January | 2016 | The Odd and Unmentionable

Here’s another great quote, only from Carl Jung.

“Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one.”

I ran across it this morning and it knocked my socks off because it so exactly describes the experience I kept having while working with the dying. It appeared so obvious in that setting, the luminousness.

I mean it was fascinating enough watching all the tricks and ploys life uses to extricate itself from the bodies that have housed it for years and years, but what I wasn’t expecting was the faint radiance I kept seeing in people’s solar plexus towards the very end. It looked for all the world like the glow of a rising sun starting to burn off a dense morning fog.

San_francisco_in_fog_with_rays

(By Brocken Inaglory – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, $3)

I came to think of that radiance as life itself and it always changed me for a little while after I saw it, relieving me of some deep and nagging fear that I’m not usually aware I even feel. It was nice. This morning reminded me of it again, only this time as sandwiched between two great mysteries. How great is that?

Well done, Carl. Thanks.

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

What a beautiful and humorous summation of the paradox we all face!

I love this guy; author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little and an eccentric man who struggled at times with anxiety and depression. Like most writers it was hard for him to determine when a piece of writing was actually “done.” (The bane of rewriting for all of us, that one.) But unlike most writers, he would sometimes panic after slipping a finished manuscript into the mailbox and go to the Postmaster General at the Post Office begging to have it back. This anecdote always makes me feel a little more accepting of my own writing fears.

For a quick peek inside the brilliant, funny, and deeply humane mind of the man, here’s a brief letter he wrote for the editor of Charlotte’s Web:

E.B. White’s Fantastic Letter About Why He Wrote “Charlotte’s Web”.