And here is the key
To a house far away
Where I used to live
As a child.
They tore down the building
When I moved away
And left the key unreconciled.
from “Souvenirs” by Dan Fogelberg
Dan Fogelberg who penned these lyrics, was the love of my life when I was a teenager. I listened to the songs from his first three albums, Home Free (1972), Souvenirs (1974), and Captured Angel (1975), over and over until I knew every word by heart. I enjoyed his later albums as well – I’m a life-long fan – but I can’t overstate the impact these early albums had on me as I navigated adolescence and early adulthood. This song, “Souvenirs,” is my favorite. Its wistful lyrics and evocative melody resonate with my nostalgic temperament. In the current vernacular, it hits me in the feels. Even as a young teenager, I found the image of an unreconciled key haunting. Before training to become a psychotherapist or studying and reading about mythology, literature, and Jungian psychology, before being able to conceptualize the words metaphorically, the idea of a key being separated from that which it unlocks and opens, was deeply sorrowful to me.
Listening to “Souvenirs” on a recent road trip, I noticed that I am still moved by these lyrics. Mindfulness and contemplative practices have taught me to pay attention to where I feel deep emotions in my body. What I felt in that moment was a kind of tugging sensation in the area of my heart and tears behind my eyes. As I stayed with those sensations, they took me quite literally to the memory of the house “where I used to live as a child.” A house that shows up in my dreams frequently and almost always in a warm and tender way. For example, in a dream from many years ago:
I am in my childhood home as an adult and find a quilt that had always rested on my bed. It is pushed all the way to the back of the shelf at the top of my bedroom closet. I take the quilt down from the shelf, then turn and see my mother with a beautiful smile on her face. I run into her arms, both of us caught up in the extraordinary joy of that moment.
I have worked with and studied my dreams from a Jungian perspective since the mid-1980s. That’s about 40 years of using my night-time dreams to help me bring into conscious awareness those parts of myself I don’t easily see and integrate them into a whole Self. I pay attention to these nighttime images and notice where they show up synchronistically in the outer, waking world. I’ve worked dreams with friends, clients, dream groups small and large, and currently with a skilled Jungian analyst. I have always believed that our dreams come to us in the service of healing and wholeness and are a source of great wisdom. Approaching the age of 63, I find this work to be even more enlivening and deeply meaningful. Which brings me back around to that unreconciled key.
As I let myself sink more deeply into the feelings and sensations that arose as I listened, I found myself asking “What would this key unlock in me?” and “What is lost and what wants to be reconciled within myself?” I can work with this image in the same way I might work with a dream image. This is the Jungian approach to images and symbols, whether they appear in dreams, songs, art, or the natural world. It’s a metaphorical approach that allows us to look for meaning in objects, images, animals, situations, and the like, by noticing what we associate with those things, either from our own lived experience or from what we know about images and motifs that show up in myths, legends, fairy tales, literature, art, and so on.
As an example, in the dream related above, I can take the image of the quilt and see
what associations I have to it: something that provided/provides comfort and warmth; something stitched together from separate pieces, scraps even; random fabrics and colors put together to form a new pattern; and for this quilt in particular, a link to my mother’s childhood as a family friend made this quilt for her when she was a girl. Then I can ask myself where in my life I am missing warmth and comfort or needing to create unity out of separateness. Where do I need some comforting, embracing “Mother” energy?
The image of Dan Fogelberg’s unreconciled key presents me with a dilemma. A paradox really. If keys give us access to something locked away, what do I do with a key for which there is no longer a lock? A key as a symbol can point to the “tension of the opposites,” a “key” concept in Jungian psychology. “Keys invoke the tension between seeking and finding, restricting and releasing, withholding and giving, prohibiting and admitting.” (The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin, editors.)
I find myself thinking not only about what wants to be healed and integrated within myself, but also about what needs to be reconciled in this world that seems to have become broken into opposing camps. This us-vs-them mentality keeps us from remembering the wisdom of finding a middle way.
Carl Jung wrote about a “redeeming” or “unifying” symbol that would appear in times of tension and conflict. I first heard this concept in a class I took on Jungian psychology in my early 30s. The instructor in that class referred to this as a “reconciling” symbol. It is a living symbol that arises in the unconscious and points us toward a middle or third way through the conflict. It takes us to the land of both/and rather than either/or. The tricky part is that we must hold the tension of the conflict, the tension of opposites, long enough for the symbol to arise spontaneously from within. In other words, if we align too quickly with one side or the other in an attempt to ease the discomfort of the tension, we will not get there. Neither will we find this symbol or middle path by using reason and logic to create it. The reconciling symbol will have a numinous quality, a term coined by Rudolf Otto to denote a spiritual, mysterious, and non-rational element of experience.
So how do we “get there?” James Finley, psychologist and faculty member at The Living School, offers some guidance that might be of help. In talking about moments of awakening that may occur in various methods of meditation, Finley says we “cannot make moments of spontaneous awakening occur.” (Emphasis mine.) He goes on to say that we “assume the inner stance that offers the least resistance to be overtaken by that which we cannot attain for ourselves.” We can’t make an awakening or numinous experience happen or create a unifying symbol using the executive functions of reason and logic. And trying to force these numinous events to happen only keeps us more firmly anchored in ordinary reality. (This is wisdom found in many spiritual traditions, but more on that in a later blog post.)
What would that “inner stance of least resistance” look like? It’s a stance of openness, curiosity, vulnerability, and allowing. It looks like staying open to possibility even in the face of the most difficult conflicts and times of tension. We must create space within ourselves for holding this tension of opposites. When there is emotional or mental tension, we often respond by carrying tension in our bodies – tight, clenched muscles, constricted, shallow breathing. A state of inner bracing rather than least resistance. At these times we can use the breath to intentionally create space – space in our lungs, our chest, our bellies. If you add imagination to your breath practice, you can envision sending the breath to any part of your body that needs to open and soften. Mindful movement practices such as walking meditations, tai chi, qigong, and yoga can help to slow the mind and body and open the spaces within us. The form of yoga I have practiced for the last few years is called SRY or Spinal Release Yoga. It is very much about softening, opening, and letting go.
I used to think this numinous, reconciling symbol would present itself to me in some spectacular way – an idea for a book or poem that would change the world! Now I know to look for these images in smaller but no less valuable ways. The birds in my yard who remind me of the connection between heaven and earth. Images of the Divine Feminine in art both ancient and contemporary. Language in poems and literature that evokes imagery of light (lanterns,) belonging (dreams of home and loved ones,) and persistence (unreconciled keys.) So I shall continue to carry that key in my pocket and as best I can, maintain the stance of least resistance to finding or being found by the lock with which it can be reconciled.
Here is Dan Fogelberg’s beautiful song “Souvenirs”
For citations of works by Carl Jung in which he writes about the unifying symbol, see https://jungiancenter.org/jung-on-how-to-anticipate-and-watch-for-the-unifying-symbol-2/
Special thanks to Leslie Criss, sister, writer, and editor extraordinaire for her help with this post.
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