Eros, Thanatos and my jacket's metamorphosis

Engaging in a new collective story with Love

Jul 26, 2024

I remember that time — not far away from now—when I pressed the button send to publish my first post here. I was truly as terrified as excited. It felt like jumping into the unknown. It was… The day after, all that primal fear of being tremendously exposed and crashing faded away… I just realized there was no certainty that my very tiny drop of French spirits would be even noticed in this ocean of words and voices. And strangely, that saddened me. I had to take care of this other little sweet part of me who was dreading not being seen. Some might call her, my inner child…

This ambivalence I carry always surprises me. I am a very frightened bird, and I adore engaging in new adventures!!! But to be honest, what I now fear the most is boredom, not being fully alive in this lifetime. I have been a walking dead for so many years…

That always strikes me how close to death we need to get before embracing change and finally espousing the flow of life. And death is inevitable. So, hopefully most of the time, it is more a question of dying a little bit and reinventing ourselves to stay alive. Throughout human history, this materialized in the eternal battle between Eros and Thanatos, these two forces both enemies and inseparable.

In Greek mythology, Thanatos is the incarnation of death. His mother is Nyx, the goddess of the night. He has a twin brother, Hypnos, the god of sleep and a sister, Lyssa, the goddess of fury. His main role is to carry the dead off to the underworld. In psychology, it refers to the death instinct, this inherent urge towards destruction, chaos, “perfection”, authoritarian control, and eternal sameness. It can take a variety of forms, including the mortiferous stability of a social or human organism completely disconnected from its environment and real needs… By contrast, Eros is the god of love and desire. He is often identified as the son of Ares, the god of war, and Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and sexual love. In Freud’s theory, it is that bold and primordial instinct, driven by the desire to sustain life and foster harmonious connections. It is a source of continuous renewal and revitalization through the pleasure to create, procreate, and awaken love and sexual desires. C.G. Jung considered Eros as “a mighty daemon”, an exceptional intermediary between Gods and humans, calling for reconciling the duality of human nature with the non-duality of the divine realm. This great spirit invites us to the convergence of opposites, such as spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, the limited and the unlimited: “he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony” (Carl Jung, CW 7, par. 32.).

In that regard, I would add that I don’t believe in coincidence anymore. In my life, I have experienced too many catastrophes, magical moments and synchronicities to say otherwise. And the month before I pressed the button send had been so full of them. It was so stormy within my psyche and out there in the French society where I live. I know worldwide too… Eros and Thanatos were fighting very hard (still are).

As for my psyche, there was this new project I put a lot of energy on, but I was still struggling to let go of my past self, of her past work and traumas. I started to do a big clear-out of her stuff in the spring, and I was striving to fully complete it… I was frozen with terror and shame.

To soothe myself, I called upon a bright dream I made months before that was still intriguing to me. It was so light and painful in the meantime. I was running with my beloved dog, “Pirate,” in a lush vegetation. And when we both arrived on the sea front, a couple of dolphins welcomed us, followed by pods of dolphins. That was sparkling, magnificent, such a radiant and ecstatic spectacle. But on my side, my faithful companion fainted. He was dying in my arms, and I felt so guilty to have brought him here. He couldn’t come with me anymore. I should have known… Also, I started to reflect in my dream: hasn’t he already been dead for years?

I decided to really look for the symbolic meanings at stake in this dream. In no way could I resign myself to thinking that it was a sad and depressing one. There was so much light and delight in it! It just felt like I was entering a new phase of my life: the Dolphin Era. Grief is indeed a significant part of the transformational journey. My research taught me that the dog represents our connection to the soul, to early initiation into the mysteries. The Dog protects the gate to the unknown. The essence of its message is: be faithful to your soul, to your intentions and to your nature, so that you will never be betrayed again. For their parts, dolphins are the embodiments of joy, tenderness and care for the others. They invite us to rediscover our Joie de Vivre. Above all, the Dolphin is connected to Love and to the opening of the heart. It is a messenger bearer of good news. It symbolizes the reconciliation with our animal spirit. To honor the Dolphin is to celebrate one’s own joy and one’s trust in life. The essence of its message is: only Joy can reflect your spiritual greatness.

