Explore ongoing classes and immersive courses in Jungian psychology, symbolic life, dreams, fairy tales, and the imaginal. Whether you’re new to depth psychology or continuing your studies, these offerings invite careful attention to the psyche through discussions, reflection, and lived experience.
Living the Symbolic Life Monthly Commentaries Fairy Tale Class Six-Week Course Register
Living the Symbolic Life
A Monthly Gathering for Those Who Wish to Live More Deeply
“The symbolic life is not mastered. It is practiced.”
Meets Fourth Sunday of each month, 4:00 p.m. Tuition $40 per class
This is not an academic course, nor is it a certification program. It is a monthly gathering of people who share a common desire: to cultivate what C. G. Jung called the symbolic attitude. Together we explore those images that have accompanied humanity across centuries — not to master them, but to allow them to become companions in the continuing formation of our own consciousness.
A welcome from Dr. Wilkins
If you have found your way here, perhaps it is because you have begun to suspect that life speaks in more than facts alone. Perhaps a dream has remained with you long after waking. Perhaps a line of poetry has continued to echo in your thoughts, a fairy tale has refused to be forgotten, or an unexpected coincidence has quietly asked for your attention. Whatever has brought you here, I am grateful our paths have crossed.
For more than forty years, my work as a depth psychotherapist, psychiatric nurse practitioner, teacher, and writer has convinced me that the deepest questions of our lives are seldom answered by explanation alone. They are approached through relationship — with dreams, with stories, with works of art, with nature, with one another, and with those images that seem to know us long before we understand them.
Years ago, while studying at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Stephen Aizenstat offered an invitation that has remained with me ever since: Host the dream. Receive it with enough hospitality that it has an opportunity to reveal its own life before you begin asking what it means.
Over time I came to realize that this invitation extends far beyond dreams. Fairy tales ask for the same hospitality. So do myths, poems, works of art, synchronistic events, and the quiet experiences of ordinary life that unexpectedly remain with us. To live symbolically is, perhaps, to cultivate this same openness toward every image that seeks our attention.
Each month we gather around a single theme that invites conversation among dreams, fairy tales, mythology, poetry, psychology, philosophy, and the ordinary experiences of daily life. C. G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Homer, Shakespeare, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Grimm Brothers, contemporary writers, and many others become fellow participants in that conversation. Their voices are joined by my own reflections, shaped by decades of clinical practice, teaching, writing, and an ongoing dialogue with the imaginal world.
Rather than moving quickly toward conclusions, we practice something increasingly rare in contemporary life. We slow down. We remain with an image a little longer than is comfortable. We listen before we explain. We discover that understanding often arrives quietly, emerging from relationship rather than analysis.
During the past year, while preparing a presentation for Pacifica Graduate Institute, I believed I would be speaking about artificial intelligence. Instead, I found myself drawn toward a much older question. In an age increasingly shaped by information, speed, and technological sophistication, will we continue to cultivate those uniquely human capacities that no technology can replace? Will we continue to dream, to imagine, to contemplate, to wonder, and to remain faithful to those images that slowly shape a human life?
That question has become the heart of this gathering.
What you will find each month
- A thoughtfully curated Study Guide introducing the month’s theme.
- Reading selections from depth psychology, mythology, fairy tales, poetry, philosophy, and related literature.
- An original commentary that weaves the month’s conversation into a unified reflection.
- An annotated bibliography introducing the featured authors and texts.
- Questions for personal reflection, journaling, and group dialogue.
- Companion readings drawn from my own books and essays, including The Alchemy of Fairy Tales.
The readings are important, but they are not the destination. They are companions for the journey. The real work begins as you return to your own life, noticing dreams that linger, conversations that unexpectedly deepen, books that seem to find you at precisely the right moment, and those quiet synchronistic events that gently invite a broader way of seeing.
Joining the gathering
- Call or text. Reach me at 913-530-2802 and tell me which month you would like to begin. There is no application and no prior study required.
- Receive the details. I will send the Zoom link or the in-person address, along with the month’s Study Guide and readings, several days before we meet.
- Complete tuition. $40 per gathering, using the PayPal button below or by arrangement. You are welcome to come month by month.
If a gathering is full, or if you would prefer to begin in a later month, ask to be added to the list. I will write to you personally when a place opens.
Tuition is $40 per gathering. Payment can be made using the button below, or by arrangement.
Fairy Tale Class
Meets Second Thursday of each month, 7:00 p.m., on Zoom Tuition $30 per class
Each month participants gather to explore a selected fairytale through the lens of depth psychology and the Holographic Mind Model. Alongside the tale, students receive a dream to enrich discussion and deepen symbolic understanding. Drawing from my books, The Alchemy of Fairy Tales, the class examines the psychological patterns, archetypal images, and transformative themes woven into these stories. No additional reading or materials are required.
August The Bremen Town Musicians
Aging, Exile, Companionship, and the Life That Comes After Usefulness
Companion Tale The Bremen Town Musicians
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” — C. G. Jung
There are fairy tales that begin with a departure into the forest, a task imposed by a king, or a child driven from home. The Bremen Town Musicians begins more quietly, with four creatures who have grown old.
Each has lived within a familiar usefulness. The donkey carried, the dog hunted, the cat caught mice, and the rooster occupied his accustomed place in the household. One by one, each discovers that the world in which that usefulness mattered no longer has a place for the creature he or she has become.
Yet the tale does not ask them to become young again. It does not restore what has been lost. Instead, an unlikely image appears: Bremen.
As you read the tale, allow Bremen to remain an image before deciding what it means. Notice the animals. Notice when they meet. Notice the light, the house, the robbers, the strange tower the animals make with their bodies, and the sounds that arise when they are together.
Most of all, notice what happens to Bremen.
As we begin. Read the tale slowly. Notice what draws your attention before you decide why. Notice where your attention lingers or where an image feels unexpectedly alive. Allow questions to remain open.
The Tale — The Bremen Town Musicians, Brothers Grimm
There was once a man who had a donkey who had carried sacks of grain to the mill for many years. As the donkey grew old, however, his strength began to fail, and he could no longer do the work he once had done.
When the donkey realized that his master intended to get rid of him, he ran away and set out toward Bremen. There, he thought, he might become a town musician.
After he had traveled for a while, he found an old hunting dog lying beside the road, panting as though he had run a great distance.
The donkey asked why he was lying there.
The dog explained that he had grown old and could no longer hunt as he once had. Because his master intended to kill him, he had run away, although he did not know how he would now make his living.
The donkey invited him to come along to Bremen, where they could become musicians together. The donkey would play the lute and the dog could beat the drum.
The dog agreed, and the two continued along the road.
Before long they encountered a cat sitting sadly beside the way. Her teeth had grown dull, and she preferred sitting beside the fire to chasing mice. Her mistress had therefore decided to drown her.
The donkey and the dog invited the cat to join them. She knew something of nighttime music, they told her, and surely she too could become a town musician.
So the three continued together.
They soon passed a farmyard where a rooster was crowing with all his might. He told them that although he had faithfully announced the coming of good weather, the mistress of the house had ordered the cook to put him into the soup pot.
The travelers invited him to join them.
His voice was certainly strong enough for music.
So the rooster joined the donkey, the dog, and the cat, and the four continued toward Bremen.
They could not reach the city in a single day, and when evening came they stopped in a wooded place to spend the night. The donkey and dog settled beneath a large tree. The cat and rooster climbed into its branches, with the rooster flying to the very top.
From there the rooster saw a light shining in the distance.
The animals decided that where there was a light there might also be food and shelter, so they left their resting place and went toward it.
The light came from a house.
When they reached it, the donkey looked through the window and saw robbers sitting around a table covered with food and drink.
The hungry animals began to consider how they might drive the robbers away.
At last they devised a plan.
The donkey placed his front feet upon the windowsill. The dog climbed onto the donkey’s back, the cat climbed onto the dog, and the rooster flew to the top.
Then, at a signal, they began their music together.
The donkey brayed, the dog barked, the cat meowed, and the rooster crowed. At the same moment they crashed through the window into the room.
The robbers, hearing the terrible noise and seeing the strange creature at the window, believed some dreadful being had entered the house. Terrified, they fled into the woods.
The four travelers sat down at the table and ate until they were satisfied.
Afterward they put out the lights and found places to sleep according to their natures. The donkey lay upon the straw, the dog behind the door, the cat near the warm ashes of the hearth, and the rooster perched above them.
Later that night, when the robbers saw that the house had become quiet, their leader sent one of them back to investigate.
