Establishing a Beachhead
A few weeks ago, I found myself talking animatedly about the Normandy Invasion, better known as D-Day. The Normandy Invasion? When did I ever find reason to talk about that pivotal moment in history when the tides turned against German might? Let alone talk about it in a therapy session? I would guess, never. Not once in twenty-five years of practice do I recall talking about the Normandy Invasion, or that “longest day” when American and English boys and men (including Canadian and other allied soldiers) crossed the English Channel, climbed into landing crafts, and rushed onto the murderous nightmare called Omaha Beach.
In that moment, as the power of that metaphor seemed to take me over, I saw that Tom (my client) seemed to ride along. His face had an expectant, engaged look as both our bodies leaned slightly forward, pulled by some invisible thread of connection. Then I said, “you must establish a beachhead, Tom, exactly as those soldiers did when they invaded France. First they established a beachhead and then they had to fight their way off the beach.”
That image has always captured my imagination: the sheer vulnerability of the allied soldiers crammed onto narrow, flat, exposed beaches with overwhelming German defenses strategically placed behind concrete walls and protected in concrete pillboxes. Relentless gunfire rained down on the troops below, and tens of thousands died as they struggled to climb off the beach.
Too much hyperbole to describe psychological work? I wanted to encourage Tom to imagine that he had finally reached the beach in our work of becoming conscious, that he had reached a turning point. I believed that he had, and the metaphor came unexpectedly. Jung once described the ego as an island surrounded by the ocean of the unconscious. It is a typically Jungian metaphor and, as always with Jung, brilliant. An island is solid: some islands are barren, not much more than rock, tiny dots in the vast ocean. Other islands are huge, lush and green. But all islands are surrounded by water.
And I suspect that almost every island has been flooded at one time or another.
There is a second reason why this metaphor of the Normandy invasion struck me with such power. My friend and buddy Andrew Reitsma created this beautiful website half a year ago. The plan was for him to contribute designs and photographs which he so generously has given to Long Beach Meditation over many years. In addition to Andrew’s contribution, I would offer posts which included excerpts from my own body of work, passages from The Bare Bones of the Buddha’s Teaching, A Letter from Crete, song lyrics, poems from my time as a musician in New York City, and essays and dharma talks from my years at Long Beach Meditation. This body of work is much like a colorful quilt covering a life that has now lasted into its 77th year, but how to string this content together in a cohesive aesthetic?
After six months of starting and stopping, and polite enquiries from website designer, Andrew Reitsma, I finally concluded that this is not something that some deeper part of me was willing to do. Period. The task was entirely daunting, almost immobilizing, to a non-linear mind that runs from organization like a bat out of hell.
This immovability changed during the session with Tom, as I heard myself say, “You have to establish a beachhead, Tom.” Ah. The bad news to every inner child is that we are born with the awesome responsibility to grow, as best we can. I realized that if I expected Tom to climb up his steep cliffs in order to get safely off the beach of isolation, pain and fear, I must do the same thing. So a second metaphor came to me. Not only must I also establish a beachhead, but while I cannot inspire as profoundly as Carl Jung, nor teach as brilliantly as James Hillman, or in the meditation worlds, touch students as deeply as Joseph Goldstein, I can certainly stitch a colorful non-linear quilt together!
So this is the beginning of establishing a beachhead on this very website. One of the most maddening aspects of the way I write is that I seem incapable of sticking to the bottom line. I read James Hillman, Freud, the Buddha, or Jung and cannot imagine how these men were able to pack such brilliant, concise sentences into a paragraph. I have to tell a story about it. I would like to believe that this is simply my way of telling all the truth, but telling it slant, to quote Miss Emily Dickinson. Perhaps it has something to do with being born in the Tennessee mountains, but in truth I also know that it is an ADHD issue plus an intuitive-feeling type way of processing while the thinking function remains, unfortunately a work in progress. Theodore Roosevelt supposedly said that “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I agree, so no more comparisons to Mr. Jung or Buddha, my two heroes, at least for now.
What’s your point VB? I believe that I have a talent that is rather unique. I seem to have the ability to put extremely difficult Jungian and Buddhist concepts into simple words, words that an ordinary person, such as myself, can understand. This is the feedback that I have received from many people who read The Bare Bones of the Buddha’s Teaching. “I could really understand what you were saying.” I hear this as high praise, and it is the reason why I offer this quilt of my life.
We will begin with Tom’s session but with one more brief meander off the beaten path:
The titanic battle that blunted the tide of what until D-Day had seemed like an invincible force of darkness racing across the face of Europe (aptly named a blitzkrieg), is a metaphor that still lives in each of us. It does not matter that most of us have forgotten it. Metaphors lives on almost as if they have their own source of energy. I shared the metaphor with Tom as a way to describe the ego’s leaving the ocean of unconsciousness and finally establishing itself on dry land. But there is a caveat to this description. In our culture, the word “ego” has evolved into a one-sided concept. If the ego is the “eye” of consciousness, or as Jung described it, the solid part that has formed above and in the midst of the vastness of the unconscious, it has evolved over the course of thousands of years with a decidedly masculine bent. “Before Adam, Eve” has been repeated ad infinitum. Adam was made in the image of God, and not you Miss Eve. You came from Adam’s rib. Basically this means, “So be quiet and sit down!” When we refer to the ego, we are talking about the heroic quest, that aspect of courage that moved the tens of thousands of boys and men to leave their mothers and homes and wives behind in order to push from the coasts of France inch by bloody inch all the way to Berlin, while Russian boys and men pushed inward from the East, a deadly encircling that led to Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s defeat. It is one side of the heroic quest, as well as a perfect metaphor for the ego’s slow landing on dry land after thousands of years in the unconscious. But the caveat I mentioned is that we must “hold” open our minds, and stretch into new territory. The unknown. Although no one can picture a concept (what does your ego look like?) we have to imagine that it has two sides. We must imagine a more complex image of it. Not only does it include the heroic masculine aspect; it must also contain the feminine factor as well: the mothers, wives, girlfriends (and, yes, boyfriends) left behind in this masculine quest to conquer darkness. The fact of the relentless repression of the feminine side is only now breaking through as an insight in both masculine and feminine consciousness. Perhaps we have come to a new beachhead. In the meantime, the feminine is really pissed off.
If Truth is a fragile presence existing only in the midst of paradox, paradox must include both masculine and feminine energy. As the saying goes:
““It’s a mighty thin plank that ain’t got two sides.””
We will continue with Tom’s session in the following post.
