Syzygy: Crossing the Bridge to Self

THE MEMOIR Scraping the chalky topsoil off trenches and craters in my war-torn psyche, the Syzygy: Crossing the Bridge to Self memoir explores the layers of environmental destruction and psychological damage after decades of abuse and Self-annihilation to exhume what remains, if anything. In search for home, for mama, for Truth, for something, I didn’t know what, I examine each piece of evidence under the light of prominent Jungian analysts—not to find fault but to find peace. Detonating explosives, long thought to be duds, forced me to rebuild the foundation of my psyche, a stone-by-stone metamorphism. Resurrected through the lenses of hundreds of dreams, fairy tales, myths, news clips, fiction, scripture, songs, and poems, as well as quotes from numerous scholarly journals, spiritual works, and psychology textbooks, this memoir doesn’t just tell you a story, it invites you to live it. THE WEBSITE While the memoir excavates the debris of a past life (a kind of therapeutic process of sorting and sifting and cleansing), the website rebuilds, replants, and rewires. Like a reality television show, www.syzygy-crossingthebridgetoself.com chronicles a life now in progress. Sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes clawing its way out of an abyss of abuse and addiction, sometimes bold enough to descend into the belly of the beast, it’s a life that seeks Truth yet hides from it. Some days—as my life develops in a dark room of its own making—I cringe at the sight of me. Other days, I marvel. It’s both work and play. It is digging and burying, finding and losing, hurting and healing, loving and hating. It is dying and being reborn. Documenting this process of Self-discovery, which Jung coined “individuation,” this website explores avenues for expansion, such as memoir writing, active imagination, alchemy, archetypes, astrology, dream analysis, psychoanalysis, I Ching, mandalas, psychological types, and shadow work.