The robber entered the darkened house and saw the cat’s glowing eyes near the hearth. Believing them to be hot coals, he bent down to light a match.
The cat sprang at him and scratched his face.
He ran toward the door, where the dog leapt up and bit his leg. As he crossed the yard, the donkey kicked him, and from above the rooster cried out loudly.
The robber fled back to his companions and told them that the house had been taken over by terrible creatures. There was a witch who had scratched his face, a man with a knife who had stabbed his leg, a monster in the yard who had struck him with a club, and a judge on the roof calling after him.
The robbers were too frightened ever to return.
And the four Bremen musicians liked the house so well that they remained there.
The Life That Comes After Usefulness
The four aging animals have each reached the end of the usefulness by which their lives have been measured. They are discarded precisely because they can no longer perform as they once did.
The tale does not restore their former capacities or return them to their former lives. The donkey does not become strong enough to carry sacks again. The dog does not regain his speed. The cat’s teeth do not become sharp, and nothing removes the rooster’s vulnerability.
Instead, they leave.
The donkey is the first to do so, and there is something worth noticing about the animal who begins this journey. He has spent his life carrying what others placed upon him. When that life ends, the image that comes to him is not another form of labor.
He imagines becoming a musician.
The movement from burden to voice may be worth staying with. The animal who has been valued for what he could carry begins imagining a life organized around the sound he might make.
Then he encounters the dog.
The donkey does not ask whether the old dog will be useful in Bremen. He sees another displaced creature and invites him to come along.
The same thing happens with the cat and again with the rooster. What begins as individual exile slowly becomes companionship.
None of them knows what Bremen will be. There is no orchestra awaiting them, no promise of work and no assurance that Bremen has any need for an elderly donkey, dog, cat, and rooster.
There is simply an image sufficiently alive to call them forward.
Bremen
Perhaps this is where the tale becomes especially interesting.
Bremen gives the animals a direction, but Bremen does not give them a map.
They follow the image without knowing where it will lead.
Had the donkey known when he began that he would never reach Bremen, perhaps he would never have left. Yet by following Bremen he encounters the dog, the cat, and the rooster, and something gathers around the original image that he could not have imagined when he first stepped onto the road.
Then darkness comes.
The rooster climbs the tree and sees a light in the distance.
At this point another image enters the tale.
The animals do not argue that Bremen is their destination and therefore the light must be ignored. They turn toward what has appeared.
First Bremen. Then the light.
The image changes, and they respond to what is before them.
The Four Animals at the Window
When they reach the house, the four animals discover the robbers and the table of food. None is individually capable of taking the house from them.
What they do instead is one of the great images of the tale.
The donkey places himself at the window. The dog climbs onto the donkey, the cat climbs onto the dog, and the rooster takes his place above them.
Then each makes the sound belonging to his or her nature.
Nothing new has been added to them. They have not become younger, stronger, or more useful according to the standards of the world they left behind.
The donkey can still bray. The dog can still bark. The cat can still cry out. The rooster can still crow.
Yet together those familiar sounds become something that has never existed before.
Perhaps companionship does more than console us for what has been lost. There are capacities that may exist only between us, becoming possible when one life is placed alongside another.
The animals do not have to become alike to belong together. Their difference is precisely what makes the new configuration possible.
The Robbers
The robbers cannot recognize what they encounter.
Later, when one of them returns to the house, he mistakes each animal for something monstrous. The cat becomes a witch, the dog a knife-wielding man, the donkey a creature with a club, and the rooster a judge calling from the roof.
The animals themselves have not changed.
What has changed is the configuration in which they appear.
Perhaps there are moments when an old order simply has no language for the life that is emerging. What was ordinary and recognizable in its former place becomes strange when it appears in a new relationship.
The robbers flee.
The animals remain.
They Never Reach Bremen
And then the tale does something remarkable.
Bremen disappears.
The animals do not hold a meeting about whether they should resume their journey in the morning. They do not lament that they failed to accomplish their original plan.
They remain in the house because the life they were seeking has, in some unexpected way, already found them.
Bremen was the image that called them forward, but it was not the place where they were ultimately meant to arrive.
Its importance lay in its capacity to begin the journey.
This offers another way of thinking about guidance from the psyche. An image does not necessarily tell us where we will end. It may simply give us enough direction to begin moving.
As another image appears, the relationship changes again.
The animals could not have seen the house when they left home. They could not have anticipated the robbers or the strange configuration they would make together at the window. They could not have known that the light seen from a tree would become more important than the city toward which they believed themselves to be traveling.
Each responds only to what appears next. Perhaps this is part of what it means to follow the image: not to interpret it into certainty, nor to require it to reveal the destination, but to remain in relationship with it long enough for the next image to appear. We do not need to write ahead of the image. We need to notice when it changes.
Study guide — the movement of the tale
- The aging animals — An old identity has reached its limit
- Leaving home — Exile becomes movement
- Bremen — An image calls before its meaning is known
- Meeting companions — The solitary journey becomes relational
- Nightfall — Certainty diminishes
- The light — A new image appears
- The robbers’ house — Something needed is occupied by another order
- The tower of animals — Difference becomes collective strength
- Their combined voices — Something emerges that none possesses alone
- The robbers flee — The old order cannot recognize the new configuration
- The house becomes home — The unexpected becomes sufficient
- Bremen is never reached — The calling image has completed its work
Symbolic domains
Alchemy. The tale begins with four lives whose former identities can no longer be sustained. Something must separate from the old arrangement before another configuration can emerge. The four animals are not refined into something purer. They remain distinctly themselves, yet their coming together creates a new form. The image at the window might be held as an alchemical image of conjunction, not fusion, but distinct elements entering relationship without surrendering their nature. What emerges belongs to all four and to none of them individually.
Imagination. Bremen first exists because the donkey imagines it. There is no evidence that his plan is practical. The image does not arise from certainty about the future. It provides a direction where previously there had only been the ending of an old life. Imagination here is not escape from reality. It becomes the means by which another reality can begin to be approached.
Numerology: four. There are four animals, each with a different nature and capacity. Within Jungian psychology, four often brings us toward images of wholeness, quaternity, orientation, and the possibility of holding difference within a larger form. Yet the tale does not give us four identical figures occupying four neat positions. It gives us four very different animals who must discover how to stand together.
Sound. Sound is central to the tale. The animals set out to become musicians, yet the music that finally matters is not polished, harmonious, or conventionally beautiful. It is braying, barking, meowing, and crowing. Their music arises when each sounds according to its nature. Perhaps the question is not always whether our voices harmonize beautifully, but whether each voice has been allowed to enter the composition.
Color and light. The tale offers little explicit color, but it gives us a powerful movement between darkness and light. Night falls before the animals reach Bremen. From darkness, the rooster sees a distant light. The light does not illuminate the entire journey. It reveals only the next place toward which they might move. This may be closer to the way psychic guidance often appears. Enough light for the next movement, rather than illumination of the entire road.
Sacred geometry. The four animals create an unexpected vertical form at the window. Donkey, dog, cat, rooster. They become a living structure, one supported by another, each occupying a different place while contributing to a single image. The geometry is temporary. Once its purpose is fulfilled, the animals separate again and sleep according to their individual natures. Their wholeness does not require permanent fusion.
Anima and animus energies. Rather than assigning particular animals rigidly to masculine or feminine categories, we might notice the movement between doing and receiving, carrying and sounding, action and rest, departure and dwelling. The tale allows capacities ordinarily separated from one another to enter relationship. The cat’s desire for warmth belongs beside the donkey’s movement. The dog’s loyalty belongs beside the rooster’s announcement of dawn. No single mode is sufficient.
Chakra energy vortices. The tale repeatedly returns us to voice. The donkey brays, the dog barks, the cat cries out, and the rooster crows. Their survival depends upon allowing those voices to sound. The throat center may therefore offer one imaginal way of approaching the tale: what has remained unsounded while a life has been organized primarily around usefulness? The animals discover that the sounds they already possess may become powerful when they are no longer required to serve the old order.
Questions for study and conversation
The animals
- Which animal first draws your attention, and what do you notice before attempting to interpret it?
- What has each animal lost, and what remains available to each?
- How does the tale distinguish between usefulness and worth?
- What changes when each animal encounters another creature who has also been displaced?
Bremen and the journey
- What first calls the donkey onto the journey?
- Why might the tale give us Bremen if the animals are never going to arrive there?
- At what point does Bremen disappear from the story?
- What happens when the light becomes more immediate than the original destination?
- Have you ever followed something you believed was a destination and discovered later that its purpose may have been to get you moving?
Companionship
- What does each animal contribute that the others cannot?
