‘Depth Writing With Dr Rachel’ is where I publish my reflections on my ongoing travels between worlds via the arts, literature, culture, nature, spirituality & all things Jungian. In my monthly dispatches, I deep dive into my outer experiences and look inward, integrating Jungian psychoanalysis and creative writing to reflect upon my lived experience in conversation with other writers and artists whose work I feel drawn to, writing from the heart to feed your head. Each dispatch also includes writing prompts to help you explore your own depths. You can do the prompts on your own or with a friend. Or you can join the mid-month Monday depth writing pods to do the prompts with others.
Depth writing is a holistic practice which continues to take me deeper and further into the invisible matrix of a larger healing reality that has made my life immeasurably richer and fuller. Depth Writing With Dr Rachel allows me to showcase this practice and it is a joy for me to be able to share my passion for free to anyone who wishes to subscribe.
‘You can possess a forest and be possessed by it.’ Ursula K Le Guin
Shadows and roots
Drawing on both ancient wisdom and science, Carl Jung viewed humanity as part of an invisible matrix that holds all things together in which we are not separate from nature, we are nature. In fairy tale and myth, the forest in particular is a place of magic and enchantment. Here in this dense, dark web of trees, the familiar gives way to the strange and the daylight realm of the solid dissolves into the mists of the ephemeral and numinous.
We wander the forest’s dark paths, temporarily plunged into a rhizomatic world of shadows and roots teeming with all that is invisible and hidden. The rustle of feathers, the swish of tails and the mycelial sprawl of what grows below ground invite us into an imaginal realm beyond the grasp of consciousness alone. In meeting with the wildness of the forest, we are called back to the instinctual nature of our own wildness. We may be eaten alive or learn to survive.
Alchemical domains of transformation and magic, forests are the lungs of the world. Living alembic systems, they breathe in carbon dioxide and light and breathe out oxygen, while also producing sugars. They purify the air and emit natural anti-depressants in the form of arboreal pheromones. As botanist and medical biochemist Diana Beresford-Kroeger writes in her memoir To Speak For The Trees; ‘Trees don’t only maintain the conditions for human and most animal life on earth, they created these conditions through the community of forests.’
Scientifically speaking, we share the same breath. Spiritually speaking, we share the same soul…
The Dream Life of Forests
On enchantment, extraction & doors to the invisible
Image: Pexels
‘It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve’ - Georgia O’Keeffe
Lately, a pair of collared doves have been appearing in my back yard. They plumply waddle across the stone flags, scratching at seeds, before fanning open their wings and flapping into the branches of the rowan on the other side of the alley as if they were as weightless as the pale feathers swirling to the ground in their wake.
Then one night as I was sleeping, the doves flew clean out of the rowan and into my dreams. One by one they plopped, coming to roost beneath the eaves of a barn - a whole flock, too many to count, improbably squishing their ample bodies into the dark, cramped space, amid a frantic rustle of feathers and loud, peeved cries. But instead of tucking beaks into breasts and going to sleep, the doves became increasingly agitated until the next thing I knew, dove was attacking dove, tearing at each other’s throats and turning the barn red with blood.
I woke, heart racing, unable to shift the doves’ cannibalistic orgy from my mind. More disturbing still was my dim awareness that these doves were carrier pigeons from some dark strata inside my own seams. But what was their message? Why were these birds of peace at each other’s throats? What inner self-sabotage might their bloody melee point to? Where was I unconsciously attacking myself?…
When Doves Bite
On the vice of being too nice & the virtues of snakes
Artwork: Leonora Carrington
The journey begins
‘All struggles/ Are essentially power struggles… and most are no more intellectual/ Than two rams/Knocking their heads together’ - Earthseed: The Books of the Living
Back in the early nineties before the ‘war on terror’, before the financial crash, before reports of wildfires became everyday news, before the forced displacement of hundreds upon millions, before the systemic rollback of basic human rights. Before we woke up one morning and wondered where have all the butterflies gone?
Back when Gen X (that’s me) were whipping ourselves into a trance to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and KRS-One’s Sound of Da Police, raging ecstatically against a machine whose death dealing tentacles still seemed far away enough in the future that - if you were privileged and western and white (also me) – it was still possible to believe their threat could be averted if you were smart enough and took the right coloured pills.
Back when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton arrived on the scene to captain a shiny new era of can-do centre-left positivism, the black American science fiction writer Octavia Butler was looking out of her Los Angeles window and noticing a few things…
Kill the Monster, Sow the Seeds
The hero/ine’s journey for an age of collapse
Artwork: Manzel Bowman