A few nights ago, spring returned. In the Catskill Mountains of New York state, where I live, it’s a distinct moment, at dusk on the night when the spring peepers erupt into song. If you’ve not had the pleasure of experiencing peepers, they are tiny little woodland frogs that spend much of their lives living on the forest floor. Every spring, on the first warm night, they wend their way across leaf mold and even snow to find the nearest pool of still water.  And then they sing, with haunting shrill voices, loudly enough that if there are enough of them, you can feel your heart pound with the noise. Frogs emerge in cultures across the world as symbols of life and fertility, fortune, resurrection, and magic. They are both familiar and deeply strange, of both water and land, with faces and fingers that look, at different moments, both oddly human and oddly alien.  We are fascinated by them, at times squeamish of them, and at times amused by them. In the case of the Frog Prince, we may agree to kiss them, as the good little princess of Disney versions does, or hurl them against the wall in a last ditch effort to retain our autonomy as the not-so-good little princess of the Brothers Grimm version does. Or, in the Hindu version of frog and royalty, we may look on in horror as the frog maiden Bhekî’s king husband does when he gives her the water she told him never to give her, and she disappears, like the sun at night, back into the water where she was birthed. In Egyptian mythology, the Frog Goddess Heqet is a creator of life as the force that brings life into the womb, mirroring the regenerative life of the Nile as it blew past its banks each spring, bringing with it not only water and rich soil, but thousands of spring frogs. She was the patron of midwives, who called themselves ‘Servants of Heqet’ and protector of women giving birth, who often wore amulets of her as they went into labor.  But not simply a fertility and birth goddess, Heqet became a symbol of resurrection as she breathed life into Horus at the moment of his birth and his father Osiris’ death at the hand of his brother in the central myth cycle of Egyptian culture. Frogs are creatures of metamorphosis, beginning from egg to tadpole with tail and gills, and then on to frog with legs and lungs as they move from their watery womb birthplace onto land.  What an extraordinary process to muse on, and to break open our imaginings of how we may shift in our life times, finding fluid fluency in our shifting understandings of ourselves and the world around us. And in winter frogs hibernate, but it is no simple sleep of a tucked-in bear dreaming of summer berries. Instead, frogs freeze solid as rocks - a trick of glucose and ice crystals forming outside cells - and when they thaw on an early warm spring evening, make their way across the forest floor and find a pond or vernal pool. Literally and metaphorically, frogs rise from what looks and feels like death to sing spring into being. I hope you have a chance to hear the peepers this spring, and as you listen, hope that you might take a moment to imagine how the frog might sing of resurrections in your own life and world.

The most important and oldest date on the Christian calendar is the celebration of Easter, the death and resurrection of Christ. The whole of Christianity rests on this event and without it, Christian mythology simply doesn’t work. The name, Easter, is probably derived from a pagan German goddess named Ēostre, in whose name festivals were celebrated in a month that corresponds to April. Other traces of pagan spring fertility rites are evident in the warren of rabbits and the clutch of eggs attending Easter celebrations. And dying and rising gods were something of a commonplace in ancient times: Mithras, Adonis, Dionysus, Osiris, just to name a few. What sorts of insights might we take away from this familiar, nearly ubiquitous metaphor of dying and resurrecting gods? Some of course, like the Sumerian god Dumuzi, were linked to the seasons and were reborn in springtime, emergent new life personifying the seasonal cycles of vegetation. But the gods are not merely personifications of nature, they can be understood as symbolic psychic energy as well. In fact C.G. Jung writes, “Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings” (Jung,  The Psychology of the Child Archetype , 154 ). In other words myths, for Jung, connect contemporary man to his own inner world, the world of personal meaning. This deeper discovery of self is the opportunity offered in central event of the Easter narrative, the crucifixion. Myth is impoverished when it is projected onto the material world as historical fact and reality; it loses its relevance, its power, its fascination, and the Christian myth is certainly no exception. Read symbolically and psychologically, the crucifixion of Jesus reflects an archetypal journey undertaken to realize the self. The self is fertilized, one might say, by a harrowing of psyche that includes polar, diametric shifts and reversals in perceptions and beliefs, sometimes so extreme that one loses any sense of subjective self-identity; ego functions are suppressed and familiar reference points are annihilated; panic may overcome rational thought, and death seems possible. However, if properly managed, a merging with the transcendent or the numinous may be the end result of the experience. The dynamism of the ongoing “harrowing” eventually equilibrates a well-balanced system; one feels as