The Lighthouse of My Childhood
Robin B. Zeiger, Ph.D.
What are the dreams and memories of your childhood that carry you and escort you along the way? What piece of your childhood do you still long for? What can you still taste and smell and feel?
It is many moons ago. Yet, one of my powerful memories of my childhood is the meandering car trips I took with my father along the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago. We would take a drive when bored, sometimes to talk and sometimes to just be. Chicago is a planned city. The magnificent lakefront with parks and beaches and bicycle trails offers so much to do and see.
The drive we took began in Chicago but extended into the richer and quieter suburbs. It offered tranquility. And it also offered windows into imagination and other lives. We drove past the beautiful Bahia Temple, and the sprawling suburban houses. My Dad and I might imagine what it was like to live in these houses.
Many times, our destination was a small quaint outdoor shopping area with gift shops. As a child, I looked forward to the trip to the candy shop that carried unusual taffy and other treats.
Each time we traveled the route, we passed the lighthouse. I am not sure we ever went inside. But somehow it stands out in my memory as an important place. I don’t even think I ever learned of its history. In our adult life, sometimes we must go back and learn more. It is away to recapture times long ago. So I looked and I learned and I wondered once again…
The now historic Grosse Point Lighthouse, located in Evanston, Illinois was completed in 1873 in response to several shipping disasters. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1999. At the time, it was just a lighthouse along the way to me. Now, I am impressed as I read its history.
Why do I love lighthouses? Somehow, they speak to my soul about vision in the dark.
I am a Jungian analyst and a sandplay therapist. I have a large collection of miniatures in my office for use in my table-top sandtray. Patients, adult and child alike create a piece of their internal world as part of their therapy process.
Lighthouses are the stuff of beautiful paintings, wistful photography, and stories steeped in mystery. Sometimes we read or imagine about the life of the lighthouse keeper. Perhaps in our mind’s eye we envision a little old lady or a wise old man who tend to the way. Sometimes there is a mystery or a love story.
The waters of the deep are symbolic of adventure, lost and rediscovered treasures. We meet the fright of the depths of the unconscious. If we are lucky, we also find the hidden treasures of creativity within the depths of soul. The lighthouse is very symbolic of the beacon in the darkness.
Sometimes we need the subtle, yet powerful lights of romantic candles, lanterns to guide in the dusty basements, or our favorite novel to read in bed by flashlight. We also desperately need the beacon of a a lighthouse to guide us home in the darkness to our soul.
Our world sometimes experiences shipwrecks. These past two years have been filled with darkness and shipwrecks. We have felt “lost at sea” without direction. It is at those times we can call from our memories the lighthouses we have seen and imagined.
Join me in another Lighthouse story of my favorite poet of Amanda Gorman. She has an incredible power to capture the suffering and the hope.
For some stories involving lighthouses https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/lighthouses
Please follow me and discover articles on mindfulness, finding peace in difficult times, Jung, longing and the Little Prince, Black Lives Matter, and grand-mothering.
Robin B. Zeiger is a practicing Jungian psychoanalyst and a free-lance writer.
She is a member of the:
International Association of Analytical Psychology and the Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology. She can be reached at rbzeiger@yahoo.com.
