The beginning and the end of writing my novel, The Far Mountains, were marked by encounters with synchronicity (a term Carl Jung coined), to which I attached great significance. To understand why I needed a meaningful coincidence to begin The Far Mountains, it is helpful to know that it took me two years to write my first piece of longer form fiction, a novella called Billy the Brave. It was a writing process I found intensely difficult but somehow utterly necessary in the year after I completed my two-year Master of Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Adding to an uncomfortable feeling that something was pushing itself outwards, there was also a deep unfamiliarity to the artistic form I was engaging with. Not only had I never written long form fiction before but, by its very nature, it was a task that required me to face it on my own.
On the surface, Billy the Brave is about a black Labrador who, along with his family, is forced to move to a distant new home. There, one night, he ventures into the attic in search of what he thinks is a ghost, who Billy is certain stole something that he is being blamed and punished for.
This is the story that floats on the surface, but its undercurrent, one that I became uncomfortably aware of as the writing unfolded, was that it was also mapping a journey into unknown (lost) parts of myself. As I began laying down the story’s structure, it was as though I was concurrently laying down a scaffold to allow lost inner material to slowly emerge from my unconscious.
If this part of the process felt unknown, it was definitively clear that writing the story was having a powerful and, at times, a deeply unsettling effect on me. One that was only barely tolerable at points. But as I proceeded—in effect using the book as what the English psychotherapist John Winnicott called, “a transitional object”—it became clearer that what I was emotionally reliving and experiencing for the first time, were some of the most painful and confronting aspects of the death of my mother twenty-five years earlier. I began to understand that it was these “lost parts” which were hiding “in the attic.” And it was through writing the book—in some sense “holding” them in the book—that I was eventually able to come to far greater terms with them.
Billy the Brave, to my relief, also worked as a story, receiving a very encouraging reception from my friends and colleagues. This was deeply satisfying, and I wondered if I could write another story. Only this time a full-length novel. But there was also a wary part to me. One that wondered what also might be “hiding in the attic” and whether I had the strength to face it.
I did have a rough idea to work with. A piece of rhymed verse for a children’s picture book I had attempted ten years earlier when my own children were young. It was a story about a frog named Robert who loves music. I wondered if I could bring this warm character and his equally warm friends (all of whom also had their names) into a richer, deeper form.
This internal debate whether to begin the novel lasted through my summer holidays—ones spent, as all our previous summers had been, at my wife, Simone’s, family’s farm—finally ending one afternoon, while sitting on the deck reading a book. It was at that moment, above me, that I heard a rustling sound in the roof gutter. As I looked up, a large green tree frog suddenly emerged. Then, as I watched on, it made a long flying leap for the plants that lined the outer edge of the deck. But rather than landing in them as planned, disappearing into the camouflage, the green tree frog instead clipped the protective glass wall that lines the deck, and fell onto it, stunned. As I approached to help, it quickly gathered itself, before hopping through the small gap below the glass, into the bushes.
In twenty years on the farm, while regularly seeing green tree frogs at night-time, I had never noticed one moving out in the open during the day. Nor since. But more than that, remembering Jung’s own famous story of synchronicity, when a scarab beetle “demanded” entry through a closed window into a session with a client, it was the strangeness of this green frog suddenly appearing, at a time when I was debating whether I would embark on writing a story about a green frog, that made what I had just witnessed feel suddenly highly significant.
Inside me, I was taken by the feeling that the frog had made a deep effort, at great risk, to do what it had done. Almost as though it was role-modelling something to me. That sometimes we must leap into the unknown to survive or transform our circumstances. It was communicating, metaphorically at least, that it would be a valuable thing—for me—to write my own story about a green tree frog. Even if I did not know what it was that I was going to be writing “about” or where it would lead me to.
But as was the case with Billy the Brave, as the story developed, “what it was about” (the transitional elements at play) began to reveal themselves. These were not a return to the raw coalface of my mother’s dying days, akin to where Billy the Brave had lead me, but rather to the years following them. The times where my deeply difficult experiences were gradually transformed by the redemptive forces of creativity and the connection with the people one finds in these spaces.
It is always hard to know when a story is finished. Just as it can be hard to pinpoint a moment in the therapeutic process when something has definitively shifted or is resolved. But after writing The Far Mountains across the next two years, I once more returned to the farm for Christmas, where I gave Simone the manuscript to read for the first time. I hoped that not only would she find a piece of her story in it, but that she would also concur the story was nearing its end.
However, like the beginning of the writing of the story, the answer as to whether The Far Mountains was finished (at least, to my still activated writing self) arrived a few nights later with another incidence of meaningful coincidence. On that evening, Simone, slightly shaken, pulled me aside to say that she had discovered, of all things, a small dead green tree frog in the downstairs living room. At first, remembering the synchronicity that shaped the beginning of the story (and the powerful sense of struggle that Robert himself endures and overcomes in the novel), I was deeply unsettled by what seemed to be “an act against the heart of the story.”
But when I first saw the small green frog, in what seemed to be a peaceful curled pose, I immediately felt differently about it. It was then I began to sense that rather than this being a representation of Robert himself dying after climbing to the top of the Steep Hill (the name of the hill in the story), I saw it more as Jung might have. As though “the idea or archetype” had fully revealed and actualised itself. That it had considered its task of delivering transformation completed. That is, the necessary healing had occurred. This conclusion helped me to feel that the writing journey of The Far Mountains was over.
Under normal circumstances, I most likely would have taken this small green frog, and simply placed it in nearby bushes and covered it with leaves. But on this occasion, I was more careful and considered, taking time to choose a resting place that befitted both the frog’s, and the book’s story. In the end, I buried the body of “Robert” in a quiet, secluded spot, at the top of the farm’s own Steep Hill. A site that gave “Robert” a full view of the magnificent surrounding valleys, and of “his” Pond down below. But most importantly, a position that gave him an enduring and full view of his true home: the hills—The Far Mountains—sitting quietly and majestically in the distance.
The Far Mountains 