Many Weeks of Amazement

I’m still recovering from a fairly astonishing stretch of events. I was about to post yet another notice about the lectures coming up, but that is a bit much. So before I do that here’s something different.

In June I spoke at the Jung-By-The-Sea Conference in Cornwall along with a very great group of fascinating people. The recordings of the talks will be available later this year and you can get notified about that here. The venue was astonishing, the organization outstanding, and we had absolutely perfect weather and I thought nothing would ever come close to the perfection of that event. I was wrong as you will learn below, but that takes nothing away from this wonderful time and the excellent friends we made. I truly think I could move to the west country, Devon or Cornwall, and feel entirely at home immediately. I love it there.

Then we went to London where I gave a talk to my many friends at the Temenos Academy, and you can hear my lecture here. We stayed with dear friends in Hampstead and in Holland Park and had a wonderful time as we always do in their company. I’m happy to say that we met Sonu Shamdasani who also spoke in Cornwall and happens to live quite near our colleagues in Hampstead. I’m also happy to tell you that he is as kind and friendly as his scholarship is deep and vast. For some reason we always have excellent weather in London, which I am told is not always the case…

Then three nights in Iceland (!) where I did not do any professional speaking. Full of tourists, but if you got up early, which we did, you can miss them in the mornings. Utterly amazing place in which I am pretty sure I would not want to live, but the visit is very much worth it, and we may well go back sometime. Puffins! We saw nesting puffins, quite close. And a glacier… which kind of gives you a lingering feeling of human finitude.

Then a few weeks later I was in Brazil for three weeks where I did two weekend workshops (which means me talking for a very long time over two days - not everyone was amused, but it went reasonably well in both Sao Paolo and Brasilia). Also we did a book launch for Mundos Imaginais: Segundo Corbin, Hillman e Jung edited by my dear friend and collaborator Marco André Schwarzstein. There are three essays in there of mine. I’m delighted to report that an English translation is in the works and will be published by Spring Publications in the near future.

There is also the little matter of my 4-day ceremony of initiation into the Bwiti tradition from Gabon in the countryside east of São Paulo. That is a long and important story to which I have alluded before, and which is ongoing. I will be going back again, I hope within the coming year. You will hear something about that in one of the upcoming lectures.

And then, to finish my grand tour, I was invited to present at the Wisdom & Pedagogy Conference at the Chateau Primard west of Paris. The event was sponsored by the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, Wonderstruck and 5 Books. Suffice it to say that I have never in my life been to an event that lavish and so full of wonderful people all of whom I wanted to come to know more deeply. I am pretty sure everything was recorded and when it gets posted online I’ll let you know. The photo above is the moat surrounding the Chateau… where Catherine Deneuve once lived I believe… As I told my daughter (who also attended!!!), if I’d had any idea people could live like that I might have spent more time trying to make some money… In any case it was grand, and the connections I made will I hope continue fruitfully into the future. We followed it up with three nights in Paris.

I mean really. How am I to come back to reality after all that? I feel blessed. I am so very grateful to everyone who made these things possible and who had the confidence in me to invite me to speak. It’s been glorious.

Next on my agenda are these 10 Lectures beginning in mid-September. About which even more will be said in my next post.