if one has been reborn. As a matter of fact, Jesus refers to the rite of baptism as a form of rebirth and to his death on the cross as a baptism: “But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am straightened till it be accomplished” (Luke 12:50). Jesus compares the woe of his own death to the pangs and hardships of birth. But this new life isn’t simply a new physical, material existence, rather it is a psychological rebirth facilitated by introspection and reflection—attitudes that are commonly illustrated by the motif of descent. One may make the argument that it was a psychological hell to which Jesus descended and remained in for three days after surrendering to the process. New life coalesces in one’s own depths, and these depths constitute a form of psychological hell. “The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deep into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to  Hades ” (Jung,  Religious Ideas in Alchemy , par. 439 ). During the late 350’s C.E. the Apostles’ Creed was solidified and the words agreed upon to describe Christ’s descent into hell were “… decendit ad inferna ,” descent into the grave (the word grave may mean serious and dangerous, and gives itself to the word gravid, or pregnant) rather than the more literal  decendit ad infernos , decent into hell. Jung’s  Hades  and the use of the word  inferna  are non-literal moves to describe a decent into serious, dangerous psychological territory, a place of rebirth and a new life, new life that we may have more abundantly. I hope you enjoy the Easter season and the call into your own depths.

April 1st, April Fool’s Day, is a day traditionally set aside for playing tricks on people or hoaxing. Pranks and hoaxes range from the very clever, like the BBC’s “ spaghetti harvest " or an article in the April 1998 issue of New Mexicans for Science and Reason suggesting that the Alabama legislature had decided that Pi should be changed from 3.14 to 3.0 bringing it closer to the "biblical value,” to the old hackneyed pranks of gluing coins to sidewalks or floors or filling Oreos with toothpaste. Celebrations of hilarity and good humor date back to ancient Greece and Rome, but one of the earliest instances of specifically April foolery,  poisson d’avril , dates back to the 15th Century and includes attaching a paper fish to an unaware victim’s back; a kind of medieval “kick me” sign. April Fool’s pranks may sometimes have a dark side, it seems, and may smack a bit of humiliation and a, well, smug manipulation of the credulous and the uncomplicated. These two qualities in particular, credulousness and an uncomplicated simplicity, constitute the heart of the fool. In the plays of Shakespeare one finds any number of apparent simpletons who speak incisively and truthfully about the nature of life, of love, and of politics. Like Nick Bottom, fools are often possessed of a “most rare vision,” a vision that makes sense of a mixed-up world, a world that has been turned upside down by greed, cruelty, and fear. The fool, in his nonsense, his glibness, his often slapstick manner, is able to speak uninhibitedly and frankly to the truth, thus setting the world aright again. By identifying the foolish, society’s anxieties find an outlet in laughter as well as a welcome reassurance that one is not, oneself, a fool. But if one looks more deeply, one may find in foolishness a profound critique of the sociopolitical forces that conspire to make one foolish. The fool offers an effective critique of society because s/he understands existence experienced from the inside out rather than the societally sanctioned outside in. The fool is aware (and brings the fact into our awareness, too) that those who judge her have never deeply examined their own lives and have no way of understanding  différance  except to call it foolishness or asinine. Beneath the fool’s unconventional, sometimes shocking, behavior, one finds a deep wisdom. Marie von Franz connected the fool with “…a part of the personality, or even of humanity which remained behind and therefore still has the original wholeness of nature” ( Lectures on Jung’s Typology , 1971 ). In the Tarot deck, the fool is the first of the major arcana and bears the number zero. Zero first appeared in the early 2nd Millennium B.C.E. in Egypt, and only found its way to Europe in the 11th century. The concept of zero is a little mind blowing in that it presents the apparent paradox of nothing being something, a “nothing” that actually occupies space. Zero is a whole, rational, and real number that has power mathematically and denominatively, and even imaginally. When one considers zero’s circular shape, one naturally imagines ideas such as totality, wholeness, and a universal, all-encompassing vessel within which everything is in harmonious relationship with everything else. A fool, then, is well suited to take on the task of revealing truth—a project so fraught with danger and misunderstanding that who but a fool would propose to do such a thing? And the workshop of the fool, the place in which he conjures his particular reconciling, healing magic, is the human heart; the undiscovered country at the center of the empty circle, zero. The fool’s genius works for all of us, helping us understand that hidden in what appears to be nothing, is a very important something. Apprehended in this way, the fool’s reply to King Lear makes perfect sense: “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” Thanks for reading.

