Life is But a Dream

Details

Category: Event

Life is But a Dream: An Interview with Jill Mellick by Fabiana Fondevilla (In Spanish - click here)

Very few still doubt that the strange stories which visit us at night when we close our eyes are filled with meaning. But how to decode those symbolic messages from our unconscious? Some visit a psychologist, others look in dream journals. Jill Mellick, a jungian analyst, poet and painter, chooses another path: that of the creative imagination, intuition and art.

Who has not woken up perplexed by the incredible adventures lived in a dream? Who has not overflown the world with the freedom of an eagle, or dropped freefall from the highest heights and lived to tell the tale? Beautiful, sinister, inspired or recurrent, dreams constitute a parallel life we all share, even if we don’t remember it.  Freud, Jung and other seekers of the mind have erected their entire opus on such strange foundations.

A  question comes to mind: Is it necessary to understand what a dream means to be able to make its message one’s own?  Jill Mellick, a Jungian psychologist born in Australia and living in California, believes it’s not. A plastic artist, poet and explorer of indigenous American cultures, Mellick relies on her knowledge of the human soul to propose an alternative path: to approach dreams with love, on tiptoes, without demanding anything, listening to them as one would a friend. Instead of the analytic interpretation, Mellick proposes such tools  as art, singing, imagination, dance.
In the course of a  telephone conversation from her home in Palo Alto, California, the psychologist provides us with a road map.

Read more ...

Lebanon 2009

Details

Category: Photography

Click on a thumbnail above to show a larger image.
Click on the left or right half of the image to advance to the next image.
Click outside the image to close.

Raised with Angela

Details

Category: Nonfiction

Published in "Divagations, 2010"

Copyright Jill Mellick, 2010

That the cadence of my mother’s and my speech and references echoed Angela Thirkell I was not aware until decades after my mother handed me my first green, cloth-coated Barsetshire tale.

We came by our addiction with sedate, devoted, colonial gusto--undoubtedly one of the qualities that propelled Thirkell from Australia back to England.

Before I was old enough to go to town alone, my mother, Letty Mellick, nee Katts, and I would take the bus from our hilltop Brisbane home looking out to Australia’s Great Dividing Range into the city. (Few families had second cars.) We would walk past the Brisbane City Hall, whose tall, elegant clock hands my grandfather had made, along Ann Street past the stone church where my parents married on Pearl Harbor Day, and climb the wide steps of the School of Arts Library (should I say “libery”?). Risking Thirkell’s scorn, we would borrow books. Given my mother’s arcane, deep, and lifelong interests--from Diaghilev to T.E. Lawrence to mysticism to the Raj--and an economy struggling after prolonged participation in the war, borrowing was first port of call.

Read more ...

Here, in thinner air, we move

Details

Category: Poetry

Here, in thinner air, we move
more easily through deep canyon,
myth, and mountain.
Here, the earth stirs at our walking,
amber streams rise from our heels.
The veins of the hills open
and flow at dusk.
Ribs curve dry and brittle
Heart beats drums.

We emerge into a new world
carrying in brown hands
feathers from ancient selves.
In the winds circling the moon
they dance licking each limb
into old forgotten fever.

Messengers come plaintive panting
from lower hibernating lands
hump on their backs
our sloughed off skins
and curl upon themselves.

We curl around each other,
double rainbow after storm.
The new moon carries the old
in her blue arms.
Yet must we singly weave
new cloud new earth new sky
spin from silent eye
new webs to hold
across a windy dawn.

Karaoke

Details

Category: Poetry

Kiki from Lamia,
Onne from Vietnam
and Mabel from China
cradle me.

I try not to meditate,
not to sing to myself.

(We can’t find your breath.
Breathe faster.

I was meditating,
I explain. I always do.
Or sing. In machines.

Well don’t. Not now.
We can’t find your breath.
It’s taking too long.)

Brief tuneless metallic tunes
chant in the empty room.
A mobile dangles from steel hooks above me.
They only took down the St Patrick's Day greens
(recycled from Christmas) this week.
No art in the halls
of the half dead half alive.

Kiki and Ohne and Mabel
watch from behind the window.
watch the monitor,
angles and degrees
of killing notated precisely
in black and white.
The only art here:
a green thin lay line mapped
by Onne or Kiki or Mabel
flows across me
marking the edges
of the killing field.

They should give you lovely pictures
to look at here
I exclaim.
Day after day you are below ground
no sun, no sky, no pictures.

When we came to this new building
our boss wanted it clean--
no pictures, says Kiki
as she checks my position.
Turn your neck a little.
They don’t want to silence me forever.

In the old place, there were pictures--
forests and mountains and lakes --
Someone even cut out our faces
and glued them into trees.

Later I meet Han Cho, M.D.
smiling in pink Ralph Lauren.

Can I swim in a pool? I ask.

Yes.

Can I kill the cells twice a day? I ask.

No.

Can I swim in the ocean after?  I ask.

Yes.You have a beautiful scar.
We see many.

Later, after seeing three of my patients
I drive to Julie’s,
her studio walls filled with pictures,
of her singing students and three children,
each from other lands.

Sing as low as you can go
as high as you can fly.
I sing. 
Your range!  You have four octaves!
I never hear this.

What use at almost 60?
I retort.
Besides, I growl or squeak.

That's the easy part.
She laughs.
Download karaoke from Amazon .
Whatever you like to sing--
for your head voice,
for your chest voice...

For my life.