Crows eat the seed
the farmers sow.
Toilers grow it;
thieves crow.
People cache curios
magpies dread.
Mouths are fed,
and coins collected.
Shelter in
nests of sticks.
Refuge in
nests of myths.
Post Script
I wrote this poem during a period when I was reading Jung deeply, including The Red Book, and thinking about the hidden structures that hold a human life together.
We gather what we need. Food, money, tools, beautiful objects, explanations, memories, and stories. Some things sustain the body. Others give us a place to stand inwardly. We may not always know why we collect them, or what sense of absence the collecting may be trying to answer.
There is tenderness in making a shelter from whatever can be found. A bird gathers sticks. A person gathers meanings. Both constructions may be fragile, provisional, and exposed to weather, yet each can become a place of refuge.
Many of the stories that shelter us were already being told before we arrived. They come through family, culture, religion, history, desire, and loss. We inherit them so quietly that they may feel less like stories than like the shape of the world itself.
Jung helped me feel that myth does not belong only to ancient people. It continues beneath modern life, connecting us with those who came before us, with the people around us, and with parts of ourselves that reason cannot reach alone. To lose those connections can leave a person uprooted. Yet even a shelter can become an enclosure when we no longer recognize its walls.
The figure in the crow’s nest stands alone above an immense sea, watching the horizon from a small structure carried by a much larger vessel. There is something familiar in that image. We build a place from which to look. We search for signs. We try to understand where we are going. All the while, we are being carried by forces larger and older than ourselves.
Inspiration
Myth, says a Church Father, is “what is believed always, everywhere, by everybody”; hence the man who thinks he can live without myth, or outside it, is an exception. He is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.
— C. G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation
Image credit: In the Crow’s Nest, on the Lookout for Whales (1903), an illustration from Hunting and Trapping Stories: A Book for Boys, by J. P. Hyde Price. Contributed by the Library of Congress and digitized by Internet Archive Book Images. No known copyright restrictions. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Primitive Joe 