In the Zoroastrian religion  Nowruz , the new day, is perhaps the most important day on the Zoroastrian calendar (it also marks the Persian new year) and is celebrated on, or near, the spring equinox. Much of what is known about Zarathustra, in addition to his vital dates, has been lost to the mists of time. What does remain is the religion he founded, its traditions, and his followers. Zoroastrianism was once one of the most powerful religions in the world, but is now one of the smallest, probably consisting of less than 190,000 followers worldwide (according to a  New York Times  2006 article ). By way of comparison, Christian religions as a whole have over two billion followers.  Zoroaster, as he was known to the ancient Greeks, was the “reputed founder of the Persian religion” (Plato,  First Alcibiades ) and thought by them to be something of a magician. Zoroastrianism was, in all likelihood, the first attempt at monotheism; Zarathustra was its prophet and Ahura Mazda, a creator god, was its divine object of worship. Zarathustra’s teachings focused on free will, heaven and hell, resurrection of the body, final judgement, and an afterlife; teachings which are doubtless familiar to a contemporary monotheistic ear. Zoroastrian tradition holds that Zarathustra lived to 77 years and 40 days, though there is some debate around the manner of his death and even a suggestion that he may have been murdered by a priest of a religion Zoroastrianism supplanted. I first encountered Zarathustra reading Frederick Nietzsche’s philosophical, poetic novel,  Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book For All and None  published between 1883 and 1891. Nietzsche himself was a brilliant classicist/philologist, and surely knew of Zarathustra from his study of ancient Greek texts by authors such as Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and Agathias Scholasticus in addition to Plato. I can’t imagine that these references did not spur him on to further study and research into the figure of Zarathustra, especially since it occupies such a place of primacy in Nietzsche’s  oeuvre . He writes, “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the  Ubermensch—a rope over an abyss …,” the  Ubermensch  being the example of “self-overcoming,” self-direction, and self-cultivation. The Ubermensch is not an end nor the goal of human evolution, but rather is a journey, a journey from one’s animal nature to self-mastery. For Nietzsche, the point of undertaking such a journey is to develop radical self-acceptance, acceptance through which one learns to embrace all the horrors, pains, and joys of one’s life and living; it is a way of living he calls, “Amor Fati,” the love of one’s own fate. In his interviews with Bill Moyers ( The Power of Myth ) Joseph Campbell referred to the prologue of  Thus Spoke Zarathustra  to introduce his notion of “following your bliss,” an idea very similar to Nietzsche’s  Amor Fati , and a very difficult and challenging path to follow indeed. To live the life of  Amor Fati , to follow one’s bliss, means to aspire to live life as consciously as possible, not rejecting any aspect of life or wishing it to have been different, not even in the smallest detail. Living in this way re-enchants one’s world, and such a re-enchantment is possible only when one strives to live at the edges of oneself, fully immersing oneself in the life one has, the only life available for one to live.

