jotun

I had a session with my therapist yesterday and noticed, for the first time, an interesting picture that has been hanging in her room all along. It's actually a woven cloth picture (SK would know the name for this, maybe it qualifies as a tapestry...) of a giant creature stepping out from behind a mountain. There is a little house in the bottom right corner, with a little curl of smoke rising from the chimney. There are tall mountains on either side and the night sky holds three huge stars, a la Van Gogh's Starry Night. In the top left corner is the word Jotun, which Wikipedia claims is a Norse word for giant. My therapist explained that Jotun was a kind of Germanic nature spirit, but so far my internet search hasn't turned up good info. The creature itself looks wild but wise, with a huge hooked nose and blue eyes (it could be me, actually), and a mane of bushy hair, full of twigs. I was so enchanted by the picture, I wanted to find a copy for myself, but alas, a google image search didn't turn anything up. This picture was given to my therapist probably twenty years ago when the head Process Work guru, Arny Mindell, was cleaning out his old practice room in Zurich. He asked her if she wanted it and she snatched it up with relish. If I had a digital camera, I would just take a picture of it, but I don't. It reminds me of the dreams I used to have when I was young, dreams always set in the mountains I was born in, dreams of huge creatures stepping out over the mountains. Sometimes they were monsters, once it was a giant chicken! But the dreams were always intense and magical. Looking at the picture there in her office, I felt connected to something that loves the land, but is so much larger than anything on the land. The thing that is in this world, but somehow not of it. Nice to imagine.