This is our space for reflections on quotes from Jung.  We invite you to share a favorite quote along with your thoughts by e-mailing us at jung@cgjungcenter.org

This recollection of an encounter with Carl Jung was told by Renee Brand, an analyst from San Francisco, and is included in C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters.

The year was 1955, in the fall.  We were stepping from the living-room where tea had been served into the garden of 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht [Jung's home].  Ten students from the Institute had been delegated to celebrate with Jung the planting of a Ginkgo biloba tree given to him for his eightieth birthday.  We stood in a semicircle by the place chosen for the tree while two gardeners started digging the hole.  Between them they fell into alternating rhythm, accentuated by the spades breaking up the earth and the thud of throwing it out.  Jung was giving directions about the width and breadth of the hole, concerned that the roots should get enough space.  As I looked at him in the outdoor light of the afternoon, he suddenly seemed less sturdy, his frame less powerful-different than in his study at my recent visit, or even a few moments ago at tea.  He looked all of his eighty years and very frail, with the frailty of old age.  With the shock of this realization, a sinister crescendo seemed to get into the rhythm of spades going in and earth thumping down.  Irrationally, it seemed that this hole was not for planting a tree, that those were not gardeners, they were grave-diggers.  The feeling about death was so strong that the scene became unbearable, and I stood in utter helplessness, wishing and praying for it all to stop.  Suddenly I heard Jung saying: "This has nothing to do with death.  They are planting new life."  He was looking straight in front of him, addressing no one.  Having my unspoken thought picked out of my head and answered was so startling that the irrational panic turned into a numinous experience. [pp. 161-162]

I so often pull out excerpts from the book C.G. Jung Speaking because they give the reader such a different view of Jung than one finds in his theoretical writings. Renee Brand paints such an arresting picture of a remarkable moment in which the "irrational" emotions which had arisen during the digging of the hole were immediately changed by Jung's words; the whole tenor of her experience became the opposite of what it had been a moment before.  I would like to comment here about the season in which this event took place-the fall.  Autumn harkens death:  the end of the harvest, the dying of all that had grown so bountifully in the spring and summer, the cold and dormant winter ahead.  Yet, autumn is just one part of the quaternity of seasons, or one of the four directions on the Native American Medicine Wheel, that make up the cycle of the year.  This cycle is not static; it is dynamic.  This dynamism can be seen not only in the progression of the seasons, but also in our own psyches. One thing begets its opposite, which when held together, becomes a new thing, a synthesis of the pair of opposites from which it springs.  That new thing then begets its own opposite, and the cycle can go on and on like this, just as the seasons continue ever onward.  When we hold together strength and frailty, or irrationality and rationality, or any opposite pair, something new can be birthed out of that tension between the two.  If we are open to it, then, new energy comes when we hold death and life together.  This is an essential way in which I experience this, my favorite, season: autumn.