A patchwork of wisdoms I’ve heard from elders over the years on how to respond to a world on fire:

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1. First, don’t lose hope. Remember that no great being who came before you ever existed outside of a world on fire. It is fire that purifies the heart, if only you know how to stay with the trouble and allow it to transform you into more of what you are.
   

2. Allow yourself to limit exposure to more news than your psyche can handle, for the sake of giving your body what it needs to respond from the heart. We live in a world of overwhelming amounts of information, a level that no human mind was designed to consume at once. Overwhelming consumption can lead to fight-or-flight, or shutdown, neither of which make you resilient enough to respond not from the mind or from survival, but from the heart, which is what is most needed in times like these. This is not bypassing but regulation. Expose yourself as you can handle while remaining sensitized, lucid and tender.
   

3. Ritually grieve. The only way for the human heart to cope with the level of violence happening across the world right now without hardening or numbing is through regularly grieving. Grief is how we digest the undigestible and transform it into a response that heals. Grieving is how your heart remains tender in hard times. How you can stay in the fire without getting burned. How you remain sensitized and in touch with the soul of the world without numbing out.

   
   Grief, in the words of Martín Prechtel, is how you praise what you love, how you keep alive what you wish to keep on living. From a Norse mythological understanding, tears are the waters of memory which feed the tree of life. It is love’s grief that keeps the world going.
   
   There is an old Norse story about a great devastating war that transpired between the sky gods and the land gods. So immense was this battle that everything on earth was being destroyed, until finally the gods looked around and saw that there was no end to this battle in sight, and that it was destroying all things beautiful. They got together and in the spirit of a truce, began grieving together, pouring the waters of their grief and spit into a large vat, from which a being named Kvasir was born. His name meant Wisdom, and he was the wisest of all beings.1 The story hints that Grief beyond partisan lines is the fertile ground of wisdom. If you’ve ever truly allowed your heart to break in front of the levels of devastation happening in our world today, you will know that what rises from that depths of that snotty wailing is a ripened understanding of the meaning in the madness, and renewed, wisened energy to respond. Allow your heart to ritually break before the destruction of the world. Never stop grieving. Paraphrasing Joanna Macy, a heart that is broken open can hold the whole world.
   

4. Situate yourself within a Big Story. This one I borrow from my grad school professor Dr. Martin Shaw, from a talk where he shared about how his daughter once helped him when he was himself in the middle of a heartbreak. She said something to him that he often said to her throughout her life as she was growing up, “dad, don’t leave the story”. Meaning, when nothing seems to make sense, when the heart feels worn down, when hope is trembling, remember what myth you are living… remember what great story you are in the middle of.
   
   This tool has been one of the greatest ways I have personally coped with the state of the world. If you study the human imagination across time — from indigenous myths to the myths of civilization to the Romantic poetry of the last hundred years — you will see very clearly a great story unfolding. Myth is one primary way that humans have told this story, and each culture has what Martín Prechtel calls their “Big Story” — their origin myth or living cosmology which helps them tell the truth of the human condition in a language that is big enough to hold it. A big story doesn’t promise happiness. It promises meaning. To live within a Big Story is to be situated back inside a world of meaning, which acts as a balm to the madness of apparently meaningless suffering. I remember a client once tell me that he could cope with any pain if he knew the meaning of it. This is what living within a story gives us. Armed with meaning, the heart can go on.
   

5. Choose 1-5 things that you can do to heal your corner of the world. This one I borrow from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés who shared this with us at a training some months ago. You cannot save the world, and if you try you will become so overwhelmed and tired and broken that you will be rendered useless. The burned out activist is no help to society. You are one person and can only do so much. So instead, chose 1, 2, 3, at most 4-5 areas in your pocket of the world that you can actually influence over the course of your lifetime, and devote yourself to these deeply.
   
   One of my spiritual teachers, Richard Rohr, runs an organization called Center for Action and Contemplation. It’s not just “center for prayer”… it’s center for prayer and action. Prayer is incomplete without action. Action is the empowered fruit of prayer — how we live prayer in the world, or how we become the prayer. When you go deep inside yourself and come into the presence of that great stillness inside, what is revealed to you there as your works to do in this lifetime? Perhaps it is becoming a truly excellent therapist to help people’s healing. Or writing to shift collective consciousness. Or being a devoted present mother to your children in a culture of busy, distracted parents. Whatever it is, focus there. That is where the waters of your love can flow, and it will nourish your own soul as much as it nourishes your corner of the world.
   

6. Make sanctuary: sing and dance in the flames. Allow the trouble to speak through you and reveal its mysteries. What if the point of the suffering was not to find clear-cut solutions, but to “become-with” a broken world? To “sing in the cracks?” To “dance in the flames”? To let soul speak through the breakdown? This is an idea that has moved me from Bayo Akomolafe that I haven’t quite heard anyone else talk about in the same way. In our rational-minded, certainty-addicted culture, we automatically think in terms of clear-cut solutions. Of neatly defined lines of progress. Of a quick fix escapes from the pain. But what if that is not the point to a world on fire? What if the point of a world on fire was to make you sacred? To be transformed, not as a separate isolated being, but with and through the brokenness of the world.
   
