Navigating Mystery, Part 7

I learned something else from my illness - that my brokenness and the world’s brokenness are no different.  We in the dominant culture are broken because the culture is broken, insupportable, and based on power and greed. Society raises us, raised me, to be disconnected from the earth and from other life forms, and we then go on to wreck the earth. We live in dark and desperate times. 

This summer,

water use in our dry

northern California

will be restricted.

My little pomegranate tree,

only two years old,

just burst out with

three deep red flowers.

Last year the tiny fruit fell off,

too heavy for the spindly

young branches to bear.

I don’t want the baby tree to die

from lack of water, so I will

catch shower-heating water

in a bucket and save the liquid

from steaming artichokes

to dribble onto the dry soil.

 

The rains do not come, cannot come.

No rain to evoke sadness

or a flow of memories, but sadness

and the ghosts of memories arrive.

What comes from the sky is dust,

what water arrives is in our eyes.

Looking up for omens and comets,

we struggle to see, to hear something,

to wait for a message, to change.

And still, I love the earth.

The earth Is not the world.

The world of drought and fire,

floods and reckless storms

is of our making.

Our tears are salty and insufficient.

The blown dust and ash clog our eyes.

Yet despite all the horror, all the brokenness,

the redwoods and pines draw up

and display their good green life.

The earth still and always reminds us

to keep on, to love anyway,

to sit down with our ancestors’ ghosts,

to keep telling the stories.

The earth has everything, bears everything –

us, the trees, the life-giving waters,

the myriad other beings.

With all that we have done to her,

can we do any less?

 

How to figure out what comes next, what to do to heal the earth, what to do to heal this fear?  While I wait, I pass a little time each morning by drawing a SoulCollage® card.  The card becomes a guide for the day.  Interestingly, the card I drew today is of a woman in a dark place full of pomegranates.  She is bent over, peering into a cauldron.  The cauldron belongs to Hecate, who is a guide for Persephone and Demeter.  She is also the goddess of the crossroads. 

SoulCollage® card - Hecate's Cauldron

Sitting here is like being at a crossroads, trying to figure out the way to go.  Waiting and writing, writing and waiting, it is essential to trust whatever flows from the pen onto the page. 

 

Here are the words that come: Real fear is necessary when you are in danger; anticipating or imagining danger and going into fear is self-torture.

Navigating Mystery, Part 5

 As Mary Oliver says, I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. 

 

I confess, I have been more of a visitor than a resident.  The land doesn’t know me.  I was never trained in its ways. I grew up without a deep connection to the natural world.  We lived in a city.  The natural world was a place to visit upon occasion.  There were parks.  There were visits to a beach.  There were summer vacations in the Smoky Mountains or the White Mountains of New Hampshire, places of beauty to love and marvel at but that were not central to my daily life.  I did spend much of my childhood playing out of doors, catching lightning bugs on warm summer nights, exploring the tiny woods a few blocks away from the house, sipping honeysuckle flowers growing along the back fence; building snowmen in the front yard on winter days.  I was not without any appreciation of the out-of-doors. I just wasn’t taught to see how everything is interconnected or inspirited.

 

Even so, I was not totally bereft of spiritual experience.  Often, I was afraid of the dark.  But once in a long time, alone in my bedroom, a radiance would wash over and through me.  Radiance is not precisely the correct word; the darkness itself glowed. I thought of it as “the bright of the dark.” It filled the room and me and left me feeling clean and peaceful.  Then, on its heels, I would see in my mind’s eye an image of a child in light blue overalls on a double swing in a garden.  The swing was draped with flowering vines.  This happened every time, and seeing this image made me happy.  That was my connection, if not to the natural world, at least to the world of the imagination, or spirit.

 

I danced the ballet again in my last recital eight years later, but Persephone continued to spark my imagination.  I was born in the spring, and she was a goddess of the spring.  But I worried that, like Persephone, I, too, could be pulled into some dark underworld.

