January is often a dark, depressing
month. It doesn’t have the anticipation
of December or the hope of February.
January is also when we’re deep in Capricorn’s territory. Just remember that the old sea goat enjoys
both the high snowy mountains and cold, dark depths of the ocean.
There are many themes associated
with Capricorn. The sign of Capricorn
symbolizes worldly power and our collective structures: government, finance,
law, education, the environment, corporations.
I thought about finding a movie that fit those themes, and the list is
extensive when it comes to Capricorn’s shadow side: “ambitious, materialist,
power hungry. . . . Calculating,
manipulative, quick to exploit any weakness…the epitome of slick, insidious
opportunism.” (Steven Forrest, The Inner
Sky, p.81) Network,
Wall Street, and Erin Brockovich are all find examples of Capricorn’s shadow. Or
just look at what’s going on in our society, especially since Pluto entered
Capricorn in late 2008, exposing the corruption in our social system. There are great documentaries made in the
past five years about the negative impacts of our social system, from food to
fracking to waste and water.
The deeper truth of Capricorn is
that it represents our inner freedom to act according to our own nature and
contribute that nature to our society.
In the East, it’s called Dharma.
“Dharma is to cultivate the
knowledge and practice of laws and principles that hold together the fabric of
reality, natural phenomena and personality of human beings in dynamic
interdependence and harmony. “ (Wikipedia)
When our inner life and our personal values shine through our public
life, we achieve Capricorn’s goal. Capricorn
is where our destiny shines.
But for us to accomplish our destiny,
we need good role models. And the most
important role models are our parents. So
I decided to look at another aspect of Capricorn we often neglect to mention. Just as Cancer symbolizes the Archetypal
Mother, Capricorn is the sign of the Archetypal Father. Just as the “archetypal Mother is the matrix—the form into which we pour our experiences,
the archetypal Father represents the
dynamism of the archetypal, for the archetype consists of both form and energy.”
(C.G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, p. 101-102) Mother
and feminine consciousness comprise our being,
while Father and masculine
consciousness make up our doing.
Like the Tarot card of the Emperor,
the Father archetype stands for law, order, authority and the world beyond the
home. The Father stands for the rules of
our society, the structures that support our community. He is responsible for teaching his children
to respect and obey the rules of his society so that they can take their place
in the world. Under patriarchy, the
Father rules supreme. In many societies,
it’s his ‘way or the highway’. The rules
are what’s important, not the individual emotional body (the Mother, feminine
consciousness). At his best, the father serves as the bridge between home and
society, and the self and our life purpose.
Instead of telling his children
what they CAN’T do, a great father finds out what his child needs to do and
helps him/her to do it.
As fathers go, one of my film
favorites is Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. There
is a sense of strength and morality that shines through his role. But the film that really expresses for me
what the great father can do to help his children is the film Fly Away Home.
Fly Away
Home
The 1996 movie, Fly
Away Home, is a gem of a movie. Jeff
Daniels and Anna Paquin play Tom and Amy Alden, an estranged father and
daughter who are reunited after many years when Amy’s mother dies in a car
crash. It’s a wonderful story about how
our kids teach their parents to grow up.
The movie begins in the rain.
Anna and her mother are driving home together in New Zealand, and we can
see how connected they are as they laugh and discuss their day. And then suddenly, the car is forced off the
road. Anna wakes up in the hospital with
her father by her side, come to take her back to Canada now that her mother has
died. Tom tells Amy, “I’ve come to take
you home.”
Neither Tom
nor Anna know what to do with each other.
Tom is an artist, a metal sculptor, and a bit of a rebel. He tells Amy ‘I’m
going to be busy. I have a lot of work
to catch up on.’ Her answer is, ‘ I’m
not a baby. You don’t have to hold my
hand.’ They are definitely prickly with
each other. Anna retreats into herself,
not wanting to be there at all.
Tom seems to be one of those men who never grew up, what Jung
would call a puer. He’s constantly trying to fly with his own
home-made wings. The first morning in
Canada, Amy wakes up and watches her father’s attempt to fly, which ends with
him crashing in the field. As Amy
watches, he slowly gets up and starts laughing like a lunatic, without any
thought for how Amy might feel seeing her only living relative crash and
perhaps die.
Jung spoke about the Puer aeternus, which is Latin for eternal boy. In Greek and Roman mythology, the term
designates a child-god who is forever young.
