I am coming to the end of a year long priestess program.  This is my summary reflection:

You chose this path.  You heard the call and it pulled you.  A cord below your heart, tugged, kite-string of hope.  You answered.  You stepped onto the road, skipped, stumbled, danced your way, dizzy with possibility into a new journey.

At the start, as in all good stories, your way is clear.  Sunlight falls dappled on the track, the earth is clear and dry, soft and mossy beneath your toes, there is a warmth in the air, and freedom and possibility call your name like a robin’s song.  You feel the clarity in your heart and mind and make each step willingly and without effort.  You name your intentions with bravery and courage, I will be connected, I will be strong and bold, I will be bathed in magic, I will stand in my own power, I will be creative and fierce.  These words are true, they are stones set in a cairn by the wayside, they are marks scratched into tree-bark, chalk etched on paving, to show the way.

The change, when it begins, is subtle.  Maybe it is a chill in the air, a shift in the light? You are aware, just out of sight, of a shadow, edging her way into the extremity of sense, felt in the scalp, in the nape of the neck.  Who is this?  Who ghosts your steps and breeds dis-ease?  The way is more difficult now.  Roots tangle your footsteps, you begin to fear, mists creep up to cover your ankles and you cannot see your footsteps, mud holds you at each step, sucking you down, hindering your dance, slowing your progress. You feel there must be some mistake, maybe you missed a turn?  The shadow takes shape.  She is familiar; from dreams perhaps, or nightmares? The sunlight dims, dusk begins to creep in from the trees around.

In the dimming light the questions come.  Who do you think you are?  Why did you think you could? How dare you? What a presumption! To give yourself this name, to stand in that company! Delusions of grandeur.  Laughter echoes, unfriendly, taunting.  The shadow is close now, you feel her presence, her eyes of fire, the smell of her, the deep, earthy fragrance.  You stumble forwards, limbs shaking with fatigue. The early optimism is gone. Now there is only the journey. Only the next step.  You dare not look too closely at the forest around you; who knows what it will show?

This is the path for the longest time.  Continuing.  Breathing in and out. Lungs burning, limbs aching, feet bruised and battered.  Next step. Next step.  Your hope that this would be a path to freedom seems mistaken and you laugh at your childishness, the fairy-tale romance you had envisioned.  Bitter thoughts crowd in, regrets, fears, disillusionment.  In the dark places you are alone, consumed by your foolishness.

Time after time and then time. A half-light returns, another dawn? A new day? So many days, none as you imagined, you are thirsty. Finding a pool, you stop to wash your feet, your face.  Heart in your mouth as you look up you find the shadow before you and know her for the first time. Wild. Fierce. Unfettered. Spirit-fire pulsing through her eyes as she holds your gaze. Earth-born goddess. Your soul self. This moment, when she stands so close, at the end of need, and you allow her embrace, allow this connection, blood and bone, earth and fire. When the old self disintegrates and the new is born and you can only think, this isn’t what I expected.

People will ask you what you learned on this journey, on your priestess-path.  They will want to know answers, truths which can be digested over coffee or lunch.  And you will not be able to show them…the raw beauty, the alchemy, the transformation, the descent and return, the dark path and the shadow.  How could you explain this?  The way expectation is lost at the edge places, how you lose yourself there, and come back changed?

You are peeled.  Stripped bare.  Scoured clean. Old patterns and habits, old thoughts, shed.  You are no longer certain. No longer clear. You have shifted; from the known to the unknown. Tame to wild. Good girl to wild woman. Princess to hag. Unboxed, unbound you step forward. New-skinned.  No velvet robe here, soul bare, eyes full of fire, a heart burning with the blue flame of divine love.

You will be exhausted.  Every day for about ten years.  You will be up at 5 a.m. building wooden railway layouts in the sitting room in your dressing gown.  You will know things about children’s TV, like characters names and storylines and the ear-worm theme tunes.  You will learn to find sanctuary in the bathroom, for five minutes each 24 hours, this will become your sacred space.  You will create boundaries and yell them through the door when you’re in there “no-one talk to me while I’m here…” like a sit-com character.