Why do we tell stories about quests? In traditional, warrior cultures, such tales make a certain practical sense: they're a way to give a sense of purpose to young men who have nothing to do except wait around until it's time to fight someone else. But that doesn't explain why such stories still have a hold on us. Why are we drawn into stories about adventures? Why the fascination with journeys traveled by characters like Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen (in the Hunger Games books) or Elizabeth in The Crown or the fabulously named Chiron in Moonlight? Joseph Campbell would tell us that these are all hero journeys, following the schema that he laid out in his ground-breaking book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His claim was that this story structure is all but literally hard-wired into the human brain — that we tell stories this way because stories that follow this pattern — or acknowledge the pattern before breaking it — release transformative psychological power. But that still begs the question: what, psychologically, do these stories do for us? There are many theories on this subject. Artists often are less concerned by the psychological or physiological causes for the power of the hero journey cycle, and more concerned in the fact that it does work to create transformative experiences. Publishers and film producers and video game companies are simply happy to know that the Hero Journey cycle works to make cash flow in their direction. Yet we still wonder: aside from some accident of neurological structure, where do these stories of quest and adventure come from? One possibility is that it is a symptom of basic human psychology. In life as humans have lived it since we started settling into towns and cities, none of us is ever truly able to experience the full spectrum of the life that we can live. To use a 1960s term that my parents would approve of, we aren't ever able to fulfill our human potential . We make choices — or our psyches push us in certain directions — and those paths we walk close off other paths to us. If we are fortunate, we are at least content if not happy with those paths. If we are less fortunate, all of our hopes and desires come to be frustrated and disappointed. In either case, there comes a time in every life when the world in which we walk — the choices in which we have hemmed ourselves — comes to feel barren. To use Campbell's term, our life begins to feel inauthentic . We are in the Waste Land. And suddenly, up wells the desire to fulfill all of that potentiality that we ignored. Did you focus on love  at the expense of achievement? Family and safety at the expense of adventure? Money at the expense of intimacy? Whatever part of our own psyche we have allowed to lie fallow or whatever dearly held wish has been withheld from us, that now becomes the boon, the treasure that we seek. In reading books or watching movies (or playing games or riding waves or...) we quest for that which we have lost: ourselves.

A week ago, I found myself at that hard moment of freeing my eighteen-year-old cat from a body that was failing her. From the moment of her choosing me at a California animal rescue, our lives have been a dance of longing and fulfillment, of joy and loss. My dogs come to me outstretched and quivering, waiting for my approval, the “house broken, domesticated deities” that never demand anything from us that Belden Lane decries in  The Solace of Fierce Landscapes . Mia was innately unbroken, deeply wild, and full of a superb indifference.  She not only resisted being sentimentalized, she outright refused it, often with something that amounted to a glitter of humor at my insecure need to gain her approval.  She never sought mine. But every morning, as the first shards of light began to pierce through my curtains, she would jump lightly on my chest, purring me awake.  I learned to move slowly (if at all) in response to her, gently reaching a hand up to pet her.  If I moved too fast or loved too hard, she would slip flame-like to the floor and be off on her morning adventures.  But if I moved quietly, and offered myself to her rather than trying to take her, we could lay for hours, until our breath became fused and I would be stilled into patience at the wonder of it. Those moments of grace were both of fierce joy and discipline, and began to teach me about the nature of wildness. We cannot want too hard. If we wish too noisily, we scare the fish, the deer takes flight, the clouds scud in heavy over the moon.  We cannot actively seek the moments where our longing for oneness with Nature is fulfilled; we can only place ourselves in the ready, to receive the grace when it comes. In those moments, Mia would become a flash of Artemis herself, seen from the corner of my eyes but never fully realized, stroked but never clutched. Wolfgang Geigerich’s exploration of the myth of Actaeon and Artemis at the bath in  The Soul’s Logical Life   defines the story as a metaphor for joining the Other and the Self: becoming one with the wildness.  Geigerich suggests that to know that wildness, one must be destroyed in the process, as Actaeon was, but I have not been certain that the gap between what is human and what is wild could ever really be bridged, even with destruction. But there is another lesson: whether inside ourselves or in the world around us, wildness itself insists upon our commitment to metaphor.  We can never bridge the gap literally, not through taming, or destruction, nor any kind of dominion. We can find it, in a sideways glance, through the metaphor itself, and through the mythopoetics of love. That connection invites us not only to breathe into paradox but to celebrate the divine, complex innocence of losing Self and Ego through loving the wildness without expectation.  It is, perhaps, the only way that we can find that oneness. And in the paradoxical manner of the universe, I learn this lesson not by the spectacular, grandiose nature of Nature, but instead the quietly wild nature of a small gray cat.

