Tag Archives: Collective unconscious

The Pink Bow

This one needed to be fiction…there’s much to unpack. Enjoy!

The bow was still pink.

In a sea of red cascading over the family that lived off Maple Grove Drive, her bow remained pink. Why was it still pink? Why did it matter? Eugene could not get the image nor the questions out of his mind. He made the same ritual as every time before: the detailed plans, the intricate movements. It was all the same but the little pink bow.

The same ritual, except this time, in the face of the little pink bow, his hands vibrated and the knife dropped. His single greatest rule was to never leave behind his weapon of choice, but this time he couldn’t hold it. It was like a blue flame in his hand burning through his flesh. In the face of the soft pinkness, he dropped his knife and walked off.

He walked into the blackness. He wasn’t sure how far he had gone or what time it was. Eugene was in a daze. A liminal space between the past and present. Eventually he came to a light pushing against the clouded sky. A children’s park. It was there, perhaps for the first time, that he was confronted with his thoughts that demanded to be heard. His upbringing. The abuse. Rejection. All to be faced in the calmness of the misty night.

His mother’s hands felt clawlike as they met his flesh. Claws that only seemed to recede when in the presence of her father; not only receding but almost waving to invite him closer with his fury. This was normal. Nothing irregular, simply a mother consumed by the rage of her past and the grief of the present. Though Eugene acknowledged this in his mother, he still could not help but feel hatred towards her. Her snide remarks burned holes through his being: He was a monster. Only happy when destroying. He was useless, helpless…just like his father.

Eugene’s father still had the stutter from nuns forcing him to write with his right hand, though he was left-handed. A scar remained fixed atop his head where his mother had hit him with a vacuum cleaner. His absentmindedness having been met with a metal clash. Eugene felt the unrelenting absence of a father who would never hold him accountable. An invisible hand in the sky, yet one that allowed his son to hold all the power. A mother who had abused his father and himself—they were nothing. Made to feel less than. To feel as though they wielded no power. “…Another useless man polluting the earth.” His father simply remained quiet in her presence. The son could not.

Eugene built his life around his pain. The killings made him feel electric. Feel as though he had finally knocked down his mother and placed his foot upon her. That’s not weak. That’s not useless. “I’m not useless.” He muttered into the shadows.

Eugene gazed at the park obstacles. Hundreds, maybe thousands of children had climbed upon the equipment. Each branded with the patterns they were involuntarily marked with. Mothers. Fathers. No matter the parent, the wounds continued to thrive and fester.

Walking home from school, he heard her giggles in his head. Imagined the bubbles being blown and a smile that reached her deep blue eyes. Eyes that pierced through one’s soul. They said nothing less than “I love you.” A smile rippled across his face. He looked down at the step he always tripped on before coming into the house. As usual, his mother was working in her home office, and his father was not due back from work for another half an hour. Immediately, he went to see her, wondering if she had awoken from her midday nap. He slowly opened the door and quietly walked to her crib. There she was. The most beautiful creature. A soft pink flower on her sheets. It looked as though it was placed in her hair, the placement being so perfect. Alas, another detail that he had not seen before. Blue lips. He tried holding her hand but the tiny weight was limp. No response. At that same moment his mother walked in. “What did you do!?” She shrieked looking at her unresponsive baby with blue lips. His mother lifting his sister, forcefully shoved Eugene aside and ran into the living room to call an ambulance. A flood of blackness enveloped his world from that point on.

“How could something so beautiful, so innocent, suddenly cease to exist.”

Eugene’s voice softly touched the darkness of the night. He hadn’t thought about it—of her—since that moment in time where it all stood still. That shade of pink had not been witnessed again until that night. Eighteen.

Eighteen. Eighteen murders he had committed and he began to relive them all. But, instead of seeing his victims’ faces, he saw his own. The red came back to him. The rush of it. The smell and intoxication. But it felt different now—distant, like a memory of someone else’s life.

He sat on a park bench and mulled over the powerlessness nurtured within his being. The illusion of power his father had passively promoted—a silence that allowed his darkness to grow unchecked. His mother only ever meeting him with pain and disgust. Eugene then gazed at the tall slide in the park. He looked at the topsy-turvy tower ladder needing to be scaled to get to the top and he pondered.

He sat. He stared. A single tear dropped down his cheek. He touched it and looked at the glistening spot on his finger. He had always felt a detachment from his body, though for the first time, he felt a thread.

