For months, I’ve been living in what feels like a liminal field—something between a lucid dream and a waking initiation. There is a psychic pressure building, both subtle and insistent, and the word that keeps surfacing is explosion. Not destruction, not catastrophe, but a kind of internal flowering so dense, so intense, that my ordinary routines and structures buckle under its weight.

On our property—a blend of formal gardens, rewilding meadow, and woods—unfolds a world of superabundance. An explosion of life and color across the Kentucky landscape, mirroring the inner combustions I've been tracking. Vitality, fecundity, the riotous shrubs, plants, and trees blossoming one after the other. It's an embodied metaphor: something is growing too large to stay contained. It presses outward and inward.

But alongside this force is an ambient disarray. Neglected antechambers in actual and metaphoric form: the disorganized garage, basement, and shed, like the neglected corners of psyche and practice. Unfinished paintings litter the studio like abandoned children. These are not merely messes to be cleaned—they are fragments of a symbolic landscape, reflecting the conflict between growth and entropy, emergence and inertia. They may be a "waking dream" that doesn't dissolve upon rising, but lingers in the sensory irritants of untidied places and unkept promises to the self.

I've recently unearthed a vital resonance with my recent immersion in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Doctor Faustus, and my dream journaling. All these works—each in their way—deal with the soul's splitting, with the daimonic call, with creative sacrifice, and with holding multiple inner realities at once.

 

Am I walking the same path?
 

I'm asked me to enter waking life as if it were a lucid dream, to assemble a symbol tray from the world around me, and to reflect on the images, dreams, and synchronicities that emerged. Together, they formed a single invitation: to treat each object, gesture, and fragment of experience as if arranged by psyche itself.
 

This isn’t about achieving perfect awareness. It’s about cultivating a willingness to return—to presence, to ambiguity, to attention. Immersed in the landscape of our home, I’ve begun to see not only the mess, the flaws, the incompletions—but their shimmer. The peeling paint on our house’s trim, the garden tools leaning like old bones, the weeds that grow tall as I watch—none of these are mere chores. They are signs.
They are not obstacles to clarity, but invitations into it—reminders that the psyche speaks in the language of disorder as much as in harmony, through stray detail as much as grand design. The “waking dream” asks not for mastery, but for surrender. Not interpretation, but intimacy. To live symbolically is

not to decode life, but to enter into dialogue with it—moment by moment, mess and all.
 

This entire property has become my symbol tray. Not just a container for metaphor, but an active field of image and event—each leaf and crack and creature arranged in relation. I think of the blue jay I saw recently: it dove without hesitation into our small pond and snatched up a tiny fish, swallowed it in one gulp. That moment stayed with me—not just for its brutality, but because I recognized myself in both players. I am Jay and the fish. I consume and am consumed. My thoughts, my affects, my sensations—all are part of a closed circuit of transformation. This is what it means to live in time with awareness: to see every act as both sacrifice and sustenance. I am beginning to understand that the symbolic life does not demand we transcend experience, but that we fully metabolize it. To live it, feel it, and—like that bird—swallow it whole.
 

In dream terms, my environment is the psyche, projected and alive. A chaotic basement may symbolize the unconscious, cluttered, and ignored. The disorganized garage, too, has begun to feel symbolically charged—its disorder echoing the dream imagery of broken vehicles, switch houses, and shifting terrain. Perhaps the garage, with its tangle of tools and forgotten projects, holds a dream of stalled motion, of journeys unbegun or interrupted. The artwork left unfinished is a severed part of my expressive body, an echo of myths centered on dismemberment and rebirth.
 

I embody many roles: an artist in the act of yet another reinvention, the writer forging myth from biography, the therapist sitting with others' pain. All seemed mediated by the relentless pull of caretaking and attention.
 

I'm aware of how much I'm carrying. My clients' stories don't leave when the session ends. They echo in me throughout the day, as if I've become a tuning fork for other people's pain, searching for a sympathetic vibration. I've chosen to be that. But it's also left me estranged from my own rhythms, my own art, even my own home. The painting has stopped—not out of rebellion or doubt, but because of pain. My hands and arms, stiff with arthritis, move clumsily now. It isn’t that I doubt the work’s quality—it’s that it feels unwanted, unrecognized, like a signal cast into silence. The ache is not only physical. It is the ache of making something no one seems to need.
 

