Sylvia's Journal

I am listening to Angeles Arrien’s book ‘The Second Half of Life.’  In the olden days that would have been around 25 or 30 when the life expectancy was 50 or so. Nowadays the second half seems past middle age, giving us more time to screw up and having less time to use the stories’ medicine. But the second half doesn’t begin at a particular age. Some very mature people may be entering their second half at age 25 while others may never get there. I know of a guy with orange hair who is not even close. I wish I had discovered this book (and the stories) when I was 25.

The book is full of stories and myths that contain lessons (medicine) that we have to learn while on our earthly walk, and in particular during the last part of that walk. The stories are drenched in symbolism; symbols that only people with considerable life experience can decipher (or with help form interpreters like Joseph Campbell and Clarissa Pinkola-Estes) but these stories can also be read to young children. In the US they tend to get the expunged versions.  

One of Arrien’s stories has a remarkable resemblance to a story I recently read to my 5 year old granddaughter Saffi out of an old book of fairytales I carried with me from Holland (Sprookjes van de Lage Landen). The version I read to Saffi is about a wife, found cheating by her husband, who slays the lover and incarcerates the woman (in one version cutting her eyes out) and then letting the wife out of her cellar to eat once a day. In Arrien’s version she get to drink soup out of the skull of her lover (in that version she also has to sleep on top of the dead bodies of preceding lovers) or, in my Dutch book’s version, eat the meat of the lover’s body that is slowly roasting in back of the fire. 

A gruesome story with a lesson that isn’t as gruesome and has little to do with ‘thou shall not covet another person’s wife (or husband).’ Arrien’s retelling is about letting the skeleton’s out of the closet (or cellar) and face all the wrongdoings in one’s life, get beyond fear and pride and set things right (the latter lesson a boon for philanthrophy).

I do wonder what Saffi gets out of all these centuries-old stories. Her retelling of them to her parents or grandfather is fascinating because of what she leaves in and what she leaves out. And I noticed she doesn’t shudder much when someone’s head is cut off (because he was looking for death) and then sewn on backwards and eventually turned the right way out of compassion, or when the alleged adulterous wife gets to eat part of her lovers thigh (‘what is adulterous?”).