Member-only story
I Was The Donkey, I Was The Goat
A love story.
In a love relationship, as Jung once put it, you risk everything. You put yourself on a table, you stop the power game and the trying to dominate or conquer the other person. If you succeed in really loving the other person, if you really relate, then all sorts of miracles happen. But in the beginning stages a general state of blindness possesses you, illusions or wrong expectations, disappointments, recriminations. You have to work through all that first. And that’s how you become more conscious. I didn’t say it is agreeable. So if you don’t love the other, you run away after a while. — Marie Louise Von Franz
“You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there’s a way or a path, it is someone else’s path.”
– Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
I had to wander a long time in the country of swamps and quicksands of love. I experienced infatuation, I knew attachments based on illusion and false assumptions, on physical attraction only, on everything except real love, in fact. I was a lost wandering donkey braying at the moon.
Suddenly I was led out into a small clearing and tossed into the fires of the real thing, or rather something that could mutate into the real thing. It almost bucked me off several times, but I held on for dear life…
