Leaves

The Seba library treats Leaves in 9 passages, across 8 authors (including Bloom, Harold, Harris, Russ, Jung, Carl Gustav).

In the library 9 passages

Wallace Stevens attempted to subsume Shelley and Whitman in his poem The Rock, in what he named ‘the fiction of the leaves.’ That trope passes from Homer and Pindar through Virgil and Dante on to Edmund Spenser, Milton, and Shelley

Bloom traces the ‘fiction of the leaves’ as a continuous literary trope linking transience and poetic renewal from ancient epic through the American sublime, culminating in Whitman’s fusion of it with prophetic scripture.

Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Imagine you’re sitting by the side of a gently flowing stream, and there are leaves flowing past on the surface of the stream … notice each of your thoughts as it pops into your head … then place it onto a leaf, and allow it to come and stay and go in its own good time

The ‘Leaves on a Stream’ exercise in ACT operationalizes cognitive defusion by externalizing thoughts onto imagined leaves, training non-attached observation of mental content.

Harris, Russ, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

its leaves are like the leaves of Marjoram, and are thirty in number according to the age of the moon in its waxing and waning … the tree symbolizes the whole opus.

Jung identifies the alchemical tree’s leaves as lunar indices marking the complete cycle of the opus, integrating vegetal imagery into the symbolic system of transformation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Just as flowers and leaves are only part of a plant, and just as waves are only part of the ocean, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts are only part of the self.

Thich Nhat Hanh employs leaves as a figure for the natural, insuppressible expressions of selfhood, arguing that awareness — not repression — is the appropriate response to the mind’s arising contents.

Nhat Hanh, Thich, The Sun My Heart, 1988thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The latent vegetal imagery in this theme — that the life of man ‘wilts’ like a plant — brings us now to yet another important contrast in the poetic representations of immortality and death.

Nagy identifies the traditional Hellenic leaf-and-vegetation simile as the ‘natural’ pole in an opposition between mortal transience and immortality’s cultural artifice, structuring archaic Greek poetic cosmology.

Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The acorn theory is bird shit to the giant … he would never equate an acorn with a leaf blown by or a drop of dung. They can pick up a metaphor when they see one

Hillman uses the leaf as an example of the kind of metaphoric perception available to imagination but foreclosed by literalist, reductionist thinking.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Long ago there was a deep devotion to living trees. They were valued, for they symbolized the ability to die and return back to life.

Estés situates the tree — and by extension its leaves — within ancient women’s religious cosmology as a symbol of death-and-renewal, informing her reading of feminine initiation rites.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Leaf 5, for example, depicts the gods of the five sacred peaks … leaves 12-16 depict other groups of celestial marshals

In this Daoist iconographic context, ‘leaves’ refers to album folios containing divine imagery, a usage without direct psychological significance but illustrating the term’s archival and sacred-catalogue functions.

Kohn, Livia, Daoism Handbook, 2000aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →