ESPrit de Corps

There was a time when I couldn’t imagine life off that rock. The cold and clear green waters, the salt in my night skies. One square mile of endless mystery and coded silence. No questions asked. None answered. I never wanted to take off my favorite summer orange dress that hung like nature over my tan lean body. It was the lighthouse flashing my windows silhouette on my bedroom wall, night after night, that imprinted the image of an exit deep in my sub-conscious. I painted that window for years, carved it in wood, etched it in stone, and only now do I remember the sleepless hours of staring at that window in that early childhood room.

“As a general rule, the unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams, where it appears not as rational thought but as symbolic image.”

-Carl Jung and M.L von Franz, Man and His Symbols

I did not sleep for seventeen years. I was known on that rock as the golden sleepwalker. Some say it was good luck if I passed near to you in the night. I would hear the clang of the bell from Graves Light and move as a ghost out of the frozen in time room that felt like someone else’s out to the wonderful warm of the outdoors. My night wandering was another piece of our towns unquestioning quilt of events that created some version of the real story.

“Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything.

-Jung, C.G.The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature

Each morning I am urged out of sleep into a body that is supposed to function as a normal girl…not a sleepwalker. At school I drift out of the classroom window, feel the salt wind on my face and I see my Mother tending her hydrangeas and speaking with fairies in her rock garden. I see my Father driving in an unknown direction with no map or compass to guide him.

“Even a man of high intellect can go badly astray for lack of intuition or feeling.”

-Jung, Man and His Symbols

“YOUNG LADY get off that desk, go outside and run around this building seven times!” Always a welcome punishment from Mrs. Goodwin. The wind in my hair, my heart pounding, a moment of consciousness. My only great sleep in life comes during school hours. Rounding the schools front entrance, near the town cemetery, I reach the scent of lilacs and I am frozen. I am in a dream. It is brilliant. Mrs. Goodwin and some of the students yell at me to get back in the school. My legs don’t move, my tongue can’t speak. All I can do is smell lilacs.

“Such a cue or trigger effect can explain the onset of neurotic symptoms as well as more benign memories when a sight, smell or sound recalls a circumstance in the past.”

-Jung, man and His Symbols

My explanation has something to do with my breakfast of nasturtiums from the graveyard, grapes from the Johnson’s vine and two Hostess chocolate cupcakes.