These findings were echoing a Jack Gilbert poem I treasure. It is called “A brief for the defense”. In these troubled times, I carried it as a first-aid kit for my heart everywhere, especially these lines: “If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”

And I had just listened to the ted talk of Valarie Kaur, a civil rights activist, founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. A part of her speech resurfaced, adding even more depth to my dream interpretation: “our Joy is an act of moral resistance… because in joy, we see even darkness with new eyes. What if the darkness is not the darkness of a tomb, but the darkness of a womb”…

All these new insights kept infusing in me till a video of Thich Nhat Hanh popped up on my screen during a brain pause. Sometimes, a scrolling gets lucky…. He was answering a little girl who lost her doggy and was sad, not knowing how to be not so sad anymore. He used the metaphor of the cloud. And as she imagined a beloved cloud disappearing but not passing away, becoming the rain, rearranging itself with some herbal flavors in the pouring of a cup of tea she could taste and scent at any time of the day, a smile aroused on her cute little face as the dawn of a new day.

This video made me melt right away. I realized how important my own doggy had been for me as a little girl and beyond that age. He was my confident, my best friend, my bodyguard, “mon petit loup”… When he was close to me, I felt safe and powerful… Whole… I felt an unfailing Love. I could just be myself. Even as a ghost during the most hellish part of my PhD adventures, he once came in a dream to wipe away my tears, as he always did. I could feel his overflowing love for me. It sounded so real. He could never bear seeing me crying. He would rather drink rivers…

I reached the conclusion that this transformational journey I engaged one year ago helped me to reconnect with him and his love, with my soul, my true self. Not only does he vividly live in my heart now, but he has also become a part of me. I don’t need him to protect myself anymore. I am him. I was so moved by this revelation I went for a walk in the evening. Waves of gratitude for him were flowing through me… Tears of Love and Joy falling… Suddenly, distant yells broke my reverie. At first, I thought I was mishearing. I quickened my steps. A man was just calling his intrepid dog whose name was: Pirate!

Afterwards… off course, I thought I had figured it out all!!! I could thence infer that I was on my Joy Path. Everything now was supposed to get smooth and easy. It felt reasonable to start setting my Dream Joy Life Plan. Ohh my… I sometimes think my brain just needs a break and gets lazy with cultivating wisdoms. The good thing is that I truly felt relieved and recovered my trust in life. I had no idea that a new trial was on my way. Gosh, Eros…

Of course not, the world was not going to turn comfortable and cozy… No… No!!! That’s not how Life works! And I should be knowing that by now… I know that… As Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in a recent Letter from Love: “The world as you perceive it with your senses was never designed to be safe. That’s not its job. Never was.” And the sole influence we can exert on it lies on the way we engage with the scenery unfolding before us.

I was invited to the launching of a book on rituals a few days later in Paris. I thought that would be a good opportunity to plan new interviews for my podcast. Green flags everywhere… So, I went… And when I was about to get off at the Felix Faure metro station, I realized someone stole one of my bags. I began gasping for breath… shocked… lost… staring at the people around me… looking everywhere… I was LOST, not knowing what to do anymore… where to go… Getting off or not??? I did! It felt like making a first step in a new nightmarish reality.

The only thing I could think about was the gorgeous and sacred jacket the bag was containing. To me, that cloth was more than a cloth. It was connected to one of the most beautiful and vibrant memories of my life-changing voyage. Losing it felt like losing all the confidence I gained this year, losing my dream of change, my direction, my desire. As if a dear and enlivening part of me left that day with that cloth… It was the totem of the New Me, my Totem… still in its gift-wrap… I just wore it for special occasions to give me strength and love. There was my laptop in it too, with tones of data I had never saved… Following Thich Nhat Hanh’s grounding, clouds were only supposed to be in the sky for me. I might rearrange that belief now…

An intense fire was raging within me, and tropical rain falling on my cheeks. That was stronger than me. I would have howled at the moon to bring it back if I could. I was devastated and kept searching for it everywhere. I jumped back aboard the Metro train till the end of the line, and then cast about for RATP agents in vain. Down in the dumps, still crying, I started waiting for a new train that was never going to come, because as an agent gently said to me: “You are on the arrival gate Madam”.