- What becomes possible only because they are together?
- Is companionship here simply comfort, or does relationship actually create something new?
- What might the tale suggest about individuation that cannot happen entirely alone?
Aging and the symbolic life
- What happens psychologically when an identity through which we have been valued is no longer available?
- Can an instinctual life change with age without becoming diminished?
- What might become possible when we stop trying to recover the person we once were?
- What is the difference between being finished and being finished with a particular form of life?
Dream images of aging
“How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” — C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
In Lewis’s retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, “they” refers to the gods, to those numinous presences that cannot be encountered fully until we ourselves have acquired a face from which to meet them. Lewis’s question invites us to consider what it may mean to become increasingly and unmistakably ourselves, and perhaps there is something here that belongs particularly to the experience of aging.
Fairy tales and dreams often approach the experience of aging through image rather than explanation. The Bremen Town Musicians gives us four aging animals, each encountering the moment when the life that once defined usefulness can no longer continue in quite the same way. Their capacities have changed, yet something within each remains alive and capable of responding when another possibility appears.
I would like to invite you to remember a dream image of your own that seems, in some way, to carry your experience of aging. There is no need to bring an entire dream or even to understand why the image comes to mind. It may be an animal, a house, a road, a landscape, an object, a changing body, a person, something lost or found, a departure or arrival, or perhaps an image whose relationship to aging remains uncertain.
For those who would like to share, we will allow each image to enter the group much as the animals enter the tale, one at a time and without requiring that we immediately know what it means. As we listen, we might wonder together what seems to be changing within the image, what can no longer continue in its former way, and what nevertheless remains alive. We might also notice whether something new is beginning to appear, even if its direction cannot yet be known.
The image may contain loss, limitation, freedom, companionship, vulnerability, movement, or some unexpected possibility. Rather than deciding what the dream is telling us about aging, we can remain with what it actually gives us and allow ourselves to become curious about what the image knows that we may not yet know.
Perhaps The Bremen Town Musicians offers us a particularly useful way of listening. The animals do not know where their journey will finally take them, and Bremen does not reveal what awaits them along the road. It simply provides an image toward which they can begin to move. Our dream images may sometimes ask something similar of us, not that we understand where they are leading, but that we give them enough attention to notice what begins to unfold around them.
As each person shares, notice also what happens within you as you hear another person’s image. A dream that is not our own may unexpectedly awaken a memory, an association, or another image, and in that way the images may begin to gather within the group just as the four animals gather along the road. Each remains distinct, yet something more may become visible when they are allowed to stand alongside one another.
We are not looking for a single meaning of aging or attempting to decide what these dreams should mean. We are allowing the images to show us something of how the psyche encounters this passage, including what is ending, what remains, and what may already be quietly asking to come into being.
Imaginal reflection
Allow the four animals to appear without deciding which one represents you.
Notice the donkey, the dog, the cat, and the rooster.
Wait to see whether one becomes more distinct.
Notice its age, its body, its movement, and whether it comes near or remains at a distance.
Rather than asking immediately what the animal symbolizes, allow yourself to ask: What do you still know how to do? Wait.
Write whatever comes without improving or interpreting it.
Then ask: What do you no longer need to do?
Again, allow the response to remain in the language of the image.
Finding Bremen
Now allow Bremen to become something other than a geographic place.
Is there an image presently calling you forward whose meaning you do not yet understand?
It may have appeared in a dream, a conversation, a book, a relationship, a creative impulse, a place, an unexpected invitation, or something ordinary that has begun to carry unusual energy.
Rather than asking where it will ultimately lead, consider: What movement is this image asking of me now?
Then allow the question to remain open. The next image may not yet have appeared.
A fairy-tale pattern
- Beginning — The old life can no longer continue. Usefulness has ended. Each animal is alone. The future is unknown.
- Journey — An image calls the animal away. Bremen gives direction. The animals travel together. No one knows what Bremen will be.
- Encounter — Companions appear. Darkness and light redirect the journey. The robbers occupy the house. The animals act with what they have.
- Transformation — Difference becomes strength. A new configuration appears. The old order flees. The house becomes home.
The pattern does not return the animals to where they began. Nor does it deliver them to the place they expected. Something else occurs between departure and arrival.
Closing Reflection
The Bremen Town Musicians begins when four animals are told, in one way or another, that the lives they have known are over.
Nothing in the tale reverses that reality.
The donkey does not recover his strength. The dog does not become young. The cat does not return eagerly to chasing mice, and the rooster remains the creature who had been marked for death.
Instead, the tale follows what happens when they leave the world in which their worth depended upon remaining who they had once been.
The donkey begins with Bremen.
Along the road there is the dog, then the cat, then the rooster. At night there is a tree. From the tree there is a light. Beyond the light there is a house. At the window four separate creatures discover that together they can make a sound none could make alone.
Only afterward do they discover that the place in which they have arrived is a place in which they can remain.
Bremen has disappeared by then.
Perhaps that is not a failure of the journey but one of its deepest images.
There may be times when the psyche gives us an image not because we are meant to arrive there, but because without that image we would never leave the place from which life has already begun withdrawing. We follow until something else appears. Then we attend to that.
Perhaps the symbolic life asks for something both simpler and more difficult than certainty. It asks that we remain close enough to the image to notice when it changes, and humble enough not to insist that we already know the ending. The four animals could not have known the house was waiting. They could only begin walking toward Bremen.
What if the image calling you forward does not need to tell you where you are going, but only asks that you remain with it long enough for the next image to appear?
September The Six Swans
Loss, Fidelity, and the Work of Redemption
Companion Tale The Six Swans Voices Jung, Homer, Kelley
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” — C. G. Jung
There are fairy tales in which what has been lost can simply be found again. A child wanders into the forest and returns home. A treasure is discovered. A spell is broken, and the world resumes its familiar shape.
The Six Swans offers something more difficult.
A family has been divided. Six brothers have been transformed into swans, and their sister learns that they can be released only if she undertakes an extraordinary task. For six years she must neither speak nor laugh, and during that time she must make six shirts from starwort for her brothers. If she fails, they will remain swans.
Nothing in the task guarantees that she will succeed. She must work while the outcome remains uncertain.
Perhaps this is one reason the tale belongs particularly well to September, when summer begins to withdraw and another rhythm enters our lives. Schools reopen. Books return to desks. Work that has been suspended is taken up again. Gardens begin giving way to harvest. The light changes almost imperceptibly, and we find ourselves gathering what will be needed for the season ahead.
The sister in The Six Swans enters such a season of gathering and making.
As you read the tale, allow the images to remain images before deciding what they mean. Notice the forest, the enchanted thread, the swans, the starwort, the shirts, the sister’s silence, the passage of six years, the accusations against her, the approaching fire, and finally the shirts thrown over the returning swans.
Most of all, notice the brother whose shirt remains unfinished. He becomes human again, but one swan’s wing remains.
Perhaps redemption does not always restore us to the person we were before the loss.
The Tale — The Six Swans, Brothers Grimm
There was once a king who was hunting in a great forest when he became separated from his companions. He wandered through the woods until evening and could find no way out.
At last he encountered an old woman who told him that she could show him the way, but only if he agreed to a condition. She had a daughter, she said, who was beautiful beyond measure, and the king must make the young woman his queen.
The king feared the old woman was a witch, yet he could see no other way out of the forest. He agreed.
The old woman led him from the woods, and when the king saw her daughter he found her very beautiful. Still, something about her troubled him, and although he kept his promise and married her, he did not trust her.
The king already had seven children from his first marriage, six sons and a daughter, whom he loved dearly. Fearing that the new queen might harm them, he took the children secretly to a castle hidden deep within the forest.
The castle was so difficult to find that even the king could not reach it without help. A wise woman had given him a ball of enchanted thread. Whenever he went to visit the children, he threw the ball before him, and the thread unwound along the path and led him safely through the forest.
The queen soon noticed how often the king disappeared and became curious about where he went. She bribed his servants and eventually discovered the secret of the thread and the hidden castle.
Then she made six small white shirts and sewed an enchantment into them.
One day, when the king was away, she took the enchanted thread and followed it through the forest until she came to the castle.
The six brothers saw someone approaching and ran joyfully outside, believing their father had come.
The queen threw one of the enchanted shirts over each boy.
As soon as the cloth touched them, the brothers were transformed into swans. They spread their wings and flew away over the forest.
The queen returned home believing that she had rid herself of the king’s children.
She did not know that the sister had remained inside the castle.
When the king next came to visit, he found only his daughter. She told him what had happened, and although he wanted to take her home with him, she was afraid of the queen and begged to remain away.
