This was to be my account about my arrival to the US. Instead, I digressed and lingered with what had come before. Why did I ever leave Zuerich and later Amsterdam?
Zurich has been named consistently as one of the world's most contented cities and certainly boasts one of the highest living standards. Why would anyone leave? I consider myself a cultural refugee and friends that immigrated like me to the US agree. We felt hampered in our development, stultified by Swiss social norms and expectation and the forever powerful push to achieve and play it safe.
Zurich has been named consistently as one of the world's most contented cities and certainly boasts one of the highest living standards. Why would anyone leave? I consider myself a cultural refugee and friends that immigrated like me to the US agree. We felt hampered in our development, stultified by Swiss social norms and expectation and the forever powerful push to achieve and play it safe.
I was hooked, line and sinker, into the kind of unconventional art therapy we practiced. The idea of exploring the unconscious and bringing it up to the light in a creative, artistic, expressive form made total sense to me. What can I say, I am from the Pluto in Leo generation, the attraction was inevitable, a perfect fit. It was our anti-dot to the analytical, way too intellectual, divorced from the body, Jungian approach, prevalent then in Zuerich. It was this desire that propelled me on my search and got me, a Cancer home body to explore not the exotic East at a guru's feet in India (although I surely was tempted at various times) but brought me to Amsterdam and the US eventually. It was my conscious choice to stay rooted in a psychological, rather then a spiritual tradition and in that way to renounce the temptation of salvation through a distant exotic guru, like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Hey, it was the seventies, temptations were many!
I longed to fully immerse myself in those transformative processes, and so I did for my first few years in the US with Alec Rubin's Primal Theater.
Why did you ever leave Zuerich? Why did I go to Africa and then leave it? Why is there pilgrimage? I think it's because we need to meet ourselves...and some of us meet ourselves best on the road to somewhere we have not yet been.
ReplyDelete"some of us meet ourselves best on the road to somewhere we have not yet been."
ReplyDeletenicely put Kendall, thanks for reading and commenting
I've lost track of the quote but someone once said "If you want to know a man, make a solitary journey with him." By extension, it can be argued that if you want to know yourself, go alone. In my early travels, I always went alone.
ReplyDeleteBetter alone with oneself then alone within a crowd of familiars. Alone is good with resources like money and basic street smarts, otherwise company can be very welcome and on occasion helpful.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading and responding.