Wisdom consists in doing the next thing that you have to do, doing it with your whole heart and finding delight in doing it. From the delight is a sense of the sacred.” – Helen M. Luke
– Dr. Jaime G. Corvalan, MD, FACS
Helen Luke was a brilliant writer and Jungian psychologist, with a deep understanding of literature, mythology and the power of the symbolic to shape and guide our lives. It can be said of Helen that she was far more than an academic, she lived what she wrote.
After conducting a well respected analytical practice with the equally engaging Robert Johnson, she retired and, in 1962, founded the Apple Farm Community in rural Michigan whose mission was to be “a center for people seeking to discover and appropriate the transforming power of symbols in their lives.”
Helen was a story teller in the most transformative sense, urging us to live with a final vision of what is divine. She understood – and lived – the notion that to have a true death we must be certain to live a true life; we must live with a sense of the sacred. It has been said of Helen that “She was endowed with a deep grasp of archetypal forces and the ability to evoke them with luminous prose.”
In one of her most endearing works – “Old Age: Journey into Simplicity” – Helen employs her gift of story-telling and her deep understanding of the symbolic in some of the greatest literary works in history to show us that growing old is a conscious journey into simplicity. One can approach old age and the end of one’s life with honor and dignity, and an understanding that one is called now to let go of everything our Ego’s once deemed critically important; or one can fall or disintegrate into the aging process – we must make the choice.
In her memoir, “Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on,” she writes with the heart and soul of a poet, bringing together the symbolic from her own inner dream life with personal and historic experiences that provide us with the clues and direction for living an authentic and fulfilling life. Helen encourages us to live in the moment with high awareness and consciousness, to live our personal truths and to “know and accept and live the next thing with devotion.” This compendium is truly her master work and a great contribution to the unfolding of consciousness and love.
