THANK YOU for the luck, good vibes, and sweet wishes!
I passed! I am now certified as a Symbolon Reflection practitioner, and am authorized to conduct coaching by the means of several paintings that have been licensed through topnotch museums. Eeeeekkkk!
I find this form of coaching amazingly powerful, and I’m excited to start implementing it in my coaching practice. You should come and try it out!
Besides that momentous event, we are now in the run up to Halloween—I love Halloween! I miss seeing all the Halloween decor that is always so apparent in the USA. Today I wore my headband that has bats flying out of it. It may have been too subtle though, because I kept getting compliments on my “fascinator.” (I wanted to retort, “It’s not a fascinator! I have bats in my belfry!” But that may be too obscure.)
I am going to get more obnoxious with headwear in the coming week.
Today Robin and I took off and visited Coventry, which is practically next-door. We are told that Coventry is a phoenix city, having been reborn from the ashes of a blitz bombing by the Germans during WWII. The bombs took out most of the picturesque medieval architecture, but luckily plenty of period buildings still remain.
Coventry will forever be tied to the famous Lady Godiva and her risqué horse ride, although it is most likely that the famous legend is untrue (-whimper-).
We had a great time visiting three wonderful churches (well, four, if we count the ruin of a bombed cathedral as one).
We started with the parish church of St. John the Baptist. Apparently this church is famous for its medieval Green Men carvings, but most of them were too high up in the rafters to actually see them, which was disappointing. But the stained glass and other features made up for that shortcoming.
The next church was Holy Trinity Coventry, founded by Lady Godiva in 1043. It was very much our “vibe,” given that it had an old “Doom” painting that had been discovered under a coat of whitewash and restored. Then, in the quire, was a large number of misericords. Here I am with a wyvern carving on a misericord.
Wait—have I talked to you about misericords and wyverns before? I can’t remember! Perhaps I’ll take them up another time… They’re among my favorite topics.
Then we walked just a little ways beyond Holy Trinity and found a pair of “opposites”—a beautiful ancient cathedral mostly flattened by the German bombs with its new sibling cathedral right alongside. These two structures comprise Coventry Cathedral. The new cathedral, built in 1962, is enormous, spacious, and open. Its interior boasts a huge tapestry of Christ on its back wall, thought to be the largest tapestry in the world.
The bombed cathedral is heartbreaking… This cross on the altar (hard to make out in the center) is quite poignant, with the words “Father forgive” visible in gold on the wall behind it. We all know the rest of that sentence, which made this quite moving to me.
This cross is called “The Charred Cross.” It is a pair of crossed, blackened beams atop an altar made of rubble. The story is that in the aftermath of that bombing, a stonemason was surveying the devastation when he noticed a pair of burned wooden beams lying across each other in the shape of a cross. He tied them together, forming a symbolic cross now mounted inside the new cathedral, and the cross behind me is a copy, a twin of the first, an echo of its message.
Notice the sky shining through all those gaping holes inside the tracery. Imagine all the beautiful stained glass that was lost in this destructive act of war!
Altogether, this was an extremely full day for us.
Pretty soon I’m going to be telling you about an article and a review that I authored which are being published in two leading Jung journals before the year is out. And I will give you some hints about the presentation I plan to give for the Australian APT (Association of Psychological Type) online conference coming up in November. It will feature some fresh material that I’ve never brought to a type conference before, so I’m really jazzed and looking forward to it.
I’d love to have you join me. The link to sign up and attend is here:
I’ll see you in a spooky week!
warmly,
-Dr. Vicky Jo
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