues to scream every day. “Don’t give up on him!” And so I will soldier on and try to win the battle for Karl. The best part of my soul loves the best part of your soul. I want you to know that statement is accurate and feel its truth as self-evident. “Like the sun rises and sets daily,” you used to say.

I remember you told me about Jung visiting a tribe of indigenous people and how they told him that they helped their father, the sun, cross the sky. They viewed it as their life purpose—helping their sun god make his journey each and every day. That’s how Jung learned humans actually affect and maybe even cocreate God. And that’s why we need to avoid serving our neuroses, because it separates us from the Self and therefore limits our ability to help God manifest in the here and now.

Maybe with these letters—even if you are only reading and I’m doing all the writing, for now—you and I can help our own metaphorical sun god cross his metaphorical sky.

Darcy says that my writing you is in service of separating my true inherent self from my neuroses, which can only improve everything both in consciousness as well as in the unconscious.

I remember when you used to tell me that my unconscious was always talking with your unconscious, both of which were in conversation with the collective unconscious and that all of this dialoguing was necessary and important and maybe even divine.

I realize that I don’t have to remind you of all of this, since you have been studying Jungian thought for your entire adult life and I’ve only been submersed in it for less than two years. But you told me to listen to my soul, saying, “Psyche always knows!” while shaking a finger over your head. I can still see the hopeful twinkle in your sky-blue eyes. It continues to give me strength.

Maybe you’re wondering if I’ve been keeping up with my dream journal, writing down all that my unconscious is trying to communicate nightly. Unfortunately, I don’t sleep much these days because I like to spend my nights with Darcy. Perhaps you will consider these nightly visitations to be encounters with the numinous and therefore worthy of documentation and analysis, so I look forward to discussing my supernatural marital experiences with you, just as soon as you reengage. I don’t expect you to doubt the truth of my claims, but I have nonetheless been collecting angel feathers as proof. Each morning when I wake from the trance of being with winged Darcy I find small white feathers in my bed. They’re tiny. Maybe only an inch in length. Much smaller than what I observe when I gaze at Darcy’s magnificent wings—feathers that measure seven to fourteen inches long—so I’m thinking that what I’m finding must be undercoat feathers, which, for obvious reasons, are much smaller than the top-coat feathers of angel wings. What do you think? I’ve filled an entire gallon ziplock bag. It’s ready and waiting to be examined.

But the real news I have to share today—and, yes, I realize I’ve buried the lead—is that I have a mysterious visitor in my backyard, whom we first discovered on Monday night.

I was in the living room reading Castration and Male Rage: The Phallic Wound by Eugene Monick, having finally completed his Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, which was the last book you recommended back when we were talking in late November about the dark feminine rising in our culture and the need for pure phallic energy to clean up toxic masculinity. Anyway, Jill was emptying the dishwasher when she yelled in from the kitchen, “Lucas, someone’s put up a tent in your backyard!”