This kind man cared for and guided me to file a complaint for theft. I eventually went to the event as planned. I was dispirited and mournful, but I tried my best to put that aside for the evening. I met very nice people there. At the end, the author signed the book and wrote a felicitous dedication to me:

“Que toujours l’Amour soit la réponse”.

May Love always be the answer.

I would lie if I said that I embodied that message right away when I went back home. I was furious, and furiously sad. Mad at me and mad at the world. For weeks afterwards, I woke up sweating at night with my heart racing. That shook something very deep in me. Rivers kept falling out of me. My flat that I seriously uncluttered months before became slobby again. That mess was big enough to lessen the vision of my laptop missing on its desk. It was too painful… And I caught myself hiding stuff I cared about under piles of bits and bobs each time I was getting out of that garbage dump.

Of course, “Misfortune never comes alone”. In that same period, our Jupiterian president had the brilliant idea to call snap elections after the catastrophic score of his party in the European election, while the Far right won 32% of the votes. It sounded as if the French Left was just about to wake up… but too late… For the first time of my life, I really felt this could be the coup de grâce for our French democracy.

There had been a first alarm in the first round of the 2002 Presidential election, when we saw the face of the one-eyed-dude from the far right—Jean-Marie Le Pen—appeared besides Jacques Chirac’s one. At that time, most of the French society viewed it as absolute horror. Demonstrations started everywhere, and people went massively voted against Le Pen’s Father in the second round. Since then, his ideas insidiously spread, and his party kept on making silent gains in various elections as much as in the content of certain legislation…

In my last post, I told you that a miracle happened. But that was not true. That’s not what happened. The left-wing parties decided to unite. They all agreed to form new “Popular front” to keep the Far Right from power. Suddenly, a woman wearing a green jacket appeared among them. This empathic, brilliant, fun and straight-talking ecologist has been a key player in the creation of that left-wing coalition and its surprise victory. At first, no one believed in it. But since the first day, she was so determined! She comes from the former mining city of Hénin-Beaumont in the north of France which is run by the Far right. She knows in her bones what they are capable of. Soon, she became the incarnation of Hope and inspired a new dynamic in France.

That stroke me when I saw that jacket blooming in the outer reality, while mine had vanished. Eros appears to work in mysterious ways. And I like to believe that my sacred cloth metamorphosed into this meadow-green jacket and took part in rescuing the French democracy. That piece of fabric has become so iconic it even has its own account on X.

To cope with these emotional rollercoasters, I finally decided to focus on the here and now. This is the only place where the new “Me” can live and blossom. That day in Paris, with the theft of my laptop, I lost most of my data and works from the last decades, except the files related to my current heart project. Fortunately, I had carefully saved the interview recordings for my soon-to-be launched podcast. I see it as a sign!

There is a unique direction Eros wants me to go: ONWARD!

And I am going to keep on writing in this place because that brings me so much Joy and grounding.

Before leaving you, I would like to share this Jungian quote I find really enlightening in the era we are living:

“Logically the opposite of love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos, (fear); but psychologically it is the will to power. Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other: the man who adopts the standpoint of Eros finds his compensatory opposite in the will to power, and that of the man who puts the accent on power is Eros.”
— Carl Gustav Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Today I want to praise all these invisible and loving people who saved the French democracy, those who are doing so in the US right now, and everywhere in the world.

“There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolute love or contagious joy. Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there.”
―David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

As above so below, let’s all come together and take part to the new script of our collective story and to a more empowering dynamic during and after the elections.

That’s what I am going to do.

In that regard, I deeply recommend you the last episode of the Bewildered podcast untitled “Change the Shape of Culture”, where Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan discuss about the great interest to move out of the dreadful Karpman “Drama triangle” to embrace the Empowerment triangle revealed by David Emerald and Donna Zajonc.

<3 Sending you lots of love from France et des bisous <3

Have you also had similar bonds with one of your four legs companions ? I am sure I am not alone with this. What’s his or her name ? How important has this stunning creature been for you ? Please feel free to share with me. I would love to hear your story!

Storm under the Mussel

Discussion about this post