 

Now, so many years later (and as I have said already) I’ve grown heartily weary of living in and with fear, and not truly connected with the earth. I think about the time Demeter occupied her newly built temple at Eleusis, grieving, unwilling to leave or to allow the earth to provide sustenance until her daughter was returned to her.  The first sit-down strike. I am no goddess, and it is fear rather than grief that I am reckoning with.  But I can sit down and dig in.  Here are my tools: an old leather journal and a decent fountain pen.  I intend to write my way into healing.

SoulCollage® card - Demeter and Hades at Eleusis

 

It Begins with a Call - Part 9

I had a session with my friend, a medium who channels.  We hadn’t done this in a long time.  What emerged was that I was the same age when my health problems began six years or so ago that my grandmother was when all her trials (death of her husband and oldest son and the ensuing shock therapy that followed) happened.  Interesting.  The theory is that I took on some of her fear.  Not that I don’t have plenty of my own, but not all of what I carry is mine.

Something moved me to go back to the Psyche story.  My version. 

Another Psyche Story

Here is what I know:

Persephone’s path is

a downward spiral into

the core of my heart.

She took me in hand

when I was just a child,

led me to the darkest remote

chamber contained therein

where I interred the box

of grief and shame I bore,

the one bestowed on me

by a loving mother

who wished only for me to thrive,

who constructed the cask

with hands of humiliation.

All these years

Persephone has kept it for me,

tended it, aware that

I would need to claim it one day,

that one day I would recognize it

as treasure and be astonished

by its beauty.

What I know:

The underworld is in

the core of my heart.

I must believe

that what led me in

will also guide me out,

that love and a certain tender kindness

will revive me when

I open that box.

 Suddenly, I was struck with insight about my last SoulCollage® card (the one with a tower on it).  

As is often the case with making cards, I had no conscious understanding of why that tower had to be in the background.  Aha!  Psyche’s last task, to go down to the underworld and retrieve the box of beauty from Persephone, involved her ascending a tower; she had decided to throw herself off in order to die and so to get to the underworld.  But the tower gave her instructions that helped her descend without dying.  

So, I had a little conversation with the tower in my card.  One of the ensuing revelations was that my fear began even earlier than the incidents with my grandmother; it started in utero.  My mother had had several miscarriages and one infant death from hyaline membrane disease before I came along.  She must have been terrified throughout my pregnancy, and her fear ran through the umbilical cord along with blood and nourishment.  I was grown on fear.

Everyone insightful that I have consulted, including the gastroenterologist, has told me not to worry about the enlarged pancreatic bile duct; no one is seeing red flags.  I, however, am in constant fear.

I thought to look up the symbolic significance of the pancreas.  Get this (from the website humanityhealing.net):  “The pancreas is the main organic structure that processes the emotion of fear because its function is to maintain the stability of the organism and any threat at the emotional or physical level can cause a structural imbalance to the entire system.”  This is all starting to make a certain amount of sense – my blood sugar issues, this duct problem, my fear….  Truly, I do feel I could be getting to the crux, the hub, the core. 

My dangerous, beautiful assignment.  Beauty?  That’s what was supposedly in the box for Psyche, right? Right now my assignment seems to be waiting, sitting with the unpleasant sensations in my body, and attending to the fear.  Dangerous, I get.  Beauty, not so much.

The other curious aspect of that tower card is the fire being, hand on heart like the figure I associate with myself.  Another mystery.  But the subsequent card I made also has a fire spirit on it.  I made it in a session focused on shadows and light.  I had had a dream in which my man chose me over another woman.  This woman wore a horned headdress and was young and beautiful.  She looked down on us from the roof of a tall building.  She looked powerful and clearly did not mean me well.  I found an eerie picture of a horned woman and one of a woman with an owl on her shoulder, looking concerned – the chosen one.  But behind the horned woman was a third figure, a powerful fire spirit, with flames emerging from her outstretched hands.