You will carry enough luggage for a weekend away most days you’re out with your child.  To start with necessities, food, nappies, spare clothes (for your child, also for you).  Then on day trips, books, crayons, favourite toys, CDs for the car.  You will become an expert in day-planning.  Building an activity timetable from the moment you’re awake.  Breakfast. Play. Park. TV. Garden. Mini-beast hunt. Bubble blowing. Baking. Dinner. Bed.  A different programme each day.

Once they are in school the days, weeks and years will vanish.  The nativity plays. Parent evenings.  Carrier bag of books and drawings at the end of each year.  The long lazy days of summer, when you’re trying to work while also remembering to buy sand for the sand pit and provide additional entertainment so they don’t watch six hours of Thomas the Tank Engine a day…

There will be times when you go to check on them and they are sleeping and you wonder where their dreams take them.  There will be moments when they laugh so hard they shake with mirth, and you will feel a song in your soul of pure joy.

You will feel everything.  Every cut and scrape.  Every fever.  Every stomach ache.  When they’re older and heart-broken you will be torn in two and find a rage you had forgotten you possessed, ready to practice shadow magic, and burn anyone with the dragon-fire of your maternal fury.  When they are at the very end of despair, and you know their thoughts are leading them away from life you will pray, light candles, cast a circle of black stones and protection, and wait.

And one day they will be ready to leave.  They will be able to drive.  Have their own car (you will learn to trust them behind the wheel).  They will go to work each morning, and come home each night telling you about traffic and customer complaints.  You will know it is coming.  This is the moment you’ve been working towards. Two decades, phase one almost complete.  You will go with them to check apartments.  You will look suspicioulsy at people in the street, like strangers in the playground fifteen years before. And all the while you will be calm and enthusiastic.  Positive about their good decisions, their grounded, practical, grown-up choices.

At nights come 2 a.m. you will sit awake with tea and worry.  That they will be lonely. That they won’t know what to do. Until you remember that was you once.  And you survived.  So when the sun is up again, and you’re bleary from lack of sleep, you begin to pack.  Finding the pots and pans they can take.  Tea towels.  A spare chopping board.  You can feel the roller coaster creeping to the top of the slope, you can see the drop approaching and you know that once it’s here there’ll be nothing to do but let gravity take you.

But.

There is also anticipation.  Waiting to see them fly.  Imagination takes you to visits, meet-ups for coffee.

Not the end then.

The beginning of the next cycle.

I am over-teched.

Much of my life involves working at a PC, typing reports, dealing with email.  Many of my communities are online.  The classes I take happen in virtual space, where I am unsettled by the inability to feel into the energy around me.

The morning’s work completed I push the rest into tomorrow’s schedule and tie on my shoes.  Come with me.

I walk up the road, it’s a cul-de-sac of 1940’s, red-brick, semi-detached council houses.  Many still sport utilitarian privet hedges, of various heights and neatness.  At the top we join a main road and turn left, crossing over at the bus shelter, favourite haunt of teens on a mid-week evening, littered with cigarette butts and sweet wrappers.  On a school day this is a busy stretch, virtually impassable at the end of the classroom day, but for now the road stretches out, a sleepy, serpent coiling it’s way up and across the downs, mirroring the grey sky above.

I take the path left here, between hedges, next to the school.  I can make out their outdoor classroom with fire pit, a perspex bike shed, and the windows of the classroom I taught in ten years ago.  The track is muddy and my shoes slide.  After a few hundred yards there is a gate to the left and we enter the field.  The space feels immense, a vast opening, wind-ruffled grasses bent flat, a single line of telegraph poles crossing the centre.  Ahead I can see the red-brick water tower, one of the few reminders of the asylum which used to crown the hill, housing upwards of two thousand souls at its busiest, now an estate of executive homes.

The path crosses the field to the horizon, climbing gently.  At the crest a valley opens up before us. Bare earth of ploughed fields, farms and orchards, a lane snaking away to woodland on the opposing hillside. I stop to watch a skylark, whirring its way upwards at full voice, then hanging suspended a second before the wind takes it across the green and away.

We walk down now, watching our footing to avoid turning ankles on protruding flints.  A large, honey coloured retriever bounds across to say hello and then away again.