We are all familiar with the trope of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, but the real St. Patrick was even more remarkable in real life than the pied piper we have come to know through a rather casual relationship with March 17th of each year. Patricius was kidnapped by Irish pirates sometime in the 5th century from his home in Great Britain when he was 16, taken to Ireland where he became a shepherd-slave to an Irish chieftain, Miliucc, and charged with the bitterly lonely, excruciatingly hungry life of guarding his master’s goats or sheep. He took this opportunity to return to, and deepen his Christian faith, becoming, I think, something of a mystic. After six years of isolation and hardship, a mysterious dream voice told him, “Your hungers are rewarded; you are going home” ( Confessio ). He arose, made a long, treacherous journey to the Irish Sea, found passage on a ship, and sailed back to England. After finding himself comfortably at home and reunited with his family, he has another vision in which he is handed a “letter,” the heading of which simply says, “ VOX HIBERIONACUM ,” the voice of the Irish. He develops a desire to return to the pagus , the uncultivated Irish countryside, and walk among the pagans who, to civilized Romans such as Patricius’ family, were the uncivilized, unreliable, threatening inhabitants of the pagus . He is ordained a priest and later a bishop and becomes, in all probability, the first missionary bishop of the Roman Church. Once he returns to Ireland, Patricius finds that he loves this place and these people, these raucous, crude, exuberant Irish; he refers to them lovingly as his “warrior children.” He became one of them, he identified himself as Irish and felt his Irishness down to the depths of his soul. And while he never did, in fact, drive the snakes out of Ireland, he did almost singlehandedly transform Ireland in other ways. He attacked the slave trade with a passion that only a former slave could possess, and by the end of his life (or shortly thereafter) slavery was no longer an undisputed reality, and in fact murder and other forms of violence that had been commonplace in Ireland greatly declined. The important thing for me, contemplating the life of Patricius, is not the mythology surrounding him; driving snakes out of Ireland, using a shamrock as a parable, or even his walking stick growing into an Ash tree. What’s important to me is understanding that sometimes, while in the midst of living one’s familiar, commonplace life, we can be abducted by our own life’s purpose and subjected to hardship and grief. These violent psychological, and sometimes physical tribulations, while presenting us with all sorts of problems, are perpetrated upon us by our own futurity—our own life’s purpose or meaning—reaching back to us, manhandling us, and roughly placing us upon our own life’s path. I don’t think it would be wrong to think of this as one of the modi operandi of bliss.