Jung wrote of transformation not as a tidy ascent but as an alchemical ordeal—nigredo, albedo, rubedo. Death, dissolution, and then—only maybe—reconstitution. Right now, I feel caught between nigredo and rubedo. The disorganization around me—the garage, the basement, the neglected artwork—is not just evidence of entropy. It's symbolic. It tells me something is being broken down so that something more authentic can emerge.
 

I used to think insight was enough. That if I could just interpret the dream, assign meaning to its images and symbols, it would deliver me. But transformation is not insight. It is living through. It is ache and ambiguity, repetition and revision. It is not clean or clarifying—it is composting. The psychic content must become bodied, metabolized through time, discomfort, and contradiction. And that's what this spring is demanding of me: not to tidy the tension, not to resolve it, but to inhabit it—fully, painfully, courageously—until it begins to move on its own.
 

The symbolic life isn't something I'm studying anymore. It's something I am in. The old house—my psyche, my practice, my routines—is being renovated from within. And while I am tempted to fix everything—to clean the basement, reorganize, start painting again—it's becoming clear that this, too, can be a defense.
 

And all those selves—those echoes, fragments, aborted gestures—have become ghosts. Not ghosts in the spectral or cinematic sense, but in the old sense of presence without place, energy without voice. I use the word not because it suggests death, but because it evokes the unfinished—what lingers unresolved, half-buried, and yearning for form. These ghosts do not haunt from outside. They rise from within, stirred by excavation. As I dig through old work, old habits, old spaces—the studio, the garage, the basement—I unearth them. They are memories with unmet purpose, desires that slipped into dormancy, gestures that lost their reach. In this context, ghost is not metaphor but texture, the psychic residue left behind by everything once alive in me that never found its full expression. These ghosts have density. They shape the air. They are what the dreams echo, what the attic breathes, what the writing is trying, finally, to touch.
 

Ghosts of paintings that never left the studio.
Ghosts of dreams scribbled into margins.
Ghosts of words that asked for bodies and got silence instead.
 

I used to call them memories. Now I know better. As William H. Gass wrote in The Tunnel, “The things we are ashamed of are the things that make us who we are. We spend our lives burying them, and then we dig them up again, not to see them clearly, but to prove we’re still alive.” They are the souls of the unfinished, the archetypes with no altar, the inner cast of characters, my dreams, my reflections. They are not dead. They are waiting.
 

There is Martin, of course—me in this skin, on this porch. But within me are others. A polyphony of inner beings, not split but layered. The inner architecture resembles a fugue—a musical form in which a single voice begins and is gradually joined by others, each echoing, countering, or refracting the original theme. Initially, a single motif emerges—let us say, the conscious self. Then, another voice enters: a counterpoint, not in opposition, but in dialogue. Soon more follow—shadow selves, half-forgotten desires, lost childhood voices, the archaic, the ecstatic, the unspoken. They move in and out of phase, overlapping, clashing, harmonizing. Some fade, others reassert. The composition does not tidy itself into a chord—it moves through dissonance and return, building toward something more textured than resolution: a recognition of multiplicity. In this structure, the two figures that have stepped forward are not merely characters or fragments, but distinct voices in this inner composition. They sound different keys, they call from different depths, and their emergence signals that the fugue has entered a new phase—more intricate, more demanding, more alive.
 

These two are crucial, central, difficult to name, difficult to hold at once. They form the axis of inner architecture. You might call them sisters, though they are not of the same temperament. They aren’t just aspects of me. They are themes in the fugue. Each has a voice. I am both the composer and the listener. I bring the voices into being—and then step back to let them do their work.
 

One is the visionary, the quiet one. She walks barefoot through attics and visions, her eyes too wide for this world. Her hands are smudged with ash and silverpoint. She speaks in riddles, sees too much, and often disappears just when you need her most. She dwells in liminal spaces: attics, libraries, thresholds between sleep and vision. Her way is stillness, symbol, quiet ecstasy. She watches more than she speaks, but what she sees shapes the whole system. Her ghosts are relics. She dreams what I dare not name. She is the inner anchorite, the wish to be in the world but barely, to hold worldly things, but lightly.
 

