On my bookshelf: The Soul’s Code – James Hillman

Dr James Hillman (1926-2011) was a renowned post-Jungian analyst, depth psychologist and latter day guru of the human development movement. His books offer ideas that draw on early Western (Greek) philosophy and mythology. If we want to understand, to accommodate and direct the forces of the psyche, says Hillman, then we do well to think on what the Greeks wrote about their gods.

I find him difficult, but if one perseveres bits of him stick. In the Soul’s Code he tells us about Plato’s myth of Er, part of his magnum opus, The Republic, in which we are acquainted with the idea of a personal Daemon, an internal, psychical companion who carries the map of our lives, according to a plan laid down before our birth.  Our future then, according to this myth, is not determined so much by the environment we are born into as by a kernel of potential, like an acorn, that will grow into what it was meant to be regardless of any adversity we face in life, or possibly even because of it.

Our task in life is to live out the potential of the acorn, to allow it to grow down from the fertile earth of the deep psyche into the blossom of material realisation through the physical entity that we are. But the Daemon also has the power to bend and shape events to suit the attainment of its ambition for us. So,… we miss the bus, the car gets a flat tyre, we miss the crucial meeting, we lose our job; seen from the Ego’s perspective as personal disasters, such upsets can now be re-interpreted as part of a grander plan, releasing us to pursue another path, one closer to what the Daemon has intended for us. It’s a catch-all – so even the bad hand we are dealt can be greeted with a philosophical acquiescence. It was simply meant to be.

But we can also resist the daemon, resist the call, run capriciously and contrary to the Daemon’s aim. When this happens though, we will at some point feel resistance, feel a gnawing dissatisfaction with our lives and our tireless wants. Persist long enough in a contrary direction and the Daemon will make us ill, or even kill us off altogether, write us off as a bad job, and start afresh.

To realise the Daemon’s plan is to live the life we were intended. The challenge though is divining what it is the Daemon wants for us, and knowing if we’re on the path or not. Personal happiness is not the key, for many who have lived Daemon haunted lives do not end their lives well. Their achievements may stand out, make history, save lives, bring comfort to millions, while their own lives end in apparent ruin and ignominy.

What I find confusing about The Soul’s Code is Hillman’s use of remarkable lives as illustrations of the Daemon at work. He does this, he says, to magnify the phenomenon, to render it visible to analysis but, though he tells us the Daemon is at work in all our lives, the temptation at a first reading is to conclude only those names lit up by fame have listened well enough, and the rest of us are losers.

I’m sure this isn’t what Hillman is saying, or maybe it is. I find much in him that’s contradictory, elusive, beguilingly and beautifully poetic, rather like the psyche itself: alluring, intangible, ambiguous, shape-shifting. There are no firm handles, no answers, nothing to gain purchase, nothing one can test by putting into practice, no ten step plan for contacting your Daemon and realising your full potential. He is the dream to be interpreted, and like the all dreams perhaps not taken too literally.

I’m not unsympathetic to the idea of a personal Daemon. Indeed I think I met mine once, during a brief, spontaneous moment of transcendence, when I recognised myself as being interconnected with everything. Everywhere I looked, there I was. And the Daemon was there, felt, rather than seen, a formless presence reminding me, wordlessly, that as remarkable and unlikely as this vision of seemed, I had always known it to be the truth, but had forgotten it. I had drunk, as Hillman might have quoted, from Greek Myth, from the waters of the Lethe.

But the puzzle for all of us is what I feel Hillman did not address in any depth, and I’d hoped he would – this being the sense of our own importance, our own mission, which is at complete odds with the reality of a small speck of life played out in an infinite, cold and unfeeling universe. In company with our Daemon we feel how interconnected we are with world, that man and world cannot not be said to exist at all in isolation from the other. But in my case, my awareness underlined how much this was, my universe, my journey, that the Daemon and I are alone in working towards our purpose, no matter how insignificant a thing that might appear to be on paper. The Daemon is the captain of my vessel, while my ego-self, the thing I think of as me, is more the sole deckhand, as we sail the tempestuous seas of fate and mischance.

But where does this leave you?

In the working out of my journey are you merely the personification of my own fate and mischance, to be used by my captain as an object lesson – friends, lovers, family,… ill or well met, the whole damned lot of you? And how about the man who talks to himself on the bus, and whom I’d rather avoid? Is he a God in disguise, come to test my own godliness, my own compassion? Are you all merely the humours and the godlings come to test and steer, as in those old Greek stories.

