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Although the inner taste of the acorn may be nourishing, and communion with the angel sweet, the acorn is also bitter. It is astringent and tannic. It shrinks back; says no, as Socrates’ daimon only cautioned negations. Maybe that’s why actual acorns must be soaked and leached, boiled and blanched again and again, undergoing long softening before t

Then, and up into modern times in French and English poetry and painting, this Arcadia of the ur-acorn was the imaginal landscape of primitive nature, similar to Eden or Paradise, where the untrammeled natural soul lived in accord with nature. Therapy has transplanted Arcadia to childhood; the natural being, feeding on acorns, therapy has christene

Your calling is your psyche’s first nourishment. Galen said that the Arcadians were still eating acorns even after the Greeks had learned to cultivate cereals. This is another way of saying that the support of the acorn precedes the practical civilizing effects of your natural mother, the mother world of Demeter-Ceres, the nourishing civilizing god

More distantly, “acorn” comes from the Sanskrit via the Greek ago, agein and their various forms and derivatives, which mean basically to push, to direct toward, to lead or guide. (A chief in Homer is an agos.) The imperative age, agete means: move, get going, go. From this same ancient stem derive your “agenda” and your “agony,” the ordinary exper

Etymologically, at our third level of elaboration, the word “acorn” is related to “acre,” “act,” and “agent.” “Acorn” derives most closely from Old High German akern (fruit, produce), not merely as a seed but as an already fulfilled fruition. Actus (action, activity, agency) is associated with “acorn” so that the acorn must be understood as an acco

All tall trees are wise, according to the West African teacher Malidoma Somé, because their movement is imperceptible, the connection between above and below so firm, their physical presence so generously useful. The oak, with such size and age and beauty and solidity, would therefore be especially wise, and its acorns will carry all the tree’s kno

We are born from acorns, as acorns are born from oaks. And as the words “tree” and “truth” are cognates, so the tree in its acorn form bears truth, too, in nuce. Such would be a rhapsodic reading of the little cupped pellets lying around the forest floor.1

The invisible source of personal consistency, for which I am using the word “habit,” psychology today calls character.5 Character refers to deep structures of personality that are particularly resistant to change. When they are socially harmful they are named character neuroses (Freud) and character disorders. These hard-to-change lines of fate are