After some time, the girl could no longer bear not knowing what had become of her brothers.
She left the castle and went alone into the forest to search for them.
She walked all day, and as darkness approached she found a small hut. Inside were six little beds.
She was tired and wanted to rest, but before long six swans flew through the window.
The girl recognized them as her brothers.
For a short time each evening they were permitted to take human form. They told their sister that the enchantment could be broken, but the task required of her was almost impossible.
For six years she must neither speak nor laugh.
During those six years she must gather starwort and make six shirts from it.
If she completed the shirts and threw them over her brothers, they would become human again.
If she spoke even a single word before the six years had passed, all her work would be lost.
The sister did not hesitate.
She left the hut, went deeper into the forest, climbed into a tree for safety, and began her work.
She gathered starwort. She made the shirts, and she did not speak.
For a long time she lived alone in the forest, working silently upon the garments that might restore her brothers.
One day a king hunting in the forest discovered her.
His men called to her, but she gave no answer. When they asked who she was and where she had come from, she remained silent.
They asked her to come down from the tree. Still she did not speak.
At last she descended, and the king was struck by her beauty. He tried to learn something about her, but she could tell him nothing without breaking the promise upon which her brothers’ freedom depended.
The king took her back to his castle and eventually asked her to become his wife.
She agreed.
Although she could not speak, the king loved her, and in time she gave birth to a child.
The king’s mother, however, distrusted the silent young queen.
When the child was born, the old woman secretly took the baby away and accused the queen of having killed it.
The young queen could have defended herself only by speaking. She remained silent.
The king refused to believe the accusation, and the queen continued her work upon the six shirts.
A second child was born, and again the king’s mother took the baby and accused the queen.
Again she remained silent.
When a third child disappeared in the same way, the accusations against her became impossible for the king to resist. His counselors demanded judgment, and although he loved his wife, he could no longer protect her.
She was condemned to die by fire.
By then the six years were nearly complete.
Even as the day of her execution arrived, the young queen continued working upon the shirts.
Five were finished.
The sixth still lacked one sleeve.
She carried the shirts with her as she was led toward the fire.
Just as the flames were about to be lit, six swans appeared in the sky.
They circled above her and descended.
The six years had ended.
The sister took the shirts she had made and threw them over the swans.
One by one her brothers stood before her again in human form. The first was restored, then the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth.
The sixth brother also became human, but because one sleeve of his shirt had not been finished, one of his arms remained a swan’s wing.
The sister could now speak.
She told the king who she was, what had happened to her brothers, and why she had remained silent through all the accusations against her.
Her children were found alive and returned to her.
The king understood that his wife had been innocent, and the one who had falsely accused her was punished.
The sister and her brothers were reunited, and the enchantment that had held them for six years was broken.
Yet one brother continued to carry the swan’s wing.
And so they lived together, restored to one another, though not returned entirely to the lives they had known before.
The Work That Begins After Loss
The Six Swans begins in a world in which something has already gone wrong. A king has become lost in the forest, a bargain has been made, and before very long the children who belong to his former life must be hidden away. The king attempts to protect them by placing them in a castle so concealed that even he requires a magical thread to find his way there, yet the very effort to keep what he loves safely beyond the reach of danger cannot prevent what follows.
There may be something worth noticing even before the children are transformed. The king knows something is wrong. He fears the old woman may be a witch, and after meeting her daughter he remains troubled enough that he hides his children from the woman he has nevertheless made his queen. The catastrophe that follows therefore begins not only with enchantment but with a bargain made when the king is lost and desperate to find his way out.
Perhaps there are bargains made in moments of disorientation whose consequences are carried by those who did not make them.
The six brothers are discovered and transformed into swans, while their sister remains human.
There may also be something worth noticing in the fact that the tale does not allow the sister to rescue them immediately. She cannot confront the enchantress and demand their return, nor can she discover the correct words and simply reverse what has happened. The brothers themselves tell her that there is a way through the enchantment, but the way is extraordinarily difficult. For six years she must neither speak nor laugh, and during those years she must gather starwort and make six shirts. Only then can the shirts be thrown over the swans and their human forms restored.
The tale therefore moves us away from the wish that loss might somehow be undone and toward another possibility. Something has happened that cannot be made not to have happened, yet within that reality there remains something that can still be done.
The sister begins to make.
Perhaps this is where The Six Swans begins to speak particularly well to the season into which we are moving. September carries us out of the expansiveness of summer and toward another rhythm. Schools reopen, books return to desks, gardens begin yielding what they have spent the summer producing, and projects that may have rested for a time ask to be taken up again. The light changes, almost imperceptibly at first, and there is the beginning of a gathering inward.
The sister gathers too, although what she gathers is hardly promising material. She gathers starwort and begins the long work of turning what grows wild into something that can be worn, and ultimately into something through which another human being may be restored.
Perhaps the question following loss is sometimes not How do I get back what I had? but rather What can I make now from what remains available to me?
Six Years of Silence
The sister’s silence may initially seem the most troubling demand of the tale. For six years she cannot speak, and as the story unfolds that silence becomes increasingly costly. She enters another kingdom, marries, bears children, and is eventually accused of acts so terrible that ordinarily we would expect any innocent person to cry out in self-defense.
She does not, yet I am not certain that we should understand her silence simply as submission or voicelessness. She knows something that those around her do not know. Beneath the visible story in which she appears strange, mute, and finally guilty, another story is taking place. Six shirts are slowly coming into being, and the sister knows that speaking in order to save herself would abandon the work through which her brothers may be saved.
There are periods in psychological life when something seems to require a similar protection from premature speech. An image appears in a dream before we understand why it has come. A piece of writing begins before we know what it wants to become. A relationship changes before we have language for the change. Something asks to be painted, carved, planted, studied, gathered, or simply attended to, and our effort to explain it too quickly may bring consciousness to something that has not yet developed sufficiently to bear it.
The sister does not know everything, but she knows the task immediately before her. She gathers, she makes, and she continues, allowing her silence to surround the work long enough for the work to become what only time can make of it.
Penelope at the Loom
It is difficult to stay very long with this image of a woman, cloth, waiting, and an uncertain return without another ancient image beginning to gather beside it.
Penelope waits in Ithaca. Odysseus has been gone for years, the household has filled with suitors, and the world around her increasingly insists upon a conclusion she is not yet prepared to accept. Odysseus must be presumed dead. She must choose another husband. The old story is over and another must begin.
Penelope cannot know that Odysseus will return, and she certainly cannot bring him home by an act of will. What she can do is refuse to allow others to determine prematurely what his absence means.
And so she weaves.
By day she works upon the burial shroud of Laertes, promising that when it is finished she will choose among the suitors. By night she takes apart what she has made. The loom becomes the place at which she holds open an interval between what has been lost and what has not yet been decided.
The sister of the six swans also lives within such an interval, although her relationship to the cloth is different. Penelope makes and unmakes because the completion of the cloth would close something before she is ready for it to close. The sister must continue making because completion of the cloth may open something that has been closed by enchantment.
Penelope weaves to preserve the possibility of return. The sister sews to make return possible.
What interests me in placing these two women beside one another is not simply that both are faithful. Fidelity can become too easily sentimentalized if we imagine it only as waiting patiently for what we love to come back. Neither woman is merely waiting. Each has entered into relationship with time through the work of her hands.
Perhaps this is one reason weaving, sewing, spinning, gathering, and making appear so persistently in fairy tale and myth. There are things that cannot be hurried into existence. Thread crosses thread. One row follows another. The garment that did not exist begins slowly to take form, and the person doing the work must continue before she can know whether what she is making will ever accomplish what she hopes.
There is something of education here as well. We return to school in September because learning itself requires this peculiar faithfulness to what has not yet become visible. We read before we understand. We practice before we possess the skill. We follow an idea before we know where it leads. We remain with an image before we know what it means.
The work changes us while we are doing it.
The Shirt That Is Not Finished
Had the tale ended with six perfectly completed shirts and six brothers restored exactly as they had been before their enchantment, we might receive a very different story.
But one sleeve is unfinished.
When the swans return and the sister throws the shirts over them, five brothers regain their human bodies completely. The sixth also becomes human, except that where one arm should be there remains a swan’s wing.
I find myself wanting to stay with that wing because the sister has succeeded. The enchantment has been broken. Her brothers have returned, and what she has endured has not been meaningless. Yet the tale refuses to give us a restoration in which every trace of what happened disappears.
One brother carries the history of the enchantment in his body.