Psychologically, a man who is a puer
typically leads a provisional life, fearing to be caught in a situation where
he might not be able to escape, such as marriage or a regular job. He covets his
independence and freedom and tends to find any restriction intolerable. He chafes at boundaries and limits because
his emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. We would say he had a Peter Pan complex. He loves
to fly.
I think
Tom has a bit of the puer in him as
most of the baby boomers do who seem determined to act young until they die. But he makes a successful landing when his
daughter comes to live with him. He begins to grow up and take responsibility,
even though he doesn’t know how. He’s one of those self-centered artists,
living alone although his lover Susan comes and goes in his life. He later admits to Amy, when she asks him why
he rarely came to visit her, that he was afraid and angry for letting her mom
and her go, and besides, New Zealand is far away. He was an absent father because he couldn’t
find the father within himself. But now
with Amy living with him, things start to change.
As a puer, the idealist and rebel in Tom has
been focused on his concern for the environment. His love of the land is one of the things
that ties him down to Earth. There is a
developer who illegally tries to bulldoze some land near Tom. While Tom and Susan hurry off to a Town
Council meeting to protest the project, Amy wanders the land. She comes to where they’ve bulldozed the
trees and discovers an abandoned nest with eggs. She takes the eggs back to the barn in her
old ‘snuggly’ and hides them in a drawer, wrapped in her mother’s old scarfs
that she discovers in the barn along with her baby carrier. Unbeknownst to Amy, in saving the eggs, she
begins to reclaim her mom.
Soon all the eggs hatch, and Amy
discovers that she’s become mother to a flock of Canadian geese!
Geese
are interesting. They attach themselves to
the first moving thing they see. If the
mother or father goose is not there, they bond with whoever is. And so Amy becomes their surrogate mother.
Symbolically,
geese are found in a number of fairy tales, such as The Goose Girl and The Goose
That Laid the Golden Egg. There is something magical about them. They were sacred to the Roman goddess Juno,
goddess of marriage. Perhaps you
remember the Mother Goose Tales? Stories
and imagination seem to be part of their mythology. And their migration patterns gives them a
solar aspect (the golden egg), disappearing south in the autumn and returning
north in the spring.
Even
more interesting is the fact that in Celtic lore, the goose symbolizes
parenthood and the responsibilities of raising a family. Geese mate for life and both parents raise
their young. The geese perfectly
symbolize the lesson Tom is learning about being a father. It is by example that they teach their young
how to migrate south; it is by example that we teach our children to succeed.
As Amy
becomes more and more connected with her geese, Tom begins to take more of an
interest in Amy. And as Amy begins to
mother the geese, she influences Tom, her uncle David, Susan and even Tom’s
flying buddy, Barry. Her mothering
changes the whole feeling of the household.
You can see the love growing.
Here is
where Tom develops into a great dad. Realizing
that the geese won’t be able to migrate without their help, Tom and his friends
devise a plan to lead the geese south in a small plane they build. When Amy wants to keep the geese with her in
the barn all winter, Tom asks her if she thinks that’s fair for the geese. They were made to migrate and be free. And so he offers to lead them south. But when they keep following after Amy, Tom
realizes that she’s going to have to do it.
He respects her enough to give her the opportunity to spread her wings
and help these birds that she loves. He’ll
build two planes to fly with her as she leads her geese south.
Meanwhile,
the local animal officer, while speaking out on behalf of the wildlife in the
area that was bulldozed, is too ready to obey a set of rules that would
imprison the geese instead of setting them free. Just before Tom and Amy plan to lead the
geese to a bird sanctuary in North Carolina, he steals them from the farm. And so they steal them back and head out on
their journey.
As they
fly south, they are forced to land at an air force base, then fly over open
water and even through a foggy city. It
isn’t a surprise that the media picks up the story. People know they’re flying south and watch
for them to fly overhead. At the bird
sanctuary, people gather to await their arrival, while a developer also waits
to bulldoze the area if no birds make their home there by November 1. That’s one of the reasons for bringing the
flock south—to save the sanctuary. Just
before they get there, Tom’s plane goes down in a field and Amy has to fly the
geese there alone. When she tells him that she can’t find her way without him, Tom
says he knows she can do it. She’s
strong and brave like her mom.
So Amy and the geese arrive just at
sunset and save the sanctuary. Her geese
know how to migrate and they have a home.
And now so does she.
Fly Away Home is a beautiful movie about
how a father can help his child follow her vision and her bliss. As
more and more fathers take a bigger role in raising their children, I can only
hope that they remember that their job is not only to protect and provide for
their families, but also to guide their children as they make their way in the
world.
From the Bard’s Grove,
Cathy
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