By wood, I am journaling from a small town in the forested mountains of New England. Autumn is in full effect. The changing of the leaves is no doubt a visual wonder and adds to a proper foliage bookend experience to last year’s fall. I had just wrapped Payroll work on a Netflix product and spent last October seeing friends and family in Europe. Call it a jetset kind of trip, I couldn’t unpack before having to prepare for the next destination. The pressures of getting on the right trains and the right planes in a limited timeframe always magically work out. The flavor of “close-call” boardings happened repeatedly but I always made it in the nick of time. A thrill I can see to be easily accessed in Europe’s train-faring culture and how that translates into high vibrational living. I felt I was a traveling Swiss Army knife cutting through air with precision and functioning optimally with my bare bones travel gear. Jetset life is seductive. To relish in the impermanence of your destination only to think about where you’ll go next is the traveler’s flow that catalyzes our human biology into unending excitement and anticipation. It’s highly vibrational and realizes a manifest destiny because shit just works out. I get the vibe. I am now understanding the notion of ‘living in the end’. As you’re zigzagging in your travels and have a baseline of where you’ll be going, you unlock this flow of abundance where your body and mind will respond accordingly and things arrive to you with much success. I do my best everyday to maintain that frequency through my meditation and managing of pranic energies.
October 20, 2022. I’m in Zürich just having spent a few days in Berlin with only a few hours before I once again jet over to Madrid to see my old hermano. It’s in this brief interlude before my flight I had the sole opportunity to knock something off my bucket-list. It’s technically realizing a life-goal I see as spiritual ascension and my pathway towards becoming an integrated male. It is fall foliage in Switzerland and I’m spirited into wondering, this is what New England must look like right now. I borrow my brother’s bike and I race past all these bright, rich leaves that fall to the ground to light it up. I couldn’t continue my journey without taking a bit of Jung with me.
The cottage pictured at the top is Haus of Carl Gustav Jung in Küsnacht, Switzerland, a small town along the east bank of Lake Zürich. This was his home and office that is now a museum that exhibits his life, studies, intimate history and most importantly that still-lingering pungent cigar smoke still embedded in his favorite leather chair and his library walls of leather-bound volumes gifted from his contemporaries, Freud and Nietzsche. Say this is part of my individual masculine pilgrimage that arrived in divine opportunity. I had to cut my tour short but stayed long enough to understand(at a base level), most of what we encounter in social programming all follow archetypal motifs that we find integrated later in our adult lives.
If you heard of Jung, you may know he was the architect of psychoanalysis and is a big name in studies about human psychology. Now I’m no pro on all things Jung but his work throughout my life has been echoing out by the alphorn, urging me to tap into his studies to learn how to become individuated.
I like Kubrick. I’m a fan but it’s been a while since I’ve seen Full Metal Jacket. While I do have my gripes as a Vietnamese with the particular choices made in this film about the Vietnam War, today I am putting the lens on the Jung themes present throughout the movie. I’m Vietnamese and I do shamefully admit back in high school I’d get on the cussing bandwagon when we’d shoot each other with the wildest quotes from the most intense movies(like FMJ). The drill-instructor’s lines were so brutal that I felt the strangest thing repeating them. He was training marines to go to war with Vietnam. And looking back on my younger, unconscious, disintegrated habits, I can clearly identify the mirror that was reflected when I’d drill imaginary soldiers to prepare for war against the gooks. I established a rift with my own cultural identity. I was actually declaring war on myself. With realization comes healing.
I’ll be watching Full Metal Jacket once again so I can pick at Kubrick’s carcass with a more critical eye.
Here’s to integration!
Solo