Tales of the North Wind

A map of the series

We all encounter periods that feel like cold, darkness, or loss of direction. The North Wind is my collective image for such experience. It does not replace more specific words—grief, fear, depression, shame, trauma, or fatigue—but creates a literary space in which difficult things can be approached through a story.

The tales are not an escape from reality either. A mythologeme can hold ambiguity: the same image may frighten, protect, conceal a conflict, or help name it. Yet a metaphor remains a metaphor. It does not diagnose and cannot replace help when someone is unsafe or unable to manage daily life.

What this series calls shadow

Jung's shadow, Freud's id, and the literary figures of Faust and Hamlet belong to different theories and periods. They cannot be combined into one scientific term. In this series, they appear as different languages for discussing what a person does not want, cannot, or has not learned to recognize in themselves.

This may be aggression, envy, fear, a need for recognition, helplessness, or a wish to break a rule. Having an impulse is not the same as acting on it. Recognizing it makes decisions possible: how to respond, which boundaries are needed, and what responsibility follows from action.

The task is therefore not to put one's demons in the service of the ego. A more precise aim is to stop unrecognized experiences from governing in secret. Some feelings can be heard as signals; some actions must be constrained; consequences of trauma may require long professional work.

Crisis does not owe us a gift

An inner crisis sometimes initiates reassessment and change. Growth is not an automatic product of pain. Suffering can narrow attention, damage health and relationships, and deplete strength. A demand to discover a bright side may simply add guilt to an already difficult state.

The possibility of transformation arises not from the magnitude of suffering, but from conditions around it: safety, support, time, meaning, and available action. The first step may be honest reflection, or it may be rest, medical care, psychotherapy, social support, or leaving a dangerous situation.

The series offers questions rather than a promise of universal healing: what is happening to me? What function does this defense serve? What am I trying not to know? Where does my responsibility begin, and where does my control end? Which next step reduces harm?

Nine essays

The entire series is now published. Read it in order or choose a theme:

1. The Child as Container — a child who holds feelings and conflicts for a family system.
2. Shadow Moods — moods that are difficult to accept and easy to turn into an identity.
3. Self-Flagellation as a Form of Pride — self-accusation, exceptionalism, and responsibility without inner execution.
4. The Orthographic Shibboleth — language, error, and signs by which a group separates insiders from outsiders.
5. The Lion on the Gryffindor Emblem — courage, belonging, and the choice of an identity.
6. Does Struggle Make Us Weaker or Stronger? — the cost of struggle and conditions in which overcoming sustains or exhausts.
7. The Salt Doll — limits of knowledge and how the knower changes by entering an experience.
8. Inner Inventory — an honest review of motives, resources, and obligations.
9. Seventy-Five Posts Later — distance traveled and the changing voice of the author.

How to read these tales

You do not need to recognize yourself in every image. It is more useful to notice where a metaphor clarifies experience and where it begins to simplify it by force. Agreement with the author is not a condition of reading.

The North Wind does not make someone stronger by itself. But when we name its direction, find shelter, ask for company, and decide where to go after the storm, the experience is no longer only mute cold. It finds a place in a story—not as a compulsory justification of pain, but as a part of life that can be understood.

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