Past an old and derelict barn, barely more than rusted iron held together by gravity, we leave the field by a gate and join the lane, mud-spattered from farm vehicles.  There is the scent of damp earth and leaf mould. In autumn this would make me think of death, but now it speaks of the food for new life. The verges are full of yellow; dandelions, daffodils, celandines.  Past a converted oast and two cottages, clad in red tile.  The pony foal, almost a year old now, comes to say hello, he is covered in mud, but deigns to let us rub his nose, before nuzzling your pocket for apples…

Turning right we are headed back towards the village, we pass a farm with Dexter cows and geese in the field.  The air is full of the purposeful drone of bumblebee queens, rummaging in the verges and banks for nest sites.  The sun breaks through the clouds bringing radiance and sheen to the spring blooms.  Up the hill, past the sheep field and well-manicured lawns outside bungalows and back onto the main road.  At one time this was a pilgrim way, just over the next rise you would catch your first sight of Canterbury Cathedral. 

It’s holiday season and the traffic is light.  A woodlouse makes its way purposefully across the pavement, a graphite-grey apostrophe, armour clad. Blossom is emerging on garden trees and buds break out of the wood, tipping the trees with green.  We pass the footpath we took half an hour ago and head back down the hill to home, reconnected, body and soul.

It’s 1.03 a.m.

It starts with a cough.  A tickle in my throat, a tightness.  I am aware of the sensation, the growing discomfort.  Just a minor ailment.

At this hour, with a mind full, it’s a trigger.

I try to ignore it, then breathe into it, but feel the heat growing, a flush that creeps up my face and then down to drench my whole body in cold sweat.

I’m beginning to panic.

It is the sensation of being trapped.  Of not being able to find air. Of suffocating.

I am nine years old.  We are at a barbecue.  Someone from our village had moved and we went to see their new house. I remember brown brickwork and latticed windows.  Eighties new-build.

The parents are outside, on a patio, talking and my brother and I have gone inside with their children, two girls? A girl and a boy?  I don’t remember now.

There is a game they like.  You have to lie in the bean bag, and then they put the other bean bag on top of you and lie on it.  You have to get out.  They must play this often, it’s fun, they say.

It’s my turn.  Up to now it’s been one on one. I am in the bean bag and they put the other one on top.  Now they all decide to pile on, so it’s me with three other children on top of the bean bag.  It is dark.   I try to push them off.  I can’t.  It is difficult to move.  I can hear them giggling.  It’s a good game.  I try harder, but my brain is beginning to get dizzy and the effort is becoming too great.  I can’t breathe. My head starts to pulse as the oxygen in my blood drops.  Somewhere I realise this isn’t going to end well.

I gather all my focus into my limbs and with one huge effort  push all three off and escape.  They laugh.  What a great game.  I am shaking and weak.  I go out to seek my parents but I can’t explain what just happened.  How close it came to local paper headlines, “tragedy at family barbecue”.

It is this sensation of suffocation which catches me in quiet moments.  The feeling of trapped.  Walking willingly into something with good will and then not being able to escape.

Life feels some days like a house of cards.  I have balanced it oh so carefully, each engagement booked, each job allocated.  Time check, next task.

Without a list I will drift and get lost in my own thoughts, daydream through the day, play, create, dance.  I won’t do what needs doing, there will be no meal.  We wouldn’t starve.  But a healthy plate would be out the window along with my scheduling…

Secretly this is my dream life.  One with room to breathe.  Without the demands of others crowding in.  In my dream life I am a smoker.  I do not like the taste.  Or the health risks.  But I love the space. The permission to be doing nothing for a while.  I imagine myself walking in the door and waving people away, not now,  I need a cigarette. I will go outside and stand, staring at the clouds, as the blue smoke drifts around me, a toxic aura.  I notice an early bee on the blossom, listen to a neighbour’s conversation as they go out to their car…I am permitted to be alone.  I imagine this similar space in a social gathering.  When I become overwhelmed and the effort of tracking conversations leads me to a place where I can’t hear straight.  The chance to step out without looking anti-social, to reset.  It is an imagined and permitted convention, “a breath of fresh air” (ironically).

With the need to care for others ingrained through my life (and yours I’m guessing), embedded like resort names in peppermint rock, I need to find this.  Boundaries are tenuous at the best of times.  Because when your child trips and grazes their knee you need to deal with it, rather than explaining that mummy is in the middle of her prayers and you need to wait ten minutes. And when they are heartbroken fifteen years later you don’t tell them to go away and deal with it alone, you take a breath and go and put the kettle on…

So I need a permitted space.  Set aside.  Perhaps it is “having a cup of tea”.

