Into the Woods

 

Carl Jung (Where else will you find a Sondheim and Jung reference together in an opening line?) wrote: “Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.” 

Jung believed that even a walk in nature stirs creativity. It is fitting that the Kroller-Muller Museum is

embedded in the Veluwe National Park where nature both inspires and displays the creative process. Walking through the corridors of the museum, Van Gough’s take on nature and the people who inhabit it seamlessly bursts out into the meandering gardens where art is as natural as the surrounding flora. The art installations are both organic and jarring. Much like the woodland encounters in many fairy tales they provoke a full range of dissonance and congruence, calm and disturbance, beauty and horror (try climbing 200 steps of an “art” installation). Some things belong, others wildly out of place… or so we think. The challenge of each encounter is to react and integrate rather than dismiss. I must confess to having been rather dismissive much of the time. Integration will have to wait …it takes time. 

It is while riding through the woods that I experience a more immediate and visceral encounter, an encounter with childhood memories. These are memories of exploring the untamed, undeveloped jungles of Miami with my best friend Gilbert. Every Saturday, and Sunday if I spent the night, we’d get on our Schwinn stallions to explore and lay claim to dense thickets of trees and leafy igloos of overgrown brush forming natural canopies that served as forts and hideouts. Carved initials in the trees formalized our righteous claims as we created a network of sites that housed many of our prized possessions: iron rail spikes rumbled loose by decades of train travel, fallen blue glass telephone pole insulators, granite stones and several years’ worth of Playboys carelessly tossed in what can best be described as a treasure trove. A day or two later and the massive claws that scoop up household trash piled in street gutters would have stolen our most valued art installation. Safely housed, we’d unfold, for hours, endless centerfolds, each one begging the question: What lay behind the strategically placed pearls, ferns, and raised thighs? While not quite “life’s deepest meaning and it’s awe-inspiring workings” they were challenge enough for our 10-year-old brains. Integration as it turned out, would take a while. 

Currently, integration seems to be a lost art. Reactions fail to result in integration. The immediacy of response has supplanted well balanced psyches. We encounter mysteries, challenges and people but only react. The immediacy of social media, the 24-hour barrage of breaking news leaves little time to make us whole. The meaning of life may not be as “incomprehensible” as we think, but it takes time, certainly more than a Sunday in the Park. 

As Jung says,

“People get dirty with too much civilization. Whenever we touch nature, we get clean."

Jim