Perhaps this is closer to what we actually mean by redemption than the fantasy of being returned untouched to the life we had before loss. There are experiences after which we do not become who we were again. A death, an illness, a betrayal, a war, the loss of a home, the ending of a vocation, or simply the long passage of years may alter the form through which we enter the remainder of our lives.
Something may nevertheless be restored, something may even become more fully human, and still there may be a wing.
The wing does not necessarily tell us that the work failed. It may tell us that transformation has a history.
Nuremberg and the Question of What Can Be Restored
It is here that I would allow another, far more difficult image to enter the conversation, and I would do so carefully because fairy tale and history cannot simply be laid over one another as though they were telling us the same story.
After the Second World War, the trials at Nuremberg brought the world face to face with atrocities for which restoration could never mean returning to the world as it had been before. Millions of people were dead, communities and families had disappeared, cities had been destroyed, and the enormity of what human beings had done to other human beings could not be repaired by imagining that history might somehow begin again from an earlier point.
Among those asked to enter this terrible aftermath was the American Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who evaluated the leading Nazi defendants awaiting trial. One of the questions surrounding those examinations was psychologically compelling and profoundly disturbing: were these men somehow fundamentally different from the rest of humanity? Was there a pathology sufficiently extraordinary to account for participation in extraordinary evil?
The hoped-for answer would have been reassuring. If such men could be identified as monsters, madmen, or psychologically alien creatures, the boundary between them and the rest of us could remain intact.
What Kelley encountered did not permit such an easy separation.
That is where Nuremberg may belong in our conversation about The Six Swans. Not because the fairy tale explains Nuremberg, and certainly not because historical catastrophe can be reduced to a symbolic story, but because Nuremberg forces upon us a question that the unfinished shirt has already begun to raise:
What does restoration mean when returning to what existed before is neither possible nor sufficient?
The Creator and the Destroyer
There may be another question gathering beneath this one, particularly if we allow the fairy tale to carry us toward the religious imagination.
When we imagine the divine primarily as Creator, what happens to the Destroyer?
Our human consciousness quite understandably assigns value to these opposites. Creation belongs easily to what we call good, while destruction belongs to what we call bad, and the ethical life certainly requires us to distinguish between acts that preserve life and those that violate it. Yet the symbolic imagination complicates such an easy division. Creation and destruction are often bound together in the natural world. Forests burn and regenerate, cells die so that bodies may continue living, fruit ripens and falls, and each autumn the living world begins relinquishing the forms through which it expressed itself only months before.
September itself stands near this threshold. Harvest is abundance, yet harvest also requires cutting. The field that has spent the summer growing is gathered. Leaves begin losing their green while seeds are being carried toward another spring. Creation and destruction are occurring within the same landscape, and what we call an ending may already contain material from which another beginning will emerge.
If we speak of a spark of the divine residing within the human being, perhaps we must ask whether we are willing to imagine the divine only through those human capacities we prefer to call creative, loving, beautiful, and good. If Creator and Destroyer belong to a larger mystery than our moral categories can entirely contain, then something uncomfortable follows: the human being who carries the capacity to create also carries the capacity to destroy.
This does not mean that creation and destruction are morally equivalent, nor does it relieve us of the responsibility to name cruelty, resist it, and hold human beings accountable for what they choose to do. It means instead that we cannot preserve our own innocence by imagining destructiveness as something belonging exclusively to someone else.
Here Nuremberg becomes particularly disturbing.
If the men Kelley examined had proven to be psychologically alien creatures, we might have been able to place them safely outside the circle of ordinary humanity. We could call them monsters and thereby preserve the reassuring conviction that the capacity for such destruction belongs to another kind of person.
Yet the possibility that they remained recognizably human asks something much more difficult of us.
Perhaps evil becomes most psychologically dangerous when we can locate it entirely in the other.
If the destructive possibility belongs to the human, acknowledging it does not mean consenting to it. What is consciously recognized can enter ethical relationship with choice, responsibility, restraint, and conscience. What is denied may instead be projected outward, where we encounter the destroyer everywhere except within ourselves.
This may bring us surprisingly close to the work of individuation. Wholeness cannot mean becoming identified only with what we experience as good, conscious, creative, or divine while everything destructive is assigned to another person, another group, another nation, or another time in history. Nor can wholeness mean acting out every possibility discovered within ourselves. It asks something considerably more difficult: that we recognize what belongs to the human psyche while accepting responsibility for the relationship we establish with it.
And here the fairy tale quietly returns.
The sister does not kill the swan in order to recover the brother. She makes something through which the enchanted form can enter another relationship with the human form, and when the work is finished as completely as circumstances allow, one brother remains visibly both.
He is human, and he carries a wing.
Perhaps we should be careful about deciding too quickly which part of him represents the problem.
What Is Redeemed?
Penelope waits for the beloved to return, yet she does not merely wait. She works at the loom and keeps open a place into which return remains possible.
The sister of the six swans cannot command her brothers to become human again. She gathers what the earth provides and works for six years upon garments she hopes they will someday be able to wear.
Nuremberg confronts us with something far more difficult: the necessity of asking what humanity must learn about itself after discovering what human beings are capable of doing.
These are not the same stories, but perhaps each asks something about how we live in the interval after loss and before we know what, if anything, can be restored.
September offers its own image of this mystery. The season does not ask summer to remain summer. The green leaf does not remain green, the ripe field cannot remain standing if its grain is to nourish anyone, and what has flowered begins relinquishing its visible form. Yet we do not ordinarily experience harvest as catastrophe. We celebrate precisely because something has reached the point at which it can be gathered and carried forward.
Perhaps this brings another meaning to the sister gathering starwort. She cannot restore the world from which her brothers disappeared. She can gather what the present world gives her and make something from it.
Her answer is neither certainty nor despair. She remains in relationship with the work long enough for something to become possible that was not possible when she began.
And perhaps celebration belongs here as well. The ending of the tale is not merely an escape from death. The brothers return, the lost children are recovered, the sister’s voice returns, truth can finally be spoken, and those who have been separated are able to recognize one another again.
Yet the wing remains.
Perhaps mature celebration does not require every wound to disappear before we permit ourselves to rejoice. We may celebrate what has returned while acknowledging what cannot be restored, and we may give thanks for what has been redeemed without pretending that redemption has erased its history.
This may be another wisdom carried by September and the harvest. We celebrate what has ripened precisely at the moment when the season that produced it is beginning to pass.
Perhaps the sister of the six swans can accompany us into that season as we return to our books, classrooms, worktables, studios, gardens, and whatever else has been entrusted to our hands. We may not know what the work will finally redeem, nor whether the thing we hope will return can return in the form we remember.
What The Six Swans seems unwilling to promise is an untouched restoration. What it offers instead may be considerably more valuable: the possibility that what has been lost can enter life again without requiring us to forget either the enchantment or the journey through it.
Study guide — the movement of the tale
- The king lost in the forest — Orientation is lost; vulnerability opens the tale
- The bargain — A way out is accepted despite an intuitive warning
- The hidden children — What is precious is protected, but cannot be protected absolutely
- The enchanted thread — A path through what cannot consciously be navigated becomes available
- The six brothers become swans — The human is exiled into another form
- The sister remains human — One of the seven remains capable of relationship with what has been lost
- The brothers return briefly — What has been lost is not entirely inaccessible
- The six-year task — Redemption requires time rather than immediate reversal
- Gathering starwort — What is available in the present becomes material for restoration
- Making the shirts — Loss becomes work; devotion takes material form
- Silence — The work must be protected before it can be explained
- Marriage and children — Life continues while the deeper task remains unfinished
- False accusation — Fidelity to the inner task carries an outer cost
- The approaching fire — The work reaches its greatest danger at the threshold of completion
- The six swans return — What has been exiled returns at the necessary moment
- The shirts are thrown over them — What has been patiently made becomes transformative
- Five brothers restored — Redemption becomes visible
- The unfinished sixth shirt — The work succeeds without becoming perfect
- The remaining swan’s wing — What is redeemed still carries the history of what happened
- The family restored — Return becomes reunion rather than return to the beginning
Symbolic domains
Alchemy. The tale begins with separation and enchantment. Human beings have been changed into another form, and restoration requires prolonged labor. The sister’s six-year task may be approached as an image of the opus, work that cannot be completed through intention alone but requires sustained relationship with matter and time. The finished shirts become transformative objects, yet the opus remains imperfect because one sleeve is unfinished. Alchemy repeatedly reminds us that transformation does not necessarily return matter to its original state. Something new emerges from what has undergone the process.
Imagination. The sister undertakes a task that would appear impossible by ordinary standards. She lives according to the reality of an image that no one around her can verify. Her brothers appear as swans. Starwort must become clothing. Clothing must become the means through which animal form returns to human form. The imaginal world does not replace reality here. It creates the conditions through which another reality may emerge.
Thread. The thread appears before the sister ever begins making the shirts. When the king cannot find his way through the forest, the enchanted ball of thread shows him a path to the hidden castle. Later that same thread is taken by the queen and used to find the children. The image therefore resists an easy division into good and bad. The thread itself does not determine what will happen at the end of the path. It connects one place with another. Later, the tale returns us to the world of thread and cloth through the sister’s work, and the material associated first with finding what has been hidden becomes part of the larger imaginal field through which what has been lost may eventually be restored. We might ask: What connects us to what has been lost? What allows us to find our way when consciousness does not know the road?
Numerology: six and seven. Six appears repeatedly. There are six brothers, the enchantment lasts six years, and the sister must make six shirts. Yet there are seven siblings. The seventh child, the sister, is not transformed into a swan. She remains outside the enchanted six and becomes the one through whom their restoration may occur. Rather than assigning fixed meanings to these numbers, we might remain with the pattern itself. Six are caught within the enchantment while the seventh carries the task. Six shirts must be made, yet the sixth cannot be entirely completed. Perhaps the tale asks us to notice the relationship between what is enclosed within a pattern and the figure who, by remaining outside it, may enter into relationship with it differently.
Plants: starwort and nettle. The material from which the shirts are made deserves attention. The sister does not work with silk or linen already prepared for her. She gathers from the wild. In some versions and translations the plant is rendered as starwort, while in related swan tales the garments are associated with nettles. Either image brings the work close to the earth and to material that must be gathered and transformed through human hands. What restores the brothers comes from something humble enough to be overlooked.
Silence and voice. Unlike the animals of The Bremen Town Musicians, whose survival depends upon sounding their individual voices together, the sister’s task depends upon silence. The contrast is worth holding. One tale asks: What happens when the voice that has been unused is finally sounded? The other asks: What happens when the voice capable of defending itself is deliberately withheld in service of something deeper? Psychological maturity may require both capacities. There is a time to speak, and there is also a time to protect what is still becoming.
Clothing. The shirts are not merely objects. They are coverings made specifically for bodies that have been transformed. When placed upon the swans, they restore human form. Clothing frequently marks identity, social belonging, protection, and transformation. Here something made by the sister’s hands becomes a mediating layer between animal and human. We might wonder: What must the psyche make that allows an exiled part of life to become inhabitable again?
Three images of redemption
The Six Swans — Something beloved has been transformed. The sister makes while waiting. The work seeks restoration. The brothers return changed. One wing remains.
Penelope in The Odyssey — Something beloved is absent. Penelope weaves and unweaves while waiting. The work preserves the possibility of return. Odysseus returns changed by the journey. The journey remains within the returned Odysseus.
Nuremberg — Something human has been catastrophically violated. The world must examine what human beings have done. Judgment and memory make simple return impossible. Humanity cannot return innocently to what it believed about itself. Memory must remain within whatever is rebuilt.
Perhaps the movement across these three images might be held simply as: Wing → Journey → Memory. Something remains after return.
Questions for study and conversation
The beginning and the bargain
- What does it mean that the tale begins with a king who has lost his way?
- What is set in motion when the king accepts a way out of the forest that he already knows he cannot trust?
- Who eventually carries the consequences of the king’s bargain?
- What might the tale suggest about losses inherited from choices we ourselves did not make?
Loss and enchantment
- What exactly has been lost when the brothers become swans?
- Why are the brothers transformed into animals rather than simply disappearing?
- What remains human within the enchanted form?
- Why might the sister be the seventh child and the only sibling who remains untransformed?
The sister and her task
- Why must redemption require work rather than simply love?
- What is the psychological difference between silence and voicelessness?
- What allows the sister to continue when no one around her understands what she is doing?
- What work in our own lives requires fidelity before we know whether it will succeed?
Penelope
- What does Penelope preserve through weaving and unweaving?
- How is her waiting different from passivity?
- What changes when we place Penelope’s loom beside the sister’s six shirts?
- What do human beings make while waiting for something they cannot command?
Creator and destroyer
- When we imagine the divine primarily as Creator, what happens to our image of the Destroyer?
- What changes when creation and destruction are understood as capacities that may coexist within the human rather than belonging to separate kinds of people?
- How might acknowledging our capacity for destruction differ from consenting to or acting upon it?
- What happens psychologically when the destroyer can always be located in someone else?
Redemption and celebration
- What does it mean that five brothers are completely restored while one retains a wing?
- Would the tale be psychologically different if all six brothers were perfectly restored?
- Can something be redeemed without being returned to its original condition?
- What might we need to carry forward precisely because it reminds us of what has happened?
- Can we celebrate what has been redeemed without requiring what remains wounded to disappear?
Dream images of loss and redemption
For the dream portion, I would like to invite an image rather than necessarily an entire dream.
Allow yourself to remember a dream in which something lost, damaged, abandoned, forgotten, or transformed appears again.
It may not return in its original form.
Perhaps a childhood house appears altered. Someone who has died returns but is a different age. An object once lost is discovered somewhere unexpected. An animal is wounded but alive. A neglected garden begins flowering. Something broken has been repaired, though the repair remains visible.
Bring the image without requiring yourself to know whether it represents redemption.
As each image enters the group, we might ask: What was lost? What has returned? What is different now? What remains marked by what happened?
Perhaps the dream knows something that our conscious wish for restoration does not.
Imaginal reflection
Allow an image of something you have lost to arise.
Do not choose the most important loss. Wait for an image.
It may be a person, place, object, capacity, relationship, season of life, or something you cannot immediately name.
Notice its condition.
Then ask: What of you remains alive?
Wait. Do not improve the answer.
Then allow another question: What would it mean to make something for what remains?
Do not decide what that something should be. Allow the image to respond.
A fairy-tale pattern
- Beginning — The king loses his way. The family is divided. Brothers become swans. Something human is exiled. Restoration seems impossible. The future is unknown. Loss has changed the family.
- Task — A path must be found. Gather starwort. Make six shirts. Work without certainty. Remain faithful. Continue making. Receive what returns.
- Ordeal — A bargain carries consequences. Six years of silence. Misunderstanding and accusation. The sister cannot defend herself. Death approaches. The final shirt remains unfinished. Perfection is impossible.
- Redemption — Another path becomes necessary. The swans return. Human form is restored. Her work proves meaningful. The shirts are thrown. One wing remains. Reunion becomes celebration.
The pattern does not erase what has happened. It carries what has happened into another form.
Closing Reflection
The Six Swans begins with a man who has lost his way, and perhaps that is important. Before there are swans, before there are shirts, before there are six years of silence, there is a bargain made by someone who wants desperately to find his way out of the forest.
Others will eventually live with the consequences of that bargain.
The tale spends remarkably little time asking why the loss occurred, however, and turns instead toward what must now be done. A sister gathers plants and makes shirts while remaining silent. Years pass, others misunderstand her, and the work continues. This is not the dramatic heroism of conquest but the quieter heroism of fidelity to a task whose outcome cannot yet be known.
Penelope sits at another loom, weaving and unweaving while the world around her insists that the old story has ended. She cannot command Odysseus to return, but she can preserve the space in which return remains possible.
Across an immeasurably different landscape, Nuremberg confronts us with the historical reality that after some losses we cannot simply wish for the former world to return. The encounter with the Nazi defendants raises the more disturbing possibility that the capacity for terrible destruction cannot safely be assigned to some other category of human being.
Perhaps this is where the Creator and Destroyer enter the tale once more. The human being who can gather, sew, protect, restore, love, and create also belongs to the same human field in which destruction is possible. Individuation cannot require that we deny one in order to identify ourselves exclusively with the other. It may ask that we become sufficiently conscious of what we carry that we can assume responsibility for how it enters the world.
September itself offers an image of this mystery. The field must be cut for the grain to become nourishment. Leaves begin to relinquish their green as seeds are carried toward another spring. Harvest contains both ending and abundance, and perhaps celebration becomes possible not because nothing has been lost, but because something from what has ended can be gathered and carried forward.
The unfinished shirt matters.
One brother returns carrying a wing. He is human, he is restored, and he bears the visible trace of what happened to him.
Yet perhaps we should notice that the tale does not end by gathering everyone around the remaining wing in sorrow. Brothers have returned. Children have been recovered. A woman who has been silent for six years can speak. Those who were separated recognize one another again.
There is reason for celebration.
