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. 

Reflections on the Intensive

All week I've been wanting to write about the Healers' Intensive with Deena Metzger, partly for my friends who may be interested, but also so that I can begin to integrate everything that transpired.  But the intensive was so intense, in so many ways, that it's taken me a while to settle down from the headaches that began there and continued when I got home.  The material alone was challenging and deep, but there was also a summer solstice ritual outdoors in 112 degree heat, dense and smoke-filled air from the Santa Barbara fires, and another fire in Topanga itself, threatening an evacuation that fortunately did not happen.  Intense. Yes.   Finally, I'm feeling ready to write.

So, this morning I drew a SoulCollage® card to help me begin.  It was the card I call My Healthy Heart.  Perfect.  Where else to begin than with the heart?

The core of the intensive, as with all of the work I've done with Deena, centered around western mind and the chaos and violence it has created.  No surprise that it pretty quickly led to feelings of grief.  What other response, really, can there be?  We spent most of a whole day speaking in Council about how and where we're heartbroken.

I came to Topanga with a dream.  It was the opening dream for the week's work, and is at the core of everything for me (and I think for the community).  In the dream, I am with a friend discussing the healing properties of some substance, when I am given an image, a symbol, and some words along with it.  The image is of a hub with spokes going out from it, rather like a wheel, but not round on its edge.  The words go something like: Fix the hub and healing will radiate out to all parts of the structure.  I've never had a dream like this before.  I began to understand that, with my own physical healing, I've been trying to fix the parts but missing the core.  It then became very clear to me that my illness has been, at the core, spiritual, with physical manifestations.  (I know this may sound like, duh, but you know how sometimes you finally get the obvious.  My acupuncturist has pretty much been trying to tell me something like this for ages).

And what is the illness?  I surmised and Deena more or less agreed that it is about being disconnected from Spirit.  Disconnection was a big word for many of us in the group - from the earth, the wisdom of the natural world, the animals, the ancestors, Spirit.

Deena's work is to have us question.  Everything.  All our assumptions, all our so-called bottom lines.  We are so infected with the western acculturated mindset that we often don't even realize it.  You know - the old fish in water analogy.

How do we connect or re-connect with a more indigenous mind and heart?  According to Deena, we don't and can't really understand what it means to regard the earth as our mother, though we bandy the term about.  If we did, we would live differently.  And though we have much to learn from indigenous cultures and people, we can't be them or co-opt their particular ways.  Can we learn from them without stealing from them?  Haven't we stolen and destroyed enough?

All anyone can do is live with the heartbreak and forge one's own pathless path.  For me, a big part is staying in connection with Spirit (however you name it or think of it).  The earth is besieged.  We often live our privileged lives as though it isn't.  So, what do we do, then, to stay conscious and not collapse in despair? What we worked on all week was to understand what we are each called to.  To listen, to find out what Spirit wants of us.  It isn't easy, especially if we think we can do it without the support of community.  There is certainly no support in the broader culture for it.  But those of us who think in these ways have to be in Council together.  We need to hold each other in this work.

My particular heartbreak?  It's for these beloveds and the world they are growing up in.

The Invitation to Become Grand

Ruby turned six today.  My first grandchild.  Naturally, I've been remembering the day she was born.  All four grandparents-to-be were hanging out all week at a Berkeley bed and breakfast; Emily’s waters had broken and she didn’t go into actual labor for a number of days.  Such a rite of passage, of course for the baby and for her parents, but for all of us.  For Barry and me particularly, being first-time grandparents.  I hadn’t thought about it that way until this morning. Becoming a grandparent is not something we usually ritualize or commemorate; we aren’t the point, after all.  The child and the parents are the point.  I can remember when I visited my parents with Max, my firstborn, for the first time.  I felt that my mother finally treated me as an adult, even though I was 26 years old.

It’s not necessarily about being an elder, either, as many become grandparents at a much younger age than we did. But what becoming a grandparent truly offers is an invitation to become Grand.  My etymology dictionary says that grand comes from the Latin “grandis,” meaning “big, great, full, abundant,” and connoting “noble, sublime, lofty, dignity.”  That’s a lot to live up to.

We all know the benefits of grandparenthood – having the fun without having to be the disciplinarian or having the 24/7 responsibilities.  It’s just a matter of holding a heart full of love 24/7.

Here is my SoulCollage® card I call “The Grand Mother.”  A grandmother is connected to the Grand Mother, She who holds the world in her arms.  This isn’t big news or a fabulous insight on my part; only an acknowledgement of what this precious child (and her little sister and cousin) have given me and a reminder of what my job is.

Shortly after Ruby was born, this poem came.  It makes me happy to remember it today.

Honu* 

Little honu,

swimming her way to shore

on the full moon’s tide.

We have scooped her up

and held her next

to our hearts,

each one of us.

Blessed is the mother

who labors to bear the child.

Blessed is the one

who protects so fiercely.

Blessed is the father

who attends to the mother

and who welcomes his child.

Blessed are the grandparents

who dream the baby

into the world and

add pairs of helping hands.

Blessed are the uncles and aunts

who fall in love

at first sight.

Blessed is the baby

who give us hope.

For a week we

lived in a bubble

outside of time.

Only birth and death

drop us into that place.

The outside world

disappears in

irrelevance.

A long waiting week

it was.

The two, never

losing faith, never

wavering,

surrounded by light,

held in many hearts.

So many hours, so

many long nights.

Then, suddenly,

she is here; the

word came,

she is here.

The world has

waited eons

for her.

Her gifts, yet

to be revealed,

unique on the earth,

may be exactly

what is needed

to save us all -

little honu,

so recently surfacing

from the seas of

the other world.

* honu = the Hawaiian word for sea turtle

Memory

This morning I was writing in my morning pages about my times with Ruby, and I suddenly flashed on a memory from my early childhood in Baltimore, going with my grandmother (my father's mom who lived with us) on the bus downtown.  Here's the resulting poem:

Memory

Wearing patent leather shoes

            and white gloves,

Going on the bus downtown

            with my grandmother.

Riding the escalators in

            the big department stores.

Eating lunch in Hutzler’s basement,

            chicken chow mein, or shrimp salad on toasted cheese bread.

Visiting my cousins’ grandpa Harry’s shoe store,

             next to Mr. Peanut

Nodding and waving in the window,

            the smell of peanuts and oil filling the street.

Sometimes we would go to

            the big library, the one with

The science museum on

            the top floor.

Always, we would go through Lexington Market

            on the way back to the bus,

Stopping to buy paper cones brimming with

            buttermilk, creamy and tart.

Almost 60 years ago now,

            she, 40 years gone, me 50 years gone from Baltimore.

That downtown probably long gone, too,

            but alive in my memory,

Even down to the smells of

            department store perfume and exhaust fumes on the street.

I wonder what memories

            my granddaughter will carry

Of times spent

            with me.