When I was first struggling with writing my story, it was all a great big jumble of random plot points and intensely-felt but undefined characters. Thinking about it was great fun to a point… that point being an abrupt ledge into the deep sea Overwhelm. One afternoon I flopped down on the couch, thinking all this thinking was getting exhausting and I needed a nap.
As I lie there in that headspace between thinking and sleeping, I wondered vaguely how I was supposed to contain all of my teeming imagination into something that resembled a narrative, a coherent story. And then I had a vision, a very clear image appeared unbidden before my eyes: an acorn.
An acorn?
Now I’ve done my share of reading in dream interpretation and symbology and whathaveyou, and I couldn’t really come up with anything better than perhaps an acorn was my subconscious’s way of saying we are all trees. We start out tiny and buried, but within us we hold the stuff that, given half a chance, with a little nurturing, can eventually touch the sky.
That was around two years ago and since then I haven’t thought a lot about acorns. Then the other day I had a conversation with a friend in which we discussed our next steps in Life, like you do when you’re 40-something and start to realize that life ain’t gonna live itself. And I mentioned I’d been always been interested in Jungian psychology, that I feel alive when I read that stuff.
So when I got home I started window-shopping on Amazon and eventually landed on a book by James Hillman called The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. It sounded interesting so I bought it. Imagine how I felt a few days later when I read in the book’s preface that it is all about Acorn Theory.
As stated so succinctly by Wikipedia, “[Hillman's Acorn] theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It describes how a unique, individual energy of the soul is contained within each human being, and is displayed throughout their lifetime, and shown in their calling and life’s work when it is fully blossomed or actualized.”
Holy synchronicity, Batman.