In Ovid's  Metamorphoses,  we read story after story of a human (or demi-human) encountering the gods and being literally transformed by the experience. The stories generally come in one of two flavors: the human is ready for the experience and transcends his or her mortal bonds, or isn't ready... and is destroyed by the transformation. You can see the same pattern in stories told around the world and across the ages. Though we don't always recognize them as such, we still tell those stories. I've been thinking about this recently, because I've just finished editing a book about Arthurian romances — stories that feature knights and ladies bashing up against divine forces and either rising to their challenge or being destroyed by them. It's easy to see the stories of the Holy Grail as picking up Ovid's themes: they are explicitly stories about heroes' quests for apotheosis — about human knights like Galahad and Parzival struggling to and ultimately succeeding in coming face to face with transcendent power. These stories differ: the Galahad quests are explicitly Christian, while Parzival's is humanistic. Nonetheless, each is the tale of a mortal meeting the divine and surviving. The romances that we'd sooner recognize as  romances  usually tell the other kind of story: the terrible, beautiful story of Tristan and Isolt is about a young couple who drink a magic love potion and are consumed by it. And yet it's interesting to wonder whether this couple — like Romeo and Juliet — would have chosen not to have their lives destroyed, if the price were to give up their love. There's a reason that the ancients identified Love as a powerful god — Plato claimed that Eros was the eldest of the Olympians. We like to see love as a positive, comforting force. Yet in order to understand it, we have to embrace the idea that, like all transcendent forces, the flame of Love can be as destructive as it is empowering. The Sufi poet al-Hallaj expresses an image that unites the two experiences. He said that the mystic (like the lover) approaches his divine Beloved like a moth to the flame. He knows that the experience will destroy him, but it will unite him with his love: "The light of the flame is the knowledge of reality, its heat is the reality of reality, and Union with it is the Truth of the reality." ( The Tawasin of Mansur al-Hallaj ) He is echoing Tristan's declaration (or rather, Tristan is echoing al-Hallaj): "What the death of which you tell is to be, I do not know; but  this  death suits me well. And if delightful Isolt is to go on being my death this way, then I shall gladly court an eternal death." ( Tristan & Isolt , lines 12463-12502).

Shivaratri , The Great Night of Shiva, is celebrated this year on the 24th of February, the 6th night of the  Phalgun , and devotees fast and maintain vigil all night. This, the largest of Shiva celebrations, centers on the tradition which allows that on this night, Lord Shiva performed the  Tandava , the dance that is the source of the cycles of creation, dissolution, and destruction. Tradition also holds that it was on this day that Shiva and Parvati were married. Religious penance may be found during  Shivaratra  through a night long practice of meditation and yoga. Various scholars have noticed similarities between Shiva and other Greek deities; even Alexander the Great called Shiva the “Indian Dionysus” and his phallic symbolism is shared by Nordic, Irish, and Roman gods as well. In Vedic scriptures, Shiva is very much like Rudra, the god of the storm. The Rigveda says that Rudra has two natures, one destructive and sometimes cruel, the other peaceful and kind. Shiva, as we have come to know him, may be a conflation of Rudra and many older gods into the single figure familiar to us today as a god of paradox, a god of mystery, and a god of, perhaps, unlimited power—a power to create as well as to destroy.The familiar image of four-armed Shiva dancing within a ring of fire perfectly captures all the paradoxical oppositions that are unified in the contemplation and understanding of this image: creation-destruction, temporality-eternity, masculine-feminine, and more. This image of Shiva, Nataraja, is known as The Lord of the Dance, specifically the dance of the energies that create, preserve, and destroy the universe. The ring of fire surrounding him is representative of the cosmic fire that creates and annihilates everything and incorporates the cycles of reincarnation governing human existence as well as the cosmic cycles of the Yugas, the ages of time that are also repeated. The fire also represents the evils and joys—dangers, knowlege, and warmth—of daily living. Nataraja is also possessed of a Mona Lisa like smile connoting his calm pleasure at finding himself in the center of the sublime forces of the universe swirling around, in, and through him. Living a human life well inevitably requires us to dance with the vicissitudes of existance, pressing our limited human will as far as we are able and then, when we find we are at the edges of ourselves, to let go and allow ourselves to be led in the dance until we find another path to follow, taking the lead once more and following that new path as far as we can and submitting once more to fate, to the inescapable cycles of life and the demands of living. Living life this way, in full relationship to the nature of existence is demanding, rigorous, and exacting, but the more one enters the dance, the more one may experience the difficult pleasures found therein, and people just might wonder what you’re smiling about.

