SOME BATS IN THE BELFRY

This from Turin, Italy:  October 10, 2004

Then something very strange also happened a few weeks ago. As you know, I am a great believer in synchronicities . . .  [1] firstly, I went with Ugo Fama, my Jungian therapist friend to the Staffardia Abbey, south or Turin, beautiful 15^th century Cistercian cloisters, where in one of the cellars, a rare colony of migrant bats hang out, so to speak. They are even protected by a World Wildlife Foundation poster on the medieval door, and within the darkness we could hear a lot of shrill tittering going on.  [2] A few weeks later, we went to an artist friend, Sergio Minero, in  the courtside north of Turin, and he had painted four bats  on the corners of one of the frames of a new painting. Recently, [3] I did the Jamie Sams Medicine Cards, up came BAT, on the left hand side.  [4] The exiting bit: I woke up one night, with a strange sound and felt that someone might be intruding downstairs. . . I even smoked a cigarette out of the window . . . with the unidentifiable sound still  no closer to clarification. Eventually, back in bed, I realised the sound was coming from in the room, so I switched the bedside lamp on . . . and then, flying around the ceiling in some panic, was a BAT! Well, I immediately put the light out, and draping one of those printed Indian bedspreads over my head, in case it got entangled in my hair . . . opened the windows wide . . . and lay back in the bed to observe what would happen. Eventually, it circled the room lower and I could see it silhouetted against the light coming in from the window . . . then I clearly saw a second bat coming in through the window,  and slowly the two of them circled the room, both passing in front of the window. At that point, I could see that the one was small and the other bigger, and I knew that a pup had come into the room and  his mother was there to help him out! Eventually after a few minutes they both flew out of the window, like ships in the night with their sails unfurled. The room was pervaded with a great sense of peace and I fell asleep.

  That night I dreamt of inspecting a old house that I was going to rent. My mother was with me and she approved of the decision. But she said nothing. In fact she was more like a shadow, radiating a great warmth, a comfort, a protective veil, that only mothers can offer.  As the days passed, I came to understand that my mother and the Bat Mother, were one and the same. She was an archetypal shade, bringing necessary germination from the warm of the unconscious. There is a key in the words: “…she said nothing . . .” because the gift that she brought was no …’thing’ ..ness.  The anima does not bring “things’ for it is the no-‘things’ that are the profound activators of the psyche.

Samten de Wet