Are you not really there at all?

Perhaps I should have listened more to those Greek myths as a child, for as Hillman teaches, there’s probably many a metaphorical clue in there I’ve missed that would be of help to me now. But the Greeks, like Hillman are not exactly an easy read, and diligence seems rewarded with only more questions, while the answers, far from clear, seem lacking altogether.

Or I could just leave it to the Daemon, and hope I’m on the right path anyway. Then none of it matters and the acorn of my life will, out in spite of all my protestations to the contrary.

I leave you with a taste of the late great, Dr James Hillman (1926-2011):

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The most vital issue of the age?

My dream takes on the sound of the sea and the feeling of a warm night. At some point Rebecca and I have spooned up, and even through my closed eyes, I know her by her heat and by her scent. And keeping my eyes closed I carry with me the impression of dawn breaking, and of waking with her beside me still.

My spirits lift.

It’s enough, and I don’t care where we are now, nor what point in time we have emerged back into an ordinary waking reality, so long as we are together. But the sea is still washing on the shore, a reminder of last night’s dream, also harbinger of the fact I have not truly woken, that I am likely still dreaming. Then someone is touching my arm and I open my eyes to see Emma crouched in the sand, looking tenderly down.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she says.

I turn to Rebecca but she’s no longer there. She’s waking, somewhere, and I find myself once more alone in the dreaming, with Emma. I’m afraid, because Emma is usually the herald of much strangeness, and I can bear it no more. I want simplicity. Pray God, I want the coherence of a single line in time. I must escape her.

I must!

I cannot force myself awake, and dare not ask it of the dream to take me back in time again, though ironically this seems the easier thing to do if the last occasion is anything to go by. Instead, I do the next best thing, the safer thing; I close my eyes and ask it of the dreaming for a change of scene. But even as I feel the giddiness of the transition, I am aware of Emma’s hand upon my arm; it is therefore no surprise when I open them to find she’s still there.

“You must be wide awake to loosen my grip,” she says. “And you are not for waking yet. You’re so tired of the world and all that’s in it; it’ll be a while longer, I’m afraid. If ever. But what is this, my love? Anyone would think you did not trust me any more.”

I do not like it, the suggestion I may never wake up. I wish she would go easy on me, but that is not her purpose.

We are back in the mythic levels, as we were before, the pair of us seated in Sunday best, upon a cold flat rock by night, facing the lake. I did not ask for this location, and why the dreaming thinks it is important I do not know, other than the fact it is but one step removed from Rebecca and her prayers for deliverance. Is that where she’s gone now? Is she not waking to a fresh dawn somewhere, but still sleeping, like me? And is she still dreaming of delivering the world, through her ministry?

I need the protection of my girls.

They are already disembarking from the skiff; bronze breastplates glinting beneath cloaks of Phoenician purple. They draw swords and fan out cautiously, prepared to do my bidding, but looking all the while hesitant, unsure, as if afraid I would command them injure a vital part of my self. Then Emma’s own entourage emerges from the shadows, all leather Basques and straps, and fishnets and whips, like a comical teen fantasy.

My girls draw swords, Emma’s unfurl their whips.

Emma laughs. “Gracious, what a curious stand-off. How shall we resolve it, I wonder?”

She yields, lets go of my arm. Her girls withdraw into the shadows. My own sheathe their swords and step back to the shore. I see the glitter of relief in their eyes.

“There,” she says. “That’s better. Now we can talk.”

“Please,… no more talk, Emma. Can’t you see how overwhelmed my senses are with all of this?”

“Then let me show you something,” she says. “It shall make all things clear at last. And afterwards, I’ll let you wake up. I promise.”

Thus the scene is set for the denouement of my story. We’re a hundred and fifty thousand words in, so it’s been a long time coming. What will Emma show me that’ll make everything clear and lead me into the final chapters? I can’t say, and for the simple reason that, although I am the author of this story, I don’t know, because she has not told me.