Now I’m laughing.  How would this work at a party?  “I’m just off to have a cup of tea.” Rummages in stranger’s fridge, opens cupboards in search of tea bags…

Anyway.  It is a start.  If I can give myself this permission,  remove  the self-imposed restrictions this will allow greater grace and freedom.   In letting go of my list, of control, I may find my power again.

A space where daydreams feed my imagination, where my soul sings, with room to breathe.

 

 

All of a sudden it’s spring.

I have waited for this for months and now bulbs and blossom are emerging.  Nature has been a great teacher the past few years, noticing the patterns, the rhythms, reminding me of my earth-bound self.

This new growth plugs into something deeper.

Because with transition to something new comes the need to let go of the old.

I like to draw cards.  Oracle or tarot cards.  I sit for a few moments in quiet, shuffle, pick a card and see how it reflects my day, my week.  I read the picture, I look for patterns and connections.

Yesterday my cards were about huge life-changing shifts and about self-care.

Which was interesting.

We are currently planning a house move.  This is a choice, having considered all the options it’s the best way forward.  However it’s also a sadness.  This is the home where I raised my children, I have tended it and the garden for over thirteen years. Additionally my youngest son is planning to leave home and set up in his own place. Another huge life transition.  I am at the point of wanting to decoupage my life.  Fix in place the memories, varnish over them again and again, preserve them, freeze them.

Or I can gather them, like seeds, and scatter them into the air, watching the wind take them, to plant them somewhere totally other and allow them to grow in unimagined ways. I will need this second frame to get through this year.  The frame of release.  Releasing the winter to allow the spring, releasing the past to allow the present, releasing the known to allow the new.

Such huge shifts come upon me like a sudden meeting, here right now, in my face, no time to prepare, no time to anticipate.  It is real and present. I am on the verge of panic some days, wanting to control it all, plan it out to avoid the unforseen, my childhood conditioning kicking in with a vengeance.

I visualise myself as a seed.  Plucked suddenly from the seedhead, from the anchored space.  Drifting up into the blue, admiring the view below, weightless and free and ready for possibility.

 

Must be funny.

Etc.

I’m working through the #moneylove course with Vix at New Age Hipster.  Today I’m reflecting on what it means to be prosperous, and wondering what my life would look like if I had all the cash stuff completely sorted.

And it surprises me.

I fell into self-employment about eighteen months ago and since then I have been in a metaphorical hamster wheel of frenetic activity.  I began working for myself after having to resign my job due to poor health.  So then I panicked.  Must provide for family, like Boxer in Animal Farm, must work harder.  I pulled out all the stops, gathered all my tradeable skills, set off in several different directions at once and haven’t stopped since.

On one level this has been great.  I’m better now on so many levels.  I’m bringing in enough money to cover the bills and sometimes there’s spare cash.  I don’t have any consumer debt.  But it doesn’t feel like enough.  So I keep chasing the bookings, and the training that will keep me up to date and in demand.

Thinking about this question today I feel like I don’t actually need “more”.  I need to simplify. Clear the decks. Cut back.  Like pruning back the dead wood after winter.  I feel that I will be happier if I can learn contentment, to honestly take control of my work and my spending and know what is sufficiency.

For me abundance will feel like a lack of worry about money.  It will feel like it is a tool, something useful, but not something which carries any emotional weight. I have a lot of emotional baggage around money! Who knew?  Fear.  Desire. Anxiety. Confusion.  If I think of it as just the notes and coins in my purse then it seems so small, but the idea of wealth, and the fear of poverty are such strong ghosts to contend with.  Shadows and illusions.  Nightmares sometimes.  Like running from something that’s always at my heels, or frantically trying to get to a destination that is always just out of reach.

Money isn’t really what it is about after all. I know it helps.  I’ve been in places where it was a serious concern, but that isn’t this time, that is a previous chapter of the story.  Instead it is about learning what I need to be content.  The basics are covered.  What else?  Time is important, having choices and not being tied to someone else’s timetable. Health is also vital, the sense of wellbeing on all levels to live life with energy and enthusiasm.  Enjoying the natural world. Family.

So I am hoping that over the next four weeks I will be able to deal with not only the practicalities of getting finances in check but also exploring the emotional baggage that goes with it and letting that go.  And then get on with living.

