Marie Louise Von Franz: it is only in old age when one looks back
The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
From these amplifications, you see that the woven linen or carpet, with its designs, is often used as a symbol for the complex symbolic patterns of life and the secret designs of fate.
It represents the greater pattern of our life, which we do not know as long as we live it.
We constantly build our lives by our ego-decisions and it is only in old age when one looks back that one sees that the whole thing had a pattern.
Some people who are more introspective know it a bit before the end of their lives and are secretly convinced that things have a pattern, that they are led, and that there is a kind of secret design behind the ephemeral actions and decisions of a human being.
Actually, we turn towards dreams and the unconscious because we want to find out more about our life pat- tern in order to make fewer mistakes and not to cut with our knives into our own inner carpet, fulfilling our destiny instead of resisting it.
This purposiveness of an individual life-pattern, which gives one a feeling of meaningfulness, is very often symbolized in the carpet.
Generally carpets, especially oriental ones, have those complicated meandering patterns such as you follow up when in a dreamy mood, when you feel that life goes up and down and along and changes around.
Only if you look from afar, from a certain objective distance, do you realize that there is a pattern of wholeness in it. Marie Louise Von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Pages 6-7
