Helen Luke
Helen M. Luke (1904-1995) was born in England. In midlife, she studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich, then moved to the U.S. and established an analytical practice with Robert Johnson in Los Angeles.
In 1962, she founded the Apple Farm Community in Three Rivers, Michigan, “a center for people seeking to discover and appropriate the transforming power of symbols in their lives.” In her later years, Helen Luke was the model wise woman for many people.
Her final book, SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON, a memoir and excerpts from her fifty-four volumes of journals, was published posthumously. Her books include The Laughter at the Heart of Things, a collection of essays, and The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine. (1)
In Her Own Words
“In my life-long impatience, how much I have missed. Last night, washing the dishes, I really looked at my iron frying pan in the dishwater. The light made visible for a moment a tiny rainbow—a light through water revealing all the colors of life. It is so easy to miss the tiny symbols. Finding them is quite different from the business of trying to hatch up big symbolic experiences. It is RECOGNITION, not PURSUIT, of meaning—recognition of the sacramental, of the intersection of the two worlds, breaking through unsought because one is ATTENDING.” ~ From Such Stuff as Dreams are Made by Helen Luke
“Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart and finding delight in doing it. And the DELIGHT is the sense of the sacred.” ~From A Sense of the Sacred by Juliana Parroni and Robert A. Johnson
“The true light never hides the darkness but is born out of the very center of it, transforming and redeeming. So to the darkness we must return, each of us individually accepting his ignorance and loneliness, his sin and weakness, and, most difficult of all, consenting to wait in the dark and even to love the waiting” From Kaleidoscope: The Way of Woman and Other Essays by Helen Luke
“Each of us, as we journey through life, has the opportunity to find and to give his or her unique gift. Whether this gift is quiet or small in the eyes of the world does not matter at all-not at all; it is through the finding and the giving that we may come to know the joy that lies at the center of both the dark times and the light.” ~ AZQuotes.com
“We hurry through the so-called boring things in order to attend to that which we deem more important, interesting. Perhaps the final freedom will be a recognition that every thing in every moment is ‘essential’ and that nothing at all is ‘important’.” ~ From The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine, p.107
The inner story, though the same in essence for all, is always single and unique in each human being, never before lived and never to be repeated. Helen M. Luke (2011). ~ From The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine, p.127
Publications
- The Inner Story: Myth and Symbol in the Bible and Literature (1982)
- The Voice Within: Love and Virtue in the Age of the Spirit (1988)
- Woman Earth And Spirit: The Feminine in Symbol and Myth (1989)
- The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine (1995)
- Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On: The Autobiography and Journals (1999)
- The Laughter at the Heart of Things (2001)
- Kaleidoscope: The Way of Woman and Other Essays (2004)
- Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy (2009)
- Old Age: Journey into Simplicity (2010)
Featured Media
A Sense of the Sacred: A Portrait of Helen M. Luke (VHS)