I met a friend today.  We haven’t seen each other for a decade. The last time we met was her wedding day, we said goodbye in a marquee, disco in full swing.  She and her husband were heading off to teach overseas, we were preparing to fly to Canada for a two week vacation.

Life happens.

She is now getting ready to celebrate her tenth wedding anniversay, and has two young children.  My children have grown to adulthood, our job roles have come and gone, I have faced health crises,  marriages ending and beginning, life re-evaluation, and further major changes are on the cards this year.

We drank coffee and ate cake and tried to cram ten years of everyday life into an hour.  I left feeling thankful for the reconnection and dizzy at the amount of change that has taken place in the past decade.

I have a tendency to criticise myself.  The whole story, when laid out for inspection, looks piecemeal.  A scattering of attempts and trials, ventures that didn’t quite work out as planned, unexpected dead ends or U turns.  I can see this as inconsistency on my part.  An inability to stick to one path.  Or I can see it as life. And how we respond.  Knowing when its time to quit and start over.   They have been ten very full years.  I have lived what feels like double that time in terms of experience and internal shifts.

Today I want to give myself an award.  I will stand at the podium and invite myself to the stage.  Today I will receive an award for ten years survival, for overcoming unexpected obstacles and maintaining my sense of humour.  For raising two children to adulthood and still holding onto a shred of my sanity.  For not being afraid to try new things and equally being able to admit when I’ve made a mistake.  Loud applause.  Resounding cheers.  And for you too.  We made it this far, who knows what we’re capable of next.

I didn’t know it was there.  For the first thirty five years.  I was too busy.  I was immortal.  Building a legacy, carving a niche, making a name.

Until something went wonky.  My legs wouldn’t work. I was dizzy.  My words muddled.  Thoughts fogged. Grip weak. There were blood tests.  Scans. Inside the tube while it hammered and buzzed around me, recording my cells, my veins, my insides coming out into black and white etch-a-sketch images.

In the doctor’s office she handed it to me.  It is carved, mahogany maybe, shining with a burnished gleam.  Two globes and the sand an emerald green, already trickling.  She shows me the scan, this patch, she says, shows that part of your brain is dead.  We think you’ve had a stroke.

I tried to leave it in the office.  I didn’t want it.  I didn’t want to know I was human, finite, limited.  I can remember the white of the fluorescent lights and the lilt in her Danish accent as she spoke.  Clinical.  Professional.  I propped it in the corner and left, trying not to think.

It followed me home.  Growing stubby legs like a Disney teapot.  It sat in the corner, humming to itself, sand trickling.  I was determined not to let this stop me.  I wanted to live even more then.  I needed time to recover but once stronger I kept building, my Tower of Babel was back in full swing.  Make it higher, write the list, tick off the things.  Do it. Do it all.  Now.  There is no time to waste. It is already flowing, the lower bulb filling, the upper emptying.  It created a quiet panic in me, which I still feel below my rib cage, catching my breath.  When? How stealthily our bodies deceive us, how cunningly they plot our downfall.

I have not learned yet how to live with this.  Ignoring is no good.  Confronting also ineffectual.  How to accept it, hold it, polish it, tenderly cradle it like a baby, rocking the sorrow and grief away?  How to be thankful for this?  Harbinger.  Fate.  Death.

We have come to an uneasy peace.  An uneasy piece.  But I cannot forget.  Now that I have seen it.  It cannot be unseen.  Now that I know it cannot be unknown. I cannot pretend it doesn’t exist.  I can’t ignore it.  In the solitary moments, I can hear it whispering, shushing into oblivion, the quiet fall of my moments.

How to live with fullness and joy, with abandon, with fire and passion, with delight and freedom, while being ready to release it?  To let go.  How to be grateful for this knowing?  How to embrace the hoped for decades ahead, when they are not owned, and cannot be promised?

Maybe I will say “hello”.  Maybe I will imagine my life to come, complete with rocking soundtrack, making a giant scrapbook of memories big enough to climb right into, and share it with loved ones as I get ready to leave.  I like these ideas for getting practical and getting on with it .  And maybe I will look my Death in the face and like Arya Stark politely say, “not today.”

I’m taking an online mini-class.  It’s become a thing, over the past eighteen months.  You sign up and receive a daily prompt or meditation.  I have learned a lot.  My question today was “What do you love?” Which got me to thinking.

Now this has been a question I have lived with for over fifteen years in one way or another.  Around 2002 I took an Ignatian retreat in daily life.  The focus of much of the work is around what brings life, what brings joy and energy to your life, and how this connects to your vocation, or “life purpose” (life porpoise).

For the longest time I tied this in to my life of service.  I wanted to be a priest and I was sure that once I got there the aching hunger in my soul would be gone.  That path wasn’t to be and once set aside I spent another nine years searching.

In the past year or so I’ve been considering the four elements. My main element is air – ideas, thought, I can easily get lost in my head for days.  My second is water – emotion and feeling.  These are both fluid and amorphous, hard to tie down and see or hold.  I have this sense often.  The minute I try to embody a thought or feeling it slips away, wraith-like, a half-remembered dream lost in daylight.

Thanks to a long period of work with an excellent therapist I’ve reconnected to the earth.  Grounding practices, practical craetive work, time in the natural world or working in the garden make this a real and nourishing part of my daily life.

It’s the fire that’s missing.

Pondering yesterday I was aware of a dullness in my stomach.  A heavy, leaden feeling.  It might be called depression, ennui. It felt like a black and empty hearth-space.

To get anything done right now (and honestly for some time) I have to drive from my head, from air space. I have to find a reason and force it into being, daily chores, work, “leisure” activities.  It works most of the time but it’s draining.

It seems to me that if there’s fire there, passion, then that heat will do the driving.  It might not be my work that provides this, it might be an interest, or a community group, or a cause.  But the fact that that is my passion will mean that I haul ass to get my work done so I have time for it.  It will be the power, the energy, flowing through everything.

I am wondering if when I became a mother that fire went to my children.  I didn’t take to motherhood  easily, I grew into it with them, and then out of it as they changed, and then back in.  It’s been a woven dance between us, me and my sons, for over two decades.  And I wonder if the passion and energy doesn’t end up poured into raising them.  Not because it’s an endless joy, or the most fulfilling thing I will ever do (much of it is hard work and routine) but because it has to be like that.  Not only my physical energy to care for them and work to provide for them, but my very soul poured out to make their life and growth possible.

And I wonder if, now that they are grown, the fire is all gone, the purpose served.  It is an elemental thing, mothering.  My blood given to make their flesh, my life given to make their life.  Of course.

And now.  I wonder.  What will kindle that flame to birth again, what will grow the tiny spark, feed the glowing embers, what is possible, waiting in the wings.  I burn candles and am hypnotised by the flame, watch the smoke of incense rise and dance. I breathe into the deep space in my stomach, and wait.

 

I write stories, in my head.  These stories are what will happen in my life.  I can’t remember when I started doing this, I was quite young I think.  It’s the meta-narrative of my life, the overarching plot.  In these stories this action will lead to that event and then x, y and z will be possible.  Experience, though, is showing me that my stories are not always true.  The first time I came up against an uncooperative plot line I re-wrote the narrative.  Instead of the heroine following this path, she finds her way blocked and, full of resourcefulness, negotiates the obstacle and triumphs!  Huzzah!

Only the more this happens, the harder it is to keep a sense of the narrative.  The obstacles come more quickly, the story becomes twisted and confusing.  It splits from reality and the story life becomes so disjointed from real life that it’s hard to match the two up anymore.

The epiphany comes when I realise I need to let all those stories go.  Because they aren’t the real story.  The real story is more gritty, more powerful, more surprising.  It moves at such a break-neck speed, shifting like sands.  It changes constantly.  Releasing the old stories frightens me.  What if I am going to drift, like a post-modern novel, through surreal landscapes to inconclusive endings? If I stop writing the story where do I go next.

Shifting my metaphor I become an explorer.  Rather than writing about my travels through life I will be living it, rather than thinking I will be feeling, rather than planning I would be doing. It moves moving from air to earth.  And fire.

Releasing the stories means letting go of an illusion of control, of a sense of mastery.  It was a fiction anyway, but a comfortable one.  Releasing the stories means that I step beyond words and into the depths of experience. Immersed.  I may get lost here.  I may not be able to see the path ahead.  Likely I never could.  I will only be able to take the next step. The next breath.  To trust in the unfolding, the becoming.