Perhaps this is one of the more difficult forms of gratitude available to us, the ability to rejoice in what has returned without requiring everything that remains wounded to disappear first.
The wing can remain at the feast.
Perhaps redemption is not the recovery of an untouched past. Perhaps it is the difficult work through which what has been lost becomes capable of entering life again without requiring us to deny the loss, the enchantment, or what we have learned about ourselves along the way.
September asks us to return to our work. Books reopen. Classrooms fill. Projects resume. The light begins to change. We gather what the season has produced and begin preparing for what comes next.
Perhaps the sister of the six swans can accompany us into that season, carrying the reminder that there are times when we cannot know whether our work will redeem anything. We can only gather what is available, begin making, and remain faithful enough to discover what the work becomes.
Can we celebrate what has been redeemed without requiring what remains wounded to disappear? And perhaps, beneath that question, another: what if redemption is not the restoration of what was, but the patient making of a life in which what was lost can return in a form that remembers what happened?
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“Begin with what is happening, not what you think it means.”
Entering the Space
An Introduction to Symbolic Life, Witnessing, and the Imaginal
When Tuesdays — next cohort date to be announced Time 7:00–8:30 PM Central Length Six weeks, limited to 15 participants Tuition $450, due in full prior to the first session
Most approaches to inner life begin by asking what something means. This course begins elsewhere. Across six weeks, participants are introduced to a different way of attending to experience — one that does not move immediately toward interpretation, diagnosis, or resolution.
Read the full course description
Instead, attention is placed on what is actually occurring in the moment, allowing experience to become recognizable before it is explained.
As this capacity develops, participants often discover a quieter and more stable relationship to thoughts, emotions, dreams, images, and uncertainty itself. Rather than reacting impulsively, analyzing prematurely, or forcing closure, they begin learning how to remain present long enough for deeper patterns of meaning and relationship to emerge organically over time.
The course offers practical experience in:
- Developing the capacity for witnessing rather than immediate reaction
- Recognizing the difference between interpretation and direct experience
- Learning how symbolic life appears through ordinary moments, dreams, relationships, creativity, and emotional states
- Increasing tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, and emotional complexity
- Strengthening reflective awareness in both personal and professional settings
- Cultivating a more grounded relationship to imagination, inner imagery, and emotional process
- Discovering how slowing down changes perception, communication, and clinical presence
Participants frequently find that this way of working deepens:
- Clinical listening and therapeutic attunement
- Creative process and symbolic imagination
- Emotional regulation without suppression
- Relationship to grief, transition, and life change
- Capacity for presence in caregiving, leadership, and intimate relationships
- Trust in one’s own lived experience without rushing toward certainty
The work is quiet and precise. It requires no special background, though it does ask for a willingness to slow down, to notice carefully, and to remain with what is present without forcing immediate conclusion. This is not primarily a course in theory. It is an introduction to a way of attending that can gradually reshape one’s relationship to clinical work, creativity, emotional life, and the experience of being human itself. Each session includes brief teaching, guided experiential work, reflective exercises, and contained discussion. The pace is deliberate, allowing recognition to emerge through direct contact rather than explanation.
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This course is intentionally small and relationally focused. The form below helps ensure that the group is well matched to the nature of the work.
Following the Image
Every gathering this year explores a single question from a different perspective: What happens when we trust an image long enough for it to become a companion rather than an object of interpretation?
August Following the Image
Synchronicity, Guidance, and the Unfolding Psyche
Companion Tale The Bremen Town Musicians Voices Jung, von Franz, Hillman, Rilke
Companions for this month’s gathering
C. G. Jung. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Read paragraphs 816–845 (introduction and the definition of synchronicity), 858–889 (meaningful coincidence and the relationship between psyche and matter), and 900–931 (the symbolic implications of synchronicity). Approximate reading: 30–35 pages. As you read, notice how Jung invites us to move beyond simple cause and effect toward an understanding of events that become meaningful through symbolic relationship.
Marie-Louise von Franz. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Read chapters 6–8. Pay particular attention to unexpected helpers, symbolic guidance, impossible tasks, and moments when destiny changes through apparently insignificant events.
James Hillman. The Dream and the Underworld. Read pages 51–88. Notice Hillman’s repeated invitation to remain with dream images rather than translating them too quickly into waking-life explanations.
Grimm fairy tale. The Bremen Town Musicians, found in The Alchemy of Fairy Tales, Volume III. Read the tale slowly. As you read, ask yourself: What first calls each animal onto the journey? How does each companion contribute something the others cannot? At what point does Bremen quietly disappear? What becomes the true destination? How does the tale invite us to trust the unfolding journey rather than cling to a predetermined outcome?
Poetry. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours. Read I Live My Life in Widening Circles, printed on page 4 of the study guide. Read the poem more than once during the month. Allow its images to accompany you before seeking interpretation.
Optional companion. Lois E. Wilkins, The Alchemy of Fairy Tales, Volume III. Read the commentary on synchronicity, symbolic guidance, and the imaginal life.
At the Threshold
Before entering the commentary, I invite you to pause for a few moments with Rilke’s I Live My Life in Widening Circles, printed in the study guide. Read it slowly. If possible, read it aloud. Resist the impulse to interpret it or to search immediately for its meaning. Simply notice which image remains with you as you begin the reflection that follows.
As you prepare to enter this month’s commentary, allow one image from the poem to accompany you. There is no need to decide what it means. Simply notice which image remains with you and whether it begins, quietly and almost of its own accord, to enter into conversation with the dreams, the fairy tale, and the other companions you have encountered throughout the month.
Following the Image
Most of us have been educated to believe that understanding begins with explanation. We encounter a dream and immediately ask what it means. We read a fairy tale and search for its lesson. We experience an unexpected coincidence and wonder whether it is trying to tell us something. We have learned to move quickly from image to interpretation, assuming that the sooner we understand, the more fully we have received what has been given.
The symbolic life suggests another possibility. Perhaps understanding begins, not with explanation, but with relationship. Before an image asks to be interpreted, it asks to be received. Before it becomes an idea, it is an encounter. The image arrives with its own integrity, carrying something of itself that cannot be exhausted by our explanations. It asks first for our attention and only later for our understanding.
This summer, many people have found themselves speaking once again about Odysseus. Some have returned to Homer’s epic because of renewed cultural interest, while others have discovered the story for the first time. Whatever draws us back, it is worth asking why certain stories continue to accompany humanity across centuries. Why does one generation after another return to Odysseus, to Antigone, to Cinderella, to Hansel and Gretel, or to the parables of the Gospels? Why do these stories refuse to disappear?
Depth psychology suggests that they endure because they are more than stories. They are living images that continue to address questions every generation must ask anew. Their settings belong to another age, yet the psychological realities they reveal remain startlingly contemporary. We do not preserve these stories simply because they are old. We return to them because they continue to illuminate something essential about what it means to become fully human. The stories do not merely survive the centuries; they continue to live because each generation discovers that they are, in some mysterious way, already speaking about them.
This conviction has gradually become one of the central orienting principles of my own life. During the past year, I found myself returning to it in an unexpected way while preparing a presentation for Pacifica Graduate Institute. When I accepted the invitation to speak, I believed I would be reflecting on artificial intelligence and its implications for depth psychology. As the months passed, however, I gradually realized that artificial intelligence was never the true subject of the presentation. It had become the occasion for a much older conversation. The deeper question was whether, in an age increasingly shaped by information, efficiency, and technological sophistication, we would continue to cultivate the distinctly human capacity to remain in relationship with images that refuse to be reduced to information.
That realization returned me with deep gratitude to the tradition in which many of us have been formed. During my years at Pacifica, Stephen Aizenstat invited us to host the dream — to receive psyche with a hospitality that resists the temptation to explain an image before it has revealed its own life. Over time I have come to recognize that this invitation extends far beyond dreams. It is equally true of fairy tales, poetry, works of art, synchronistic events, and those ordinary moments that quietly alter the direction of our lives. To live symbolically is, perhaps, to cultivate this same hospitality toward every image that seeks our attention.
Jung described the symbolic attitude as a way of living in which consciousness recognizes that it is not the only source of knowledge. Dreams, fantasies, fairy tales, and meaningful coincidences all participate in the gradual formation of consciousness. Synchronicity, as Jung understood it, is not remarkable because it defies probability. It is remarkable because an inner experience and an outer event suddenly illuminate one another in a way that cannot be accounted for by causality alone. We experience such moments not primarily as intellectual puzzles but as recognitions. Something within us knows that we have encountered an event whose significance exceeds its immediate circumstances.
