The shackle on one side
Héroes del Silencio, The stranded mermaid
And your heart on the other, meanwhile, bleeds
And the beggar always by your side
Your fellow traveller
When the stars will fade
You will come too
I always saw the beggar, all beggars, as leeches trying to feed on others, on me. Trying to take what I had earned with my hard work and was rightfully mine. Mine. My possession, my ‘precious’. The things I own. The things that own me.
Is the beggar freer than me? No possessions, no attachments. Empty. Lighter. But also colder, hungrier, dirtier. A sort of uncomfortable opposite of the ego. Another part of me, attached to me, if to nothing else. Always by my side, as in the song.
What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved – what then?
Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East
What if the beggar is there for me? Not to steal from me, to bleed me out, to feed on me. No. What if the beggar is there to help me? To help me release myself from the things that own me and to which I attach so fiercely, to unload my burden.
The beggar provides a ‘negative pressure’ so that my energy can flow. He provides an opportunity for balance. There is something of a flow in the beggar. Not because he may be a wanderer, but because something, material or not, will flow from me to him. He is a sink.
I beg because I am empty and am a beggar. In the day of this world, I forget that I drank the sun and am drunk from its active light and singeing power. But I stepped into the shadows of the earth, and saw that I am naked and have nothing to cover my poverty. No sooner do you touch the earth than your inner life is over; it flees from you into things.
Carl G. Jung, The Red Book
Are my things really mine? They will survive me, most of them. They will see me go and say “there goes the one who thought he owned us, the fool”. They will watch me dissolve into nothingness, while they sit there waiting for their next ‘owner’.
A very interesting book I recently read argued about the inbetweenness of things and how objects stand in between cultures, people, times, uniting them in a strange way. There is a flow in the inbetweenness of things that I had not appreciated before. An object is not a still dot connecting two other still dots. No, it is a flow between them. An inanimate piece of rock, wood, or plastic, which doesn’t move, becomes in itself the flow of spirit. Strange and marvellous.
But if you watch closely, you will see what you have never seen before, namely that things live your life, and that they live off you: the rivers bear your life to the valley, one stone falls upon another with your force, plants and animals also grow through you and they are the cause of your death. A leaf dancing in the wind dances with you; the irrational animal guesses your thought and represents you. The whole earth sucks its life from you and everything reflects you again.
Carl G. Jung, The Red Book
The beggar is here with me to remind me to let go. To let it flow. To become flow.
My life is a connection between the past and the future. Just a breeze.
The Introverted Tree 