"The sea is the favourite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives." - Carl Jung
Inside me is a sea. I feel it pulling and stretching inside my stomach. Sometimes, it rises and is in my head. Its liquid tendrils dissolve all form, all shapes--I feel myself floundering. What is this world, this body, this life? In therapy, I tell my therapist that I see my parents' house and it's coated by an amber resin that is making its way into the house. I touch it. It's sticky exactly like resin and has a bad smell. There is more to the dream but what I'm left with after the session is that my fears are primordial, shapeless and gelatinous. They are not concrete fears like being afraid of not finding the right partner or not being able to fulfill my dreams. No, they are pre-verbal and inchoate.
What to do with this learning, I wonder but also know somewhere that there is not much to do with it but see it and live it out. In dreams is perhaps a way. Another way is this where I sit and put to form some of the inner chaos that comes up from the invisible and powerful sea within.
I feel relieved that I live so close to the tangible and physical sea. When I am unable to put to words my feelings or even feel them, I can go and stand by its shore and feel a oneness. Boundaries of the world fade away if I keep looking at the swirl of the water, the line of the horizon, the sky, the clouds, the waves. It's a little threatening too, the feeling that I am getting erased, that my awareness can rise out of and leave this body. My body. Mine... what does it mean? If I poke enough, ask enough questions, all foundations can come apart. It is a strange feeling, and an even stranger thought to put into words and share with others. But this world is made of all this variety and I am coming to believe it a disservice to hide the truth of personal experience.
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