What she has told me is that a damaged life is not a ruined one, that it is upon the whetstone of adversity the human spirit is most keenly sharpened. Yet, naturally, if given the opportunity to invent our own realities, we would edit out all forms of adversity, all forms of pain. We would invent for ourselves a paradise of pleasure. But pleasure is a thing we do in resting. Adversity, suffering, is the thing we do for a living. We cannot help ourselves. Lives are broken on its harsh anvil, while others are made more meaningful, and rise more beautifully from the ashes of suffering, redeemed, enlightened,…

And eternity is a long time to be spent merely resting in pleasure.

Is any of this true?

What’s true is the world is a place of immense suffering, and at times it’s impossible to see the good in it. Our ignorance sows an ever more bitter harvest, one spotlighted with brutal efficiency by our global news media, which shall surely one day put a camera on the very tip of a bullet. A hundred years ago, we were less aware of the suffering in the greater world, unlike now, when there is no end to the live commentary by which we might probe its ills, from the very comfort of our living rooms. And our analysis reveals what? That the innocents run from the juggernaut path, that it careens blindly, scorching vast swathes of the earth, returning them to barbarism. Our capacity for the creation of suffering immense, yet seemingly the work of mere moments of madness. Conversely our ability to subvert the suffering of the world is pitifully weak, itself fraught with conflicting opinions. And it is the work of generations.

But if we could realise the dream, what kind of earth would it be? Easy, one might say. There would be no living in fear of our neighbour; there would be plenty to eat, and everyone would possess a secure roof under which to make love and nurture children. Returned to such an Eden, we might then vent our energies and our intellect in the creation of what? Great works of art to uplift the spirit? Contemplation of God’s will? In such a world no man need fear being anything other than his true self, and he would certainly not fear his neighbour might rob him of his goods, or his life.

From such a secure foundation, a man might then exercise his ingenuity, coupled with his spiritual instincts, and all so he could explore the million and one ways he might do good, and express his loving nature in the world.

But Eden has fallen.

In schizophrenia, the sufferer experiences a breaking through of unconscious energies from deep within the collective mind. They manifest as voices, as a dire urges, as a debilitating cacophony of destructive thought that burst with uncontrollable fervour upon the defences of the personality. They overwhelm us. Literally, they swallow us in madness. And these energies are amoral, grotesque, irrational, the very antithesis of order and calm. We see this too in the world, this breaking through of hitherto unimagined disorder. We see it night after night on our TV screens – a veritable daemonic orgy of death, destruction, and the ever more imaginative ways one human being can do harm to another.

One might have thought ten thousand years of civilisation would have yielded some defence, a key, a wise philosophy by which we might all live in harmony, and in doing so turn back the tide. But if such a philosophy exists, we have rendered it in so many layers of myth by now we can do no more than argue over its interpretation. Meanwhile the earth burns; and the pace of this awful breaking through of banshees from the dark depths accelerates.

As with schizophrenia, there is no cure for what ails man’s dominion over the earth. It might be controlled somewhat, moderated in its worst excesses by targeted therapies, but the overall prognosis is rarely positive. It is something we have to live with, something we must manage as best we can.

Is it this, the thing Emma would show me?

Would she take me on a tour of Bedlam to show me only the hopelessness of it, the absence of any cure to mankind’s most pernicious malaise? One might be tempted to say yes, except there are some humans who dare to look the daemons in the eye as they tear screaming though the gates of hell, and to ask them their names. If these are the denizens of the nether world, their residence in that abode seems only to have rendered them all the more destructive to a higher purpose. And the more we dream of Utopia, the more we seem only to feed their appetite for chaos and destruction.

But is Emma not herself a daemon?

She has all the qualifications, existing solely in imagination, her form rising from the archetypal foundations of the psychical sub-stratum of experience. Semi-autonomous, she draws me into her world, reveals to me forms that are infinitely malleable to my will. Meanwhile her brethren invade my own realm to torch the forms I cherish, to torment the living even as they flee from the shadows. And she reveals to me how readily I would escape the world, escape the madness, when my place is still firmly rooted in it.

“It is as Lao Tzu taught us,” she says, “that a man stands most strongly when he has one foot in the outer, and one foot in the inner world.”

If we shut ourselves off from the inner world, it’s excesses will lay waste to the physical, to the world of forms. Its energies exist, whether we believe in them or not, and their natural tendency is to flow into the world, through us, regardless of our will. If they do so, untempered by our communion, the result will be a world always falling to chaos, no matter how carefully or rationally we have built it. If we turn our backs on the physical, sink back into the inner world from whence we came, seek escape in our dreams, we will lose our selves, and our purpose, and all meaning, in its infinite possibilities.

