relentlessly off-topic

so i've been seeing this Jungian analyst for about a year and I'm about to stop seeing him. I have to say that I think analysis gets a bad rap & there are free-form analysts out there who really have it going on. I like the intellectual quality to Jungian analysis.

Like today, discussing how much Persephone I've experienced (I've even had these crazy Persephone dreams)--underworld voyages, strange abductions, sudden little deaths, and then risings. We tend to forget that Persephone is also the queen of the underworld. She is more than just victim. She rises, and rises, and rises, relentlessly.

And we were talking about her significance to me as an archetype, and somehow we got into my devotion to Kali; the unique Hindu flavor it has taken on since I've visited India. I laughed and said "I pray to Kali, I pray to Mary, I pray to my grandmother and jesus and whoever. Whoever wants to listen. I want to believe the world is listening. Lately I feel like I'm in a bubble." and babbling on and on. I'm like that these days.

It's really Kali and Persephone that rule my life. And no, I don't believe in them as actual ... entities. But I've read a bit of Jung in my lifetime and I like how his theory about archetypes led to the idea of a collective consciousness, part of a philosophy that I base my life around.

My Nana, she loved Mary. She really lived her life in devotion to Mary. She always had rosary beads with her; and if you're not Catholic, a rosary is in essence a devotional meditation to Mary with a few Our Fathers thrown in because otherwise it'd be, you know, too female altogether. That was her archetype; the mother, the nurturer. She saw visions of Mary as she lay dying. (The stubborn woman, though--would never agree with any priest that Mary was actually a virgin. "Why couldn't she have just made love to Joseph like any other woman would?" she'd say to me in her Cutlass Ciera on the way to church...)

I digress.

My mother is like my Nana. She meddles; she loves to give advice. She loves so hard that it hurts. I come from a long line of tough Irish women. I want to be that tough; I wonder if I am.

Somehow, in a patriarchal world, I come from a matriarchal family. A family where the oldest woman is the matriarch; the one who makes the decisions & is always listened to & is somewhat feared by certain of her grandchildren.

Don't ask me how this happened in an Irish-Catholic family called Connolly on the emerald isle; or maybe called by their new name in New York in the 1800's. I don't know how old this tradition is. I like to think it's old as the hills.