So, somehow I am back - or still - in the realm of fire.  It is quite mysterious to me why these figures came to be on my cards.  But they are protective, strong, empowering.  What exactly they mean or bode for me I do not know. 

It Begins with a Call - Part 8

My SoulCollage® Fire Element Card

More fire?

There are little fire gremlins in my stomach now.  I have no idea what they want or how to get them to leave.  Weeks go by, and I am nauseated.  I have literally visited over twenty practitioners, both allopathic and alternative, in the last six or seven years.

The story shifts again.  The story is, I see now, about fear.  I am beginning to realize that my fear is what damaged the hub of the wheel.  Yes, I can try to connect to Spirit, but until I find a way to live with or accept or deal with or get rid of or I-don’t-know-what about the fear, I will continue to break or damage or crush or ignore the hub repeatedly.  All my repair work will be for naught, because, for the last number of years, with all of my little unpleasant and undiagnosed (and often seemingly undiagnosable) illnesses, with all of my mortality, deer-in-the-headlights’ reactions, the common denominator is fear. 

My acupuncturist and friend tells me that the moving symptoms are called wind in the Chinese system.  Moving around, now here, now there, because every time I realize this set of symptoms is not deadly serious, another one pops up.  Back to Oya, goddess of wind, lightning, storms.  But why?  Perhaps to inaugurate new fearful scenarios and more opportunities to handle my core issue?  If so, up till now I have failed dismally.  I am only beginning to get this.  It’s been pointed out to me, and yet I didn’t get it.

How interesting that my state right now (it is January 26, 2017), when fear permeates the country, and Donald Trump is, in short order, instituting all of the things he ranted about in his campaign, is a perfect reflection of the collective.  I can hardly figure out what to be afraid of first or more. But the nausea and the gremlins demand my attention.

Finally, a diagnosis!  Here is the question – is it possible for me to come to terms with any of this?  I am now in a waiting game to find the cause of and the cure for an enlarged pancreatic bile duct and my 7 weeks of nausea and distress.  It could be an easy healing, or it could be my death, or anything in between.  Assuming I survive, will I then, Chinese-wind style, be off into the next fear-provoking episode?

Right now, the waiting feels somewhat like doldrums, but worse.  Maybe I’ve gone deeper down.  No one has to tell me to go down now.  I’m down.

I didn’t intend to write this part.  I certainly don’t want anyone to read this epistle of self-pity.  I think, “Well, I can edit it out later.”  Whatever.  Right now I need to write.  I need to write because it is how I process.  I need to write to fill the time.  I need to write to be truthful.  I need to write so that it shows up somewhere that I am facing this darkness, that I don’t know what the fuck to do, that I am pretty much a wreck.  I wanted to say that I’m “at my wits’ end,” but I stopped myself.  Why?  Is there further down to go?

I had the thought this morning that this facing up to my fear is what the brilliant Caroline Casey calls my “beautiful, dangerous assignment.”  I may never know why this is so.  It is a useful reframe, though.

The box is open.

How did I get so fear-based?  A few years ago while getting a cranial-sacral treatment, a story about my paternal grandmother surfaced, out of the blue.  She lost both her husband and her oldest son the year before I was born and moved in with my parents.  Grief-stricken, she cried for several years, apparently endlessly, according to my mother, her daughter-in-law, who, at her own wits’ end, took my grandmother to the doctor.  He prescribed shock therapy.  My mother then had to take my grandmother across town on the bus (in the days before we owned a car) for treatments, and my grandmother begged her repeatedly to stop.  My mother replied that when my grandmother got a grip on herself, she could be released from the therapy.

So, my insightful practitioner asked, “Where were you when this was going on?”

I’d never thought about it.  I must have been on that bus, too, and observing this whole drama.  No wonder I got scared.  Maybe if I didn’t behave, my mother would take me for some terrible treatment, too.