I have betrayed my kind. I have betrayed my self.

“Time to wake up,” she says. “You’ll be late for work.”

And then, as she said to me at the very opening of my story:

“The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge.”

Sri Aurobindo 1872-1950

So, after all of that, am I any nearer my conclusion?

Don’t count on it.

Thanks for listening.

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Letters to my muse.

I’ve been trying to define more clearly this idea of an inner voice or, what in more traditional religious parlance, might be called a guiding spirit. The evidence suggests these entities do not serve only the religiously inclined, that you can be entirely secular in your outlook and the inner voice will still speak to you. It’s simply a question of knowing it’s there, respecting that presence, and having the courage to talk to it.

It’s just a pity that talking to yourself is something that’s not encouraged in adults. Even children who claim kinship with an imaginary “friend” are likely to have that relationship beaten out of them by parents keen to raise perfectly sane and normal offspring. After all, hearing voices in your head is a clear sign of mental illness, isn’t it?

 Well, yes and no.

 Certainly the schizophrenic sometimes hear voices. They’re usually negative and critical of the sufferer, and those voices will seem quite real. But to the non schizophrenic, the voices are not taken as being literally real; they always belong to the imagination, to the mysterious unconscious realms and do not break through into reality as auditory hallucinations. The non schizophrenic does not believe in their literal existence, but rather he accepts their non-literal reality. And the conversations always take place in the imaginal hinterland of some form of controlled fantasy. It is in the safe middle ground, the rich liminal zones of such imagined realities, that we meet our daemons.

 Of course, it helps if you’ve gone off the mental rails at some point: suffered from depression, or dodged the symptoms of anxiety for the best years of your life. If you have, then you’ll more easily appreciate how readily the mind can have a physical effect upon your body, manifesting dramatic symptoms than can convince you you’re about to have a heart attack, collapse in a fainting fit because you can’t draw breath, or they’ll pump the sweat out of you and have you dripping wet and embarrassed to be in the company of other people.

The question is why? Why does the mind do this? Is it purely pathological, or is it something else?

Is the mind trying to tell us something?

Depression and anxiety tend to go hand in hand with a negative self-image. We also tend to see the world in negative terms. Life is shit and then you die. But life doesn’t need to be like that, indeed the only world that’s coloured dark with such negative hues is the one you’ve invented for yourself. It’s tricky territory; your unconscious mind is apparently attacking you, trying to overwhelm you, but if you could only see your way towards engaging with this seemingly mad beast, then things can suddenly get a lot better.

 But how do you develop this relationship?

 The nature of the unconscious is hidden from us. We don’t know what it is, nor even for sure where it is, and in order to get any sort of handle on it, we have to start personifying the various bits of it that we encounter. On the downside this has the effect of oversimplifying it, while at the same time running the risk of our over-literalising it, and imagining little fairies running about all over the place, but we have to start somewhere.

 For a man, the most frequent and reliably identifiable emissary from the unconscious is the soul image, or the anima. We see her in dreams as an unknown woman. Of course the actual nature of our soul, the shape of it, the size of it, most probably doesn’t look anything like a woman, if it looks like anything at all. More likely it’s an abstract nothingness, a twist of psychical energy rising like a solar flare from the the ground of being, but in order to make sense of it we imagine it as a woman.

When I first began to get a handle on these ideas, around the turn of the millennium, I was doing it out of necessity, trying to burst the bubble of existential angst I’d been living in, and to salve the rat-bites of my last major blow-out. I was doing this mainly by reading Jung. Inspired by what I read, and amongst other things, equally strange, I began writing letters to my soul. I gave her a name that sounded right, invented a look borrowed from dreams, but one that was allowed to morph over time, and I placed her in another time, made her a Victorian lady who wrote and spoke with a peculiarly Victorian vocabulary.

We kept up our correspondence for several years.

I’d write to her about my anxieties and I’d sound her out on my half baked theories of the nature of consciousness. The really spooky part is that she would reply. All right – I know it was me actually penning her reply, that in playing her part, I was writing from inside the head of a fictional character. But the thing about my fictional characters is I never think about what they’re going to say. They just say it, and I’m often surprised by what they tell me.

