I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
The late psychologist James Hillman believed that every person has a purpose that reveals itself in childhood. Due to environmental pressures and family conditioning on the child, this purpose often goes underground, resurfacing later as clusters of mental health symptoms meant to alert the person that they’ve strayed from the path they were meant for….
Hillman often spoke of the mythic “acorn theory,” an idea that suggests we each come into the world with a calling…. According to Hillman, rather than the idea of growing up, the acorn theory spurs us to “grow down,” back into alignment with some original, mysterious energy that reminds us who we are.
Jessica Dore, Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance, and Growth
Here, Dore discusses the Page of Wands, a card I drew in a Tarot reading about my nascent trading practice. This was the core advice of the reading, the last of seven cards. The Page of Wands is experimental, curious, energetic, and teachable. The page of each suit represents a youth and the “quality of each suit in its simplest state, enjoying itself for itself in a lighter, more youthful, way than the mature Queen” (Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom). The suit of wands is the suit of fire, the “vital life essence that animates our bodies.”
Pollack writes further:
Wands tend to show the way the inner fire shows itself in ordinary life….
Whether they win or lose Wands constantly struggle, not so much because of the actual problem or goals, but just for the love of conflict, of the chance to use all that energy…. Wands lead us to approach life with action and eagerness.
Is the inner fire something that exists from childhood as Hillman proposed? Or could it be that we can build different inner fires based on our own choices and freedom, existentialist-style?
I tend to think the latter, but it feels incontrovertibly true that each person is born with a set of dispositions and capabilities and limitations that mean certain fires will burn brighter in them than others.
mental health symptoms
My own challenges with mental health have included a tendency towards introversion (often treated as a mental health symptom when it is not), impulsivity and a love of risk-taking, blood sugar swings that result in too much eating sugar and drinking alcohol (which acts like sugar in the body initially, providing a quick buzz), and a tendency to lose myself in romance, again and again.
I could easily, had I been born thirty years later, been diagnosed with Asperger’s, except that such a cluster of behaviors shows up less obviously in girls. I never had trouble making friends, even if I had trouble keeping them, because my devotion to intellectual debate and my grounded cynicism about the world made me hard company (and continues to do so).
What “acorn” — what destiny or calling — could these mental health challenges reveal?
The story I’d like to tell is that they suggest a person who brings together the Apollonian (logic, rationality, boundaries) with the Dionysian (instinct, passion, intoxication, unbridled emotion), to use Nietzsche’s terminology from The Birth of Tragedy.
To bring this back around to the Page of Wands, who started this post: how do I grow back down into that youth?
Dore writes:
I like to think about the Page of Wands as the keeper of a little spark that lives inside each of us. And though that spark sometimes gets obscured or covered over by judgments, core beliefs, and social pressures, the Page of Wands bears that spark as long as we are alive. Conceptually similar to Hillman’s idea of the daemon, this page could be seen as a sort of guide, one assigned to us at birth and who might act up when we stray too far from the thing we’re meant to do in the world.
Right now, I am living in almost purely Apollonian fashion: all rationality and intellect and logic, with my options trading and my daily routines in which I care for my home, my garden, and my pets.
I am missing the passion and the intoxication of the Dionysian. I am not in love. I hardly skied at all the past season (the snow was poor and I had a bad accident at the start). I’m not drafting a book about romance or starting a YouTube channel about midlife reinvention or taking professional photography courses.
Perhaps the acorn theory is wrong, and the Dionysian part of me was all mental illness?
Or does the Page of Wands in my recent reading suggests that I’ve strayed too far from how I am meant to live in this world?