The origins of Valentine’s Day are a bit murky, but they seem to reach back far into the early Roman celebrations of Romulus and Remus and the fertility festival of Lupercalia celebrated at the ides of February, or the 15th of February. Lupercalia was itself a modification of another, even older (dating back to Etruscan or Sabine cultures) springtime cleansing ritual, Februa, which lent its name to the month of the year. Later, as Christianity was emerging in the Empire, there were several Christian martyrs named Valentine or Valentinus in the first few centuries of the early Church and one of them, perhaps even all of them, were remembered in the celebration of a feast day named in their honor and placed on the 14th of February in the familiar modus operandi of the Christian Church to coopt venerable pagan celebrations, rename and redefine them in Christian terms and significance in order to make the new celebration seem familiar and facilitate a broader acceptance of Christianity. I am particularly fond of one legend that describes an imprisoned, and doubtless soon to be martyred, Valentine sending a greeting of love to a young girl with whom he fell in love while he was incarcerated, and he signed the missive, “From your Valentine.” Not only is this a sweet story that explains the continued use of the phrase, but it also points out the rather painful aspects of love (I recall Joseph Campbell remarking in Reflections on the Art of Living, that romantic love is an ordeal), aspects one would rather overlook in exchange for contemplating the more exhilarating, self-affirming, blissful aspects of love. Loving another, and communicating that love, is often not easy; especially if the thrilling, enthralling, novelty of love has settled into a predictable familiarity, and perhaps just such a communication is something that Valentine’s Day affords. Among the modern symbols and images of Valentine’s Day, one in particular stands out: the honeybee-winged, infant Eros clumsily holding his wee bow and tiny arrows, arrows that should they find their mark, one wouldn’t notice any more than the sting of a mosquito. This image of Eros—infantile, small, impotent, speechless, dependent, and incapable of adult, especially sexual, relationships—may well represent an unconscious, neurotic orientation to love that is gaged by the value of the gifts bestowed and the hackneyed, greeting card folderol that passes for poetry, and alerts us to the fact that, culturally speaking, we don’t want to work too hard at love. Compare the Valentine’s Day Eros to the Eros depicted in ancient Greek culture: Eros was among the oldest of the gods, fully mature, robust and muscular, bearing angelic golden wings, and as sculpted by Praxiteles, heart renderingly beautiful. Hesiod, in his Theogony, writes that it is the influence of Eros—of love—that first gives form to the universe. His arrows also wound, and thereby give form to the human heart, sometimes causing an aversion to the beloved, other times kindling love, and even the greatest of the gods were not immune to his influence. This Eros is hardly a powerless child, and one must wonder how ideas of love would change if this was the image of Eros we were faced with each February 14th. Encountering the Eros of Hesiod or Praxiteles, one encounters the often disorienting, disturbing nature of the sublime, and the difficult pleasures of the sublime are never more present than when one becomes vulnerable enough to love deeply, unhesitatingly, and wholeheartedly.

New Year's is, traditionally, the time set aside for reflecting on the year just past and setting goals and making resolutions for the year to come. It is a curious emotional position in which to find oneself, not quite out of the old year and not fully engaged in the new, a liminal space leaving one betwixt and between, attempting to resolve the conflict between past memory and future ambition--just the thing New Year’s resolutions ideally do if we can realize them. The month of January was named for Janus, who was the unique (he had no Greek precedent), ancient (some scholars find a relationship to Romulus), and very important Roman god whose numerous and elaborate rituals acknowledged his influence over thresholds, transitions, endings and beginnings, gateways, passages, and time. His two-faced image was what one first saw in preparation for entering the most significant gate to the Eternal City, Rome, called the Ianiculum, the old face of Janus looking into the past, into death, even, while his young face is turned to the future and possibility. One might think of his domain as eternity itself, replete with births and deaths, beginnings and endings, and all varieties of psychosociomorphic possibilities. In fact, Janus may may be thought of as the god of the gap, occupying the liminal space and offering solace to those of us caught betwixt and between. Thanks for taking the time to read this MythBlast.