Sirens wailed in the background yet he remained, unflinching. Hands in his black hoodie pockets. He decided to climb the tower to the top of the slide and slid down the tall descending chute. A half smile crossed his face—and then the image of the little pink bow. The flower. Another tear rolled.

He gazed up and at that moment he saw a doe. She was but a few feet away, gazing at him. He froze and stared back. They stared at each other for what felt like hours. Suddenly, she closed her eyes with a slight bow of her head and walked away.

Eugene was frozen in this moment.

A cop car’s sirens briefly sounded as red and blue lit up Eugene’s face. Another tear fell as he turned to face the lights.

Embracing the Hanged Man: Lessons in Stillness

“The highest virtue does nothing; yet nothing needs to be done. The lowest virtue does everything; yet much remains to be done.”
—Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 38)

The Hanged Man tarot is an image of an archetype embodied throughout time. He hangs not by punishment, but by choice; note the ease his face embodies. One foot bound, the other free, his head illuminated in a quiet radiance of inversion. The Hanged Man does not fight the ropes, nor the cross he is upon. Seemingly, he yields, seeing that illumination only comes when perspective breaks. In the stillness of that surrender, the noise of the world falls away, and what remains is unbearable silence – the kind that reveals truth.

Our age, too, dangles upside down, though few may wholly comprehend or admit this. We call it progress, yet everything familiar feels inverted. Conviction, shame, and guilt have replaced curiosity; outrage masquerades as moral vision, and stillness is mistaken for weakness. We so often seek power over strength, forgetting that one conquers while the other endures. The collective ego writhes, demanding movement even though motion only tightens the noose upon our brittle necks. We have confused suspension with stagnation (or perhaps innovation and progress), forgetting that pause is the only doorway through which transformation enters.

One interpretation of the Hanged Man is that he symbolizes the alchemy of perspective. To hang is to see differently…not from the lofty gaze of superiority, but from the humility of inversion. When the world turns on its head, the false becomes obvious: the illusions of fear, the idols of certainty, the addictions to control, the misguided notion that perpetual ascent equals evolution. It is in falling, or rather being hanged, that we are invited to encounter reality without the masks we built merely to survive it.

Yet this surrender terrifies the modern psyche. We are taught to act, to fix, to do for others until the day we die. The incongruence of it all killing us long before we are even dead. When confronted with paradox, we reach for labels rather than silence. We want answers before any sincere question has ripened. We want redemption without crucifixion. To hang is to endure the unbearable middle: between death and rebirth, knowing and unknowing. It is a paramount stage that our culture has forgotten how to inhabit, yet one the soul requires to remain whole.

There is wisdom in reversal. The suspended figure reminds us that consciousness matures not by addition but by subtraction. Meaning is not created by collecting truths, but by letting false ones fall away. Yet our collective religion is productivity. We measure worth by movement and confuse noise with vitality. In such a climate, the act of hanging, of not participating in the frenzy, of stillness, becomes rebellion itself.

Jung wrote that “…there is no coming to consciousness without pain” (CW 17, Para 331). The Hanged Man embodies that axiom in image form: consciousness requires the unconscious ego’s crucifixion. The man who hangs is not destroyed; he is inverted, stripped of his illusions of mastery. He is humbled. His suffering is not passive; it is willful, a kind of offering to the deeper Self, because something must always be sacrificed in order to gain. What looks like helplessness from the outside is sacred discipline within.

Perhaps this is what our world fears most: stillness that exposes what the noise conceals. We fill the void with commentary and consumption, terrified that silence will show us what we have become. Yet silence is the only thing that can restore vision. The Hanged Man reminds us that salvation is not found in the clamor of certainty but in the humility to hang, to wait, and to eventually see again.

We keep banging our heads against what feels like a brick wall, until one day, we realize it was only drywall all along.

Suspension is not defeat; it is initiation. It is the psyche’s descent into the womb of transformation. The world hangs, as we all do on individual levels, in the liminal space between collapse and renewal. Whether we awaken or asphyxiate depends on whether we can stay in the tension long enough for meaning to emerge. To stay within the building that we hear creaking all around us, water pouring out from its crevasses, aware of its impending fall, is the ultimate test of the skill of stillness.

To hang willingly is to trust that the rope is not strangulation but tethering: a thin line between the false and the true. Perhaps, like the Hanged Man, we must surrender our obsession with being upright, good, and correct before we remember what it means to stand at all.

What, dear reader, might you see differently if you stopped struggling to stay upright?

“Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises.”
—James Hollis (What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life)