Upcoming workshop with Land Art Agency and Collective
Wednesday March 27th 6-8pm UK
I’m running this workshop in collaboration with the Land Art Agency, to share how myths and folktales can help us explore the territory of our creative self and weave us back into the cycles of life as well as our own cycles and rhythms. Through the story of La Loba (the wolf woman/bone collector), we will gather, collate and reconnect to the indestructible bones of our creative self and discern what is truly important and reliable for us.
Full details and booking are here: https://www.landartagency.com/mythstoryfolktales
It will be recorded if you can’t attend live. I am so looking forward to this, I hope you’ll join me!
When I was contemplating the subject of grief, particularly my own experiences, I thought about how grief and loss comes in many forms, and how loss is a threshold that we cross into a new, often unwelcome world.
John O’Donohue puts this so beautifully in his interview with Krista Tippett in 2008 https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty/
“…if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, 50 things to do, and you get a phone call that somebody that you love is suddenly dying, it takes 10 seconds to communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world, because suddenly, everything that seemed so important before is all gone, and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there, and the solid ground we are on, is so tentative, and I think a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit. And I think that, very often, how we cross is the key thing.”
Reflecting on my own experiences of loss, there are the losses of loved ones. Losses that have been sudden and unexpected, where the world changes in an instant, like the death of my brother when I was 12, or the death of our animals fatally injured. The slow death of ageing or illness, where all we could do was witness the gradual decline and the crossing of the threshold, knowing that no amount of love was enough to halt that transition. And living day by day with the anticipatory grief of waiting for the inevitable.
These are losses and grieving we can all relate to. And I think we can recognise too the grief of ending a relationship, of losing a job, of moving home – the big pivotal thresholds.
But what about the other losses and grieving that we don’t always acknowledge or recognise. The small deaths that we just swallow down and hide away. The many times and ways we have died to ourselves to conform to expectations or avoid disapproval. The thresholds we didn’t cross. The times we have heard a call or felt a longing within and squashed it – or it has been squashed.
My hubby and I were both teenagers in the 80s in different areas of the UK and different environments. His desire for long hair, a leather jacket and a bullet belt was thoroughly squashed by concerned parents who did not want him turning into one of those heavy metal head bangers; a genre which was wholly unacceptable to them. An aspiration to be a concert pianist was ok. An aspiration to be a guitarist in Led Zeppelin decidedly was not! A small death of outward self-expression, swallowed down, and his love of progressive rock then hidden from view.
In my corner of rural Lincolnshire, I too felt the weight of parental approval/disapproval over choice of boyfriends. My older sister had made a choice of husband that did not meet with my parent’s approval and her marriage (without their blessing) was just a few months before my brother died in an RTA. I’m still unravelling how these two events impacted me – rather like an onion, I peel off one layer and find there is another underneath. For certain, much of my life, my decisions and my relationships have been coloured by the tug of war in my heart between following my desire and avoiding/navigating the disapproval of my choices. And there are a thousand little ways I have tried and failed to reconcile that. A thousand ways I’ve tried and failed to be the ‘good girl’. A thousand little losses and petit griefs that add up.
This week in a women’s circle led by Dr Vanya Leilana, we considered crossing the threshold of the ‘should’ and the seeking of permission from someone or something external to take that step. We also contemplated loss and grief around wanting and not receiving approval or blessing for our choices.
Vanya’s work has much to do with creative transgression and obedience. Her book The Flesh and the Fruit: Remembering Eve and the Power of Creative Transgression will be published later this year by Womancraft Publishing. She also hosts a podcast Belonging to the Wild, which is well worth a listen.
For some months I have been working with Eve as an archetype of rebellion. Another time we will explore the whole Garden of Eden story as a metaphor, but for today let’s just consider Eve as a holy revolutionary. Her curiosity and willingness to honour her hunger for knowledge, her call to follow her personal values rather than comply with the status quo.
Eve’s apparent transgression is also the vehicle for transformation, and as such it is not easy path. It asks us to choose between the death of our spirit, by complying or being ‘obedient’, and the loss of blessing and approval from those who expect us to comply or fit in or follow the ‘should’. That metaphysical loss is as much a deep grief as the physical loss – and indeed can be a physical loss if you are cast out of your ‘tribe’ for transgressing.
This fear of crossing the threshold and losing approval is deep rooted in our ancestry. From the days of hunting/gathering right through the witch hunts of the 1600s to kids in the playground (or in the corporate boardrooms) today, to go against the accepted norm was almost certain ‘death’, literally or metaphorically. It is an act of immense courage to follow your heart and soul’s calling when it means you leaving the safety of the ‘tribe’. Yet change and evolution relies on the rebellious.
The rift between my sister and my parents for her ‘rebellion’ hurt all concerned very deeply and for many years. In fact, only since the death of my father and my brother-in-law within months of each other in 2017 has the rift started to mend. My mother, my sister and I are sewing ourselves back together as a different tribe.
The choices I made to appease my parents, even while I disappointed them, still hold a resonance of grief. The fact that some of those choices were made from fear, or because I could no longer hold the duality of loving them and loving another, still carries an energy that eventually will be transmuted. There is always more work to do to tend to the wounded heart. Always another layer of onion skin to peel away with love. I continue to do the deep inner work – probably a life’s work.
There has been a conjunction of Chiron (the wounded healer) with the Moon’s North Node this week, so if you have felt old wounds presenting themselves for healing, then the energy has been ripe for that.
Ultimately though, the only permission and the only real blessing we need is the one from within. From the deepest recesses of our own heart. Meaningful rebellion is a creative act. At her best, the Rebel within emboldens us to return to our deepest essence, to come alive with every fibre and nerve of our being. It does not stop us grieving that loss of blessing or acceptance from others, but it does enable us to hold a space for that grief with gentleness, compassion and forgiveness rather than shame.
Tomorrow I will offer you part 2 of this post, which is the practice of descansos as a way of healing those losses and griefs, often unacknowledged, that we carry in our hearts and the recesses of our psyche.
Until then… with love from my soul to yours.
Coming up next week:
A conversation with Uma Girmish on what she has learnt from grief as a companion and ‘sister’.