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Facilitated by Cybele Brandow
Second Saturday every Month (Except October 10):
Starting September 12, 2020
10 am to 12 pm
Held online via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81898146363

FREE for members and non-members; No pre-registration is necessary

A little more than thirty-two years ago, renowned scholar Joseph Campbell sat down with veteran journalist Bill Moyers for a series of interviews that became one of the most enduringly popular programs ever on PBS. In dialogues that span millennia of history and far-flung geography, the two discuss myths as metaphors for human experience and the path to transcendence, touching on topics as diverse as world religion, the virgin birth, and pop culture. Filmed at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and New York’s American Museum of Natural History, this series demonstrates that, despite superficial differences between cultures, all stories are humanity’s story.

In this discussion group, each day we will watch one of the six, 60-minute segments together, then spend the second hour in informal discussion concerning what arose for each of us out of the images, thoughts, and dialogues shared by Campbell and Moyers.

Cybele Brandow is a student of late ancient Christian mysticism, biblical and general hermeneutics, and tarot. They are the current Coordinator of the Maine Jung Center as well as a writer of children’s nonsense literature that engages metaphorically with dreams, schizotypy, naming, gender cosmologies, dynamic identity, myth and fairy tale, and more. Cybele lives in South Portland atop a hill and is a devout admirer of their Seussian bungalow’s resident tortie, Persephone (‘Persy’ for short).

Tools of Individuation
Quilts: Woman’s Taproot to the Heart
Deborah Freedman

Sunday, September 13, 2020
2 to 4 pm
Held Online via Zoom (link to go out to registrants on September 12)
Members $15, Non-Members $20

The language of quilts is heart-based and has a long history. Stories from diaries, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt will be shared. Woman have used the quilting process to bring a sense of comfort and being for themselves and those they love. Patterns are created from the world outside their door… The process is co-operative and collaborative. Home becomes a place where we belong.

Isolation is broken.

When Cleve Jones, in his social activism, asked for quilt panels to be made for those who had died from AIDS, he had no idea what he was tapping into. At home, with skills many already had, around a table, people gathered to remember a loved one.

Isolation is broken.

Deborah Freedman was a quilter for several decades collecting stories and teaching. In 1988, when a chapter of the Names Project was formed in Maine, she was asked to help. Twelve years passed sewing, gathering stories and traveling to share them. She has authored a trilogy, The Quiet Triumph of the Heart. In 2016 she was invited by Oxford University to share her story and insights at a global conference, Storytelling, Illness and Medicine. A published article resulted, “AIDS Awakens Ancient Stories”. You see the fairy tale had emerged… but that’s another story.

Interview with Simone de Beauvoir “Why I’m a Feminist” (1975)
with Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber
Viewing facilitated by Andreea Paine
Free for Members and Non-Members, No Pre-Registration Required
Zoom link to watch: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87299048789

Forever tethered to Jungian community by the incredible work and person of Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir was assuredly one of the greatest, most unconventional, paradoxical, brilliant individuals of the 20th century. In this 1975 interview by French journalist Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, de Beauvoir picks up the ideas of The Second Sex, which Servan-Schreiber calls as important an “ideological reference” for feminists as Marx’s Capital is for communists. He asks de Beauvoir about one of her most quoted lines: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” Her reply shows how far in advance she was of post-modern anti-essentialism, and how much of a debt later feminist thinkers owe to her ideas: “Yes, that formula is the basis of all my theories…Its meaning is very simple, that being a woman is not a natural fact. It’s the result of a certain history. There is no biological or psychological destiny that defines a woman as such…Baby girls are manufactured to become women.” 

Facilitated by Jeffrey Pinnette
Third Sunday every Month:
Starting September 20, 2020
10 am to 12 pm
Held online via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88486208410

FREE for members; No pre-registration is necessary

Required Text: Ecological Intelligence: Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature (2005) by Ian McCallum

This discussion group will explore the concept of Ecological Intelligence through Ian McCallum’s book entitled Ecological Intelligence: Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature.

A bestseller in Africa, Ecological Intelligence addresses the interconnectedness of all living things, drawing significantly on the author’s Jungian background. McCallum has stated the intent of the book is “toward a greater awareness of the privilege of what it means to be human…it is a wild and ethical imperative – an urgent reminder that we are inextricably linked to the land; that the history of every living creature is within us; that we are above all a mindful, poetic species and that we are the “keepers of our zoo”. If we cannot accept this then we will continue to be the creatures of our own undoing.” The book reflects on the evolution of life; the development of emotions, language, and consciousness; fields of influence; and a concept of ecological intelligence that is closely linked to a spiritual and poetic approach to our place in the natural order.

Ian McCallum is a Jungian analyst, medical doctor, wilderness guide, and poet – as well as a director of the Wilderness Foundation. He is the author of two anthologies of wilderness poems: Wild Gifts (1999), Untamed (2012) and a novel Thorns to Kilimanjaro (2000).

In this discussion group, we’ll read the book together during each session with no reading assignments.

Jeffrey Pinnette is the facilitator for this discussion group. He is a long-term Jung Center member and current serves on the Center’s Board as the Program Committee chair. He lives in Topsham.

Pan and Pandemic: A Panoramic View of the Greek God, Pan
Thankful Butler

Sunday, September 20, 2020
2 to 4 pm
Held Online via Zoom (link to go out to registrants on September 19)
Members $15, Non-Members $20

The Greek god, Pan, has returned to our modern world in a most fearsome form, a pandemic. Pan is also the god of thresholds ushering in new directions, as well as the god of unbridled wildness. What might we make of his reappearance now as pandemic from an archetypal, mythological, psychological, and ecological perspective? What do we need to re-call of this lost god? And what might be needed to shift from pandemic, panic, and pandemonium, to panacea?

Thankful Butler, LCPC, is a retired therapist living in Bath. She attended Pacifica Graduate Institute, and is a long-standing member and past Board Member of the Maine Jung Center. She is particularly interested in how Jungian dream-work, fairy tales and myths inform our world-view and guide our individual growth. She is also an avid gardener and proponent for green technologies.