Those letters would be very embarrassing of course, if they ever fell into the wrong hands; and anyone reading them would see only a middle aged man going steadily off the rails, while in fact what they reveal to me now is a middle aged man changing track and getting himself properly in gear for the first time in his life, leaving his demons behind and making the acquaintance of his daemons. And daemons are a much nicer bunch to have inside your head, but they bring changes in your conscious outlook, and you have to be prepared for that. For a start, you might just end up making friends with yourself, and seeing the world as an altogether brighter place. Some of those letters also brought with them a very real presence, and a sense of inner comfort I’d never known before. I remember penning one by lantern glow while camping by the shores of Ullswater, and it felt as if I’d only to turn my head and she’d be sitting there, watching me, smiling her reassurance. 

In my last blog piece I introduced you to Elizabeth Gibert, through her lecture on creativity, on You Tube. She spoke eloquently about the idea of a personal daemon, a muse, or a genius, being responsible for our creative output – a sentiment I agree with entirely. But these beings are not exclusive to artist types alone. If you’re comfortable with the idea of imaginative play, then these characters will come through to you, and they will help you.

You’ve only got to ask.

The reductionist human-behaviourists will scoff at all this psychobabble. They’ll point out my lack of relevant qualifications, and they’ll tell us our imaginations are nothing more than a biological mutation, one that gives us an evolutionary advantage over lesser creatures. In those dim, prehistory days, they’ll explain, we were able to plan our hunting expeditions in our minds. Our imagination therefore enabled us to place ourselves in a possible future, and to work through the “what ifs”, so preparing ourselves in advance for any eventuality. The creatures we were up against had no imaginations, reacted instinctively and in a largely predictable way. They became, literally, easy meat. My own rational training tells me I have to accept that this much is probably true. My personal experience of imagination however suggests it’s not the full story.

Okay, let’s get morbid for a moment: in the great scheme of things it makes little difference if I live or die. In all the pullulating turmoil of mankind’s petty presence here on earth, my own humble contribution to human endeavour is neither here nor there. Yet for all of my inability to influence human affairs, I do sense a possibly inappropriate importance to my presence, if not exactly to the world as it is, but at least to the world as I see and experience it. There is also a beguiling quality to the worlds I create inside my head.

My own interpretation of this apparent paradox, after over a decade of letters to my muse, is that I’m alive in two places at the same time: there is an inner and an outer world, and the inner world is the more abiding of the two. My daily existence is real enough, time-bound as it is, and filled with the nonsense of man’s making. My purpose in the world is to make my way as best I can in the circumstances I find myself, to discover a way of liking myself and seeing the world in a positive light – because only then can I manifest personal happiness and, through that, be capable of both giving and receiving love. It seems a tall order at times, because at times circumstances can be testing, but although I’m physically alone here, I am not without back-up. There are voices I can call upon. Their counsel is always wise – and not necessarily of a spiritual nature.

It can also be surprisingly prosaic.

Six months ago I developed a peculiar rash on the backs of my hands. It wasn’t painful, or itchy or anything, just a little unsightly. I took it to show the sawbones who had no idea what it was. He gave me some cream, which I tried for a month, but the rash continued to spread. Was it stress? Was it some kind of allergic reaction?

I remember turning to my inner self one day, to that imaginary daemon, and saying: Look, I’ve tried everything here and this rash is really bugging me. Is there anything you can suggest? And the following day, while my head was off chasing butterflies in some other place, the answer came; it wasn’t a voice exactly, more of an idea, a flash of inspiration: you’re eating too much tuna fish.

 Tuna fish?

 It was true. When I thought about it, I realised I was eating tuna-fish every weekday at lunchtimes, because I love tuna fish and it was easily the tastier of offerings on the work’s canteens rather limited sandwich selection. I’d started doing this at the beginning of the year, due to a change in work routines, which was roughly when the rash had begun. I’d simply got into the habit of it, without realising it. So, I stopped eating tuna fish and the rash had gone in a couple of weeks.

An inspired guess? Sure,  but where does inspiration come from? I’m happy personifying it.

For me the daemonic are fast becoming a non literal reality.

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Listening to the Universe?

So,… what’s the chicken telling me here?