Fairy tales have always known this. Their wisdom seldom appears through argument. It emerges through images that quietly accumulate meaning. A traveler offers kindness to an old woman. An animal is spared. A forgotten object is carried almost absentmindedly. At first these moments seem inconsequential. Only later do we discover that the entire story has been shaped by what appeared least important. The fairy tale invites us to trust that the psyche often works in much the same way. What seems ordinary today may later reveal itself as the quiet beginning of an entirely different life.
James Hillman extends this invitation by reminding us that every interpretation carries a certain danger. If we explain an image too quickly, we risk replacing the image with our explanation. The image ceases to live as an image and becomes an illustration of something we already think we know. Hillman invites us instead to remain in conversation with the image, allowing it to disclose dimensions of meaning that cannot be reached through analysis alone. This is not an argument against interpretation. Rather, it is a reminder that interpretation has its proper season, and that understanding often ripens through companionship before it matures into language.
Our companion tale this month, The Bremen Town Musicians, offers a quiet example of this movement. Four aging animals leave behind lives that have come to an end and begin walking toward a city they never reach. From the perspective of the ego, the story appears unfinished. Yet from the perspective of the psyche, something far more important has occurred. The image of Bremen has already fulfilled its purpose. It awakened movement. It gathered companions who otherwise would never have met. It carried them beyond despair into a place that unexpectedly became home.
There is an interesting parallel with Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus believes he is trying to return home. The animals believe they are traveling toward Bremen. In both stories the destination matters, but not in the way we first imagine. The journey transforms the traveler long before the destination is reached. In the Grimm tale, Bremen quietly disappears from the story, having already accomplished its symbolic work. The image has done what it came to do. It has called life forward.
Looking back over our own lives, many of us can recognize similar moments. A book opened almost by chance. A dream refused to be forgotten. A conversation lingered long after it ended. An invitation accepted with little thought became the beginning of an entirely different vocation. At the time we seldom recognize their significance. Only years later do we begin to see that these seemingly unrelated moments belonged to a larger pattern that was quietly unfolding.
One of the deepest realizations to emerge from my own work over the past year was the recognition that while I believed I was remaining faithful to certain images, those images had, in their own mysterious way, been remaining faithful to me. They continued to return. They patiently awaited my readiness. They accompanied me through seasons when I scarcely understood what they were asking. In time I came to wonder whether the symbolic life is less about our search for meaning than about our willingness to recognize that meaning has long been searching for us.
As you enter this month’s readings, I hope you will resist the understandable desire to master them. Read Jung slowly. Allow Marie-Louise von Franz to remind you that fairy tales have their own way of knowing. Let Hillman encourage you to remain with the image before translating it into psychological language. Read The Bremen Town Musicians as though it were describing a movement that has already begun within your own life. Read the accompanying commentary not as an explanation of the tale but as one person’s ongoing conversation with it.
Most importantly, notice what begins to accompany you during the coming month. Attend to the dream that remains unusually vivid after waking. Listen for the line of poetry that returns unexpectedly. Pay attention to those ordinary encounters that quietly refuse to disappear from memory. Resist the impulse to decide too quickly what they mean. There may be wisdom in allowing them to remain images a little longer.
If the symbolic life teaches us anything, it is that consciousness is not formed by accumulating explanations. It is formed by entering into an ever-deepening relationship with those images that patiently accompany us, often long before we recognize that we have been accompanied.
Perhaps that is why these ancient stories continue to find us. We imagine that we have chosen to read Homer, the Grimm Brothers, Jung, or a poem by Rilke. Yet there are moments when it seems equally true that these stories have, in some mysterious way, chosen us. They have waited patiently through generations, carrying questions no single lifetime can answer and offering images no single interpretation can exhaust.
Our task is not to solve them. Our task is to keep them company long enough for them to become companions in the ongoing formation of our own consciousness.
Meeting our companions
The companions gathered for each month’s conversation speak in many voices — psychology, fairy tale, poetry, and reflective writing. Each has been invited because it offers a distinctive way of seeing the symbolic life. Together they encourage us to remain with images that continue to unfold over time. Each companion brings a particular gift to this month’s gathering.
Jung, C. G. (1988). Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle. In The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8, R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1952.) Jung invites us to recognize that some events are united not by cause and effect, but by meaning. His reflections on synchronicity encourage us to notice the subtle ways psyche and world sometimes mirror one another.
von Franz, M.-L. (1996). The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Shambhala. Marie-Louise von Franz helps us discover how fairy tales reveal the quiet movements of the psyche. Her work draws our attention to symbolic guidance, unexpected helpers, and the patient unfolding of inner transformation.
Hillman, J. (1979). The Dream and the Underworld. Harper & Row. James Hillman reminds us to remain faithful to dream images without hastening toward explanation. His writing encourages us to dwell with the image long enough for its own life to emerge.
The Brothers Grimm. The Bremen Town Musicians. In this month’s fairy tale, the journey itself gradually becomes the destination. As the animals respond to an inner summons, the place they believed they were seeking quietly gives way to the place they truly needed to find. The tale invites us to trust the unfolding path and to discover that transformation often occurs before we reach the destination we imagined.
Rilke, R. M. The Book of Hours. Rilke gives poetic voice to the symbolic journey. I Live My Life in Widening Circles reminds us that consciousness grows not in a straight line toward certainty but through repeated returns to the same enduring mysteries, each time with greater depth and awareness.
Wilkins, L. E. The Alchemy of Fairy Tales (Vol. III). This month’s commentary serves as a place of hospitality where these companions are invited into conversation with one another. Rather than offering definitive interpretations, it encourages us to notice how dreams, fairy tales, poetry, and synchronistic experiences continue to illuminate the symbolic life.
September The Symbolic Home
Rooms, Thresholds, and the Architecture of the Psyche
Companion Tale Hansel and Gretel Voices Jung, Bachelard, Hillman, Rilke
If August invites us to trust the journey, September invites us to notice where the journey leads. Dreams frequently bring us into houses, rooms, stairways, gardens, doors, and thresholds. These are not merely places; they are images through which the psyche reveals its inner architecture. Together we will explore what it means to become more fully at home within the symbolic life.
Companions for September’s gathering
C. G. Jung. Man and His Symbols. Read “Approaching the Unconscious,” the sections concerning houses, rooms, doors, stairways, windows, and symbolic space.
Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Read “The House,” “House and Universe,” and “Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes.” As you read, notice how intimate places become containers for memory, imagination, and soul.
James Hillman. The Thought of the Heart. Read the selected essay. Notice how places, like dreams, possess their own psychological life.
Grimm fairy tale. Hansel and Gretel, found in The Alchemy of Fairy Tales, Volume III. Read the tale slowly. As you read, consider: What makes a house feel like home? Which homes nourish life, and which imprison it? How do thresholds change those who cross them? What must be left behind before a true home can be found?
Dream reflection. Review two or three dreams involving houses, rooms, stairways, windows, thresholds, gardens, attics, or basements. Bring one dream that continues to live with you, even if you do not yet understand it.
Optional companion. Lois E. Wilkins, selected essays on symbolic dwelling, homecoming, and the architecture of the psyche, available on this website.
Poetry — Rilke, The Ninth Elegy
A Living the Symbolic Life rendering.
Here is the time for speaking what can be spoken.
Give voice to the world entrusted to you.
The things we love are passing away,
yet they place themselves into our care,
hoping they may continue to live
within a human heart.
Show the ordinary world its dignity.
Show how even sorrow may become form,
how loss itself may be transformed,
and how what is most fleeting
may become enduring through love.
The passing things of this earth
entrust themselves to us.
They ask that we receive them so deeply
that they may live again within us,
changed into something invisible,
yet no less real.
Earth, is this not what you ask of us —
to rise again within us,
no longer merely visible,
but inwardly alive?
If transformation is not our calling,
what, then, is?
Beloved Earth,
I give myself to this work.
Look:
I am alive.
And from somewhere deeper
than memory or expectation,
life continues to rise within my heart.
The full commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
October Into the Forest
Losing Our Way and Finding the Soul
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
November Hospitality to the Stranger
Welcoming the Unknown Within
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
December The Long Night
Waiting, Hope, and the Return of Light
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
January Vocation
Listening for the Work That Calls Us
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
February Love and Eros
The Images That Shape Relationship
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
March Thresholds
Death, Renewal, and Psychological Transformation
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
April The Living Earth
Nature as an Imaginal Presence
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
May Memory and Ancestry
The Stories That Continue to Live Through Us
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
June Creativity
Participating in the Work of Imagination
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
July Returning to the Image
Living the Symbolic Life
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.