In the excellent book On Becoming an Alchemist, Catherine MacCoun describes spiritual life as a series of alchemical operations, with all the peaks and valleys that metaphor suggests. Basically, she says that there’s a process, a bit like respiration, of inspiration followed by digestion, a necessary process of learning to embody what we may only think we’ve already grasped mentally.
For me, that certainly tracks. I’ll get inspired about a particular web of ideas and synchronicities and pursue it until some mysterious point, surprising to even my own conscious mind, at which I’ll suddenly drop it and start to think a lot about cooking, physical activity, getting organized, and probably sleeping a lot. This is partly to say that if you’re new to my work and you happened to notice that I suddenly stopped posting a month or so ago, I apologize; apparently I needed to do some digesting.
I’m here again today partly because this interminable February is starting to let up and I’m considering ending my hibernation, and partly because there has been one idea kind of gestating in the back of my mind that I think is finally ready to share.
It’s about junebugs.
A month or so ago, I discovered this popular tumblr post about cleaning while neurodivergent. The author describes a process she calls “junebugging,” during which she will imitate a junebug by focusing on one specific location, remembering to return to it again and again throughout the day.
On the most basic level, I just love this because it seems like a great idea. My whole family struggles with executive function somewhat, and this is certainly a memorable way to conceptualize around it. My partner, James, has been experimenting with domestic junebugging, and he reports that it is helping.
Once I started thinking about junebugs (and their geographic habits, of which I had previously been unaware), though, I found that I couldn’t stop. I’m not a big fan of bugs in general, but irridescent junebug green is certainly unique and beautiful. It made me think about scarabs, and thinking about scarabs made me think about synchronicity because of a story about Carl Jung and one of his patients, which he liked to use as an example when explaining the concept. She (the patient) had a dream about a scarab beetle, and while she was describing it to Jung in his office, another scarab flew in through the window. Sometimes, life is weird like that.
For example, when I looked up junebugs and scarabs to figure out if they were related, I learned that junebugs actually are a kind of scarab. Who knew?
For me, there’s something there about images, and the way they work in general. I guess I’m noticing that the way I study and write is a kind of junebugging, too. There’s often an image of some kind, vague or very specific, there long before I understand exactly how I’m going to put it into words – or even what subjects it’s going to connect to. As long as I stick close to that image, I usually find that all my lines of inquiry resolve in surprisingly satisfying ways (and of course, junebugging about junebugs may be especially satisfying because of the recursive nature of that inquiry).
I’d been meaning to write something about this for a while, but today I was thinking there’s another important theme here, which is something about memory. The traditions that I study are, in many ways, mainly traditions of spiritual remembering. According to Plato, we each start out with a perfect understanding of – well, everything, I guess – and rather than learning anything new we just need to learn to remember. Or as James likes to put it (recursively), magic is 60% remembering that magic exists. In Sufism (with its seriously Platonist flavor) the main ritual is called zikr, Arabic for remembrance.
This week I’ve been picking my daily meditation practice – which had been somewhat derailed during this long period of digestion – back up, and just before the final bell rang today, something about the junebug clicked into place:
I want to remember the junebug because the junebug is remembering.