I’m half way through reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love at the moment. I watched the film (twice) and enjoyed it both times, but even as I watched it, I was wondering to myself to what extent it differed from the book (which I’d not read) – because films always do that, don’t they? They miss a huge chunk of the real story out because it doesn’t fit into the cinematic way of telling things. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a link to You Tube of the author speaking about the writing process and the idea of the personal daemon, or muse, and was at once captivated by her wit and the marvellously easy way she was able to put across some of the very difficult concepts I’ve been wrestling with for years now:

So, after listening to that I no longer had any choice: I simply had to read the book! I found a ridiculously inexpensive Kindle edition on Amazon, and I’ve been enjoying it in snatches for about a week now.

The difference between the book and the film is perhaps no surprise (and there are some significant differences). I think the film glossed over a lot of the deep and meaningful stuff, a lot of the nitty-gritty that you just can’t get at with dialogue between photogenic characters or intimate voice-overs. You need that most timeless and basic of mediums: a page of text. You need a skilled journalist capable of peeling back the layers of themselves and one who’s capable of seeing themselves reflected in their surroundings, or rather one who is capable of reading what the universe is telling them, in a metaphorical way, simply by what’s in front of their eyes – and setting it down on paper in an accessible way, a way that makes your reader go aha!!

For those of you who don’t know, “Eat, Pray, Love” is the true story of an American journalist (Elizabeth Gilbert) whose life falls apart, and how she rebuilds it. Put simply, she does this by travelling, first to Italy, where she eats, to India, where she prays, and then to Indonesia, where she finds love. The real story is infinitely more complex than that of course, and you really need to read the book. It’s the story of a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage, and a psychological voyage into what Jungians would call the dark night of the soul.

I was thinking though that no matter how inspirational this book is to me at the moment, many of us travel through life without quite getting our lives turned to rubble. The black tide of depression comes in now and then, and washes up around our doorsteps but without quite drowning us in shit. We’re able to take shelter in the upstairs rooms for the night, but come morning, we’re just about able to stare down our demons and steer the car back in the direction of our day-jobs. We lack the intellect, the finances, the personal freedoms, or just the sheer balls to take ourselves way across to the other side of the world and immerse ourselves in something totally unfamiliar. Or it may be that we’d quite like to quit everything and devote a year of our lives to a cathartic experience of travel and inner soul searching. It may be that we think we’d really like to spend some time in an ashram in India, but,… well,… things just aren’t quite that bad, and that cataclysm we’re half expecting to overwhelm us just,… doesn’t. Not quite. So we don’t go.

Does this mean we’re not that serious about understanding our lives and our selves after all, not that serious about understanding what God is? Well, possibly, it does, but worse, does our timidity in the face of our life’s circumstances mean we are excluded from any chance of experiencing God’s grace – just because God didn’t destroy our lives and then kick us half way around the globe?

I think on this latter point the answer has to be no. Studies of religious or spiritual awakenings show they are a fairly egalitarian phenomenon – open to all. All right, the man in the street may not experience God’s presence as often nor so regularly as a genuine Yogi, but once we know how to listen, I think God or “the universe” can find all sorts of ways of getting his/its message across to us personally.

Which brings me to the rather goofy picture at the top of this post. It was raining this morning, and I was in a contemplative mood. I happened to notice a rather colourful display of late summer flowers on my patio. They were like sunshine laughing the face of the overbearing greyness of the day and I wanted to capture the mood of them through my camera lens. I know,… I keep trying this and it hardly ever works, but then sometimes you get more than you bargained for, if you can only look at things in a different way and perhaps broaden your perspective.

I was only notionally aware, as I focused in on those flowers, that I was focussing through two objects on either side, on my window-sill. They were just “foreground interest”, but I wasn’t actually interested in them in the slightest. I thought the main picture was somewhere else – like in the middle. But in the end the camera focussed itself on the raindrops on the window and blurred the flowers out, bringing my foreground into a more significant focus. The first of those foreground objects, on the left, is a rather ornate soap-stone incense burner. I use it when I’m meditating, or just chilling with a glass of wine, but its aura is undeniably one of spiritual contemplation and – well – navel gazing. On the other side of course there’s rather a cheeky chicken who’s been hanging around since Easter, never having made it back into his box in the attic, and which I can hardly look at without wanting to smile.

So, what’s the universe telling me here?

Well, you can read this many ways of course, and in some respects having a metaphorical perspective is simply a question of reading just about anything from anything. But to me it’s saying chill out Michael – don’t take yourself so seriously!

I reach for the Kindle and spend the rest of the day in the company of Elizabeth Gilbert.

Great stuff.

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