The other is incendiary. She is raw creativity incarnate—angry, volcanic, unruly in her need. She doesn't paint to soothe; she performs to survive. She is mouth, hips, nerve, defiance. She doesn't merely enter a space—she erupts into it, demanding witness. She throws the door open, sings in the ruins, rages at absence, and pulls the sacred from the mundane with blood, sweat, and noise. Her ghosts are not just erotic—they are the music I never made, the incantations I silenced, the dances aborted before they reached crescendo. She is an unfinished symphony, lit match, and unrepentant demand. She's my inner Lee Miller who tends to burn out, burn up.
 

Together, they are my anima—not in the Jungian textbook sense, but in the ancient, shape-shifting sense. Music is then not a metaphor; it is a psychic model. My ghosts are like a polyphonic mass. The visionary speaks in a minor key, quietly. The incendiary bursts in with rhythmic insistence. The ancestors groan below the staff. The daimon distorts the key and changes the meter.
 

One is my sealskin. The other is my fire. One hides me from the world. The other dares me to be seen. And I—we—they—am tired of wandering the beach looking for the old skin. I am tired of keeping these ghosts at a distance. I want to call them home.
 

There's a story I've returned to lately. Sometimes it's the Selkie myth, sometimes it's Frau Holle, and both, in their own way, resonate with the wounded Fisher King. In the Selkie tale, a seal-woman is drawn from her oceanic world, her sealskin stolen by a man who wants to keep her on land. Though she may love the life she makes, she is always aching for the sea. Her transformation, her wholeness, depends on the return of her skin—her capacity to slip back into the world from which she came. In Frau Holle, a young girl—often unnamed—is cast between worlds: above and below, hearth and earth, life and death. Her passage through the otherworld grants her gifts or punishments, not based on virtue but on attention, rhythm, rightness of relation.
 

The Fisher King, too, is caught between vitality and ruin. He is wounded, often without knowing how or why. His kingdom suffers as he does, drying up around him. Healing depends not on a cure but a question—a recognition. Someone must ask the right thing, with the right heart.
 

These myths all speak of liminality, of being between worlds. They center figures—often feminine, sometimes ghostly—who hold beauty and power, but are unseen, misunderstood, exiled. And always, what redeems or releases them is not mastery but meaningful encounter. Not logic, but enchantment.

 

Not conquest, but return.
 

So too with these ghosts I carry. They do not want resolution. They want recognition. They do not want fixing. They want form.
 

The visionary doesn’t need interpretation. She needs a sanctuary—a studio, an anchorhold, perhaps a cavern near the old well. A place where symbols can settle, where stillness is allowed to speak.
The incendiary doesn’t need approval. She needs the right instruments—something strong enough to bear her voltage, tuned to her pulse, capable of translating fury into form. Not a stage, but a composition. Not applause, but resonance. She is raw need, wired for creation. She is the music I never made, the spell that broke in my throat. 
 

And I need to stop hovering above them like some anxious god.
 

Through these explorations, I’ve built a home for what has long lived inside me—too wild, too radiant, too complex to name until now. A house for the haunted.
 

Each character is a ghost I’ve carried: not invented, but remembered. Or at the very least, a resonance.
They will no longer wait for permission. They are already moving. Already speaking. Already stitching their presence into every line I write.
 

As John Gardner wrote in Mickelsson’s Ghosts, “There are ghosts. They are real. But they are not what we think they are. They are not just echoes of the past, but warnings. Invitations. Refusals to vanish.” 
These presences are not remnants to be exorcised—they are initiators. Invitations. They demand not forgetting, but a deeper listening.
 

And what they want—what I want—is connection. Connection to other haunted ones. To those whose ghosts ache for form, whose symbols dream of being touched. 
 

I do not want to be understood. I want to be felt.
 

I want others to recognize the music of their own ghosts in my song.
 

This is not confusion—it is a form of psychic polyphony.
 

Like the fugue, the music of the self is full of dissonance, echo, and tension. It cannot be resolved in the conventional sense. It must be composed with.
 

And now, I listen for the next motif.
 

I write not to explain, but to continue the composition—where every silence is a rest, and every ghost, a note.