   To make sanctuary, as I understand it, is to offer hospitality to the unknown so that something older, quieter, and more truthful can emerge in its own time — perhaps something of the Soul. It is creating a pause in the machinery of fixing and sense-making so that you can hear what is whispering through the cracks of civilization:
   
   "In small pollination songs, in stifled dungeon music, in stirring strains flowing across desolate places, in smaller revolutions, in molecular experiments within arachnean networks, at the shorelines of “no return”, something else sings. Something crosses. You’ll never capture it, not fully. You can only touch traces of its awkward glory. You might find pieces of it as we notice that conferences aren’t doing as much as we want them to do… you might notice traces of “it” as we feel the grief that dances across partisan lines; you might sense the tingling sensation of it as a politician admits that contemporary politics is stuck on itself, and can’t seem to rise to the occasion. You might smile then because you’d know what I know and feel what I feel – that when one comes to one’s death, when one arrives at the door of no return, when one touches the agnostos theos, the tribute to the unknown god, it is not a rising that is needed.”2
   
   Perhaps it is more of a kneeling or a falling that is being asked of us… or a dancing while falling.

   
   Marion Woodman speaks of a similar idea in her own Jungian language, referring to the deep primal feminine force that civilization has repressed — the dark goddess of transformation speaking in the only ways we will listen: through breakdown, chaos, disease, and destruction. “She ravages us with physical diseases and broken relationships in order to force us into a spiritual level of awareness — a recognition of Her as the container of divine creativity, and a recognition of our own bodies as the containers of wisdom… Individually and culturally, something is trying to be born, if only we have the courage to breathe into the pain” — to dance in the flames — “and the consciousness to let it BE.”3

   
   I’ll close with more of Bayo Akomolafe’s words because they are so great:
   
   “Only then, at the threshold that Esu and Osun nourish with their cosmic intimacy, will we realize that the world was never ours to fix, only to feel. That the trembling was not a sign of failure, but of fermentation. That the end of the usual is not catastrophe, but a stranger choreography where every collapse composes a new rhythm, a fugitive score for those willing to dance offbeat.”4

When the Bone-Mother comes, knocking softly or violently on the door of your life, she demands you drop everything to listen… 

To the pain in your neck. 
The stiffness in your jaw.
The tiredness and dis-ease of your body and womb.

With her boney-finger she calls you in through the pain, into that famished place within that you have scarcely touched into but most often avoided or ignored…

That place at the bottom of your self where there sits she who is just a bag of skin and bones — the malnourished part of you who you starved all this time, but has been waiting patiently, knowingly for you to tire of all your antics, and finally sit with her to just be.

Through your nightmares the Bone-Mother tapped gently on your door — once, thrice, a thousand times…. Nightmares of authorities chasing you. Scary men hunting you down in your dreams. Sometimes you managed to fly away in a glorious flight, but most often awoke startled, only to forget the dream as quickly as you remembered it, and then carried about your day the same as before — pushing, striving, numbing, forcing; your tired bones rattling in the cage of your body, but your ego was too dense, your white-knuckled grip of control too tight, to hear.

And so she made them louder. Pulled your life force energy underground through the grips of depression or exhaustion, your entire body longing for a deep exhale. But still you pushed on — leaned on coffee, accepted a diagnosis, maybe took some drugs, and kept on without listening.

And so she banged on the loudest, most obvious place she could: your body. Her skeletal frame rattling in full force as she rammed herself into the door of your consciousness via sickness, paralysis, dis-ease — conditions which are made, like bone, of life-through-death, the Death Mother reaching her boney finger out to point to that which is not working, inviting you into a new way.

Whether it is the first knock or the last, the Bone-Mother demands listening. Ultimately, she asks for that which takes all of your strength: to surrender. To strip yourself bare of your false-powers and pretenses, all the protective masks and self-avoiding patterns, and like Inanna bowing naked before the She-god of the underworld, to let them all go, so that you may die and be reborn into your true form.

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The Bone-Mother is She who comes when we’ve ignored the first, second, third, fourth, fifth knock, knock, knock on the door of our lives, inviting us to open our eyes to see that which is no longer working.  She comes as the psychopomp of the Life-Death-Life cycle in the form of physical pain, illness, dis-ease, depression, burnout, writer’s block, financial scarcity, exhaustion, perpetual boredom, divorce, being let go from a job, and all manners of endings. She is the chthonic voice of the deep feminine when the soul in us has been starved, repressed, or entirely abandoned for that which does not truly nourish — power, money, status, the approval of those-who-do-not-truly-understand.

As the Mother of Death, the Bone-Mother is ultimately the Mother of Life. She carries over her shoulder her bag of bones, our bones, which rattle with the promise of regeneration… 

Bones symbolize perseverance in death, and thus, Life. After an animal dies, what remains still thousands of years later is bones. Resilient bones. The sign that life was here, and continues in some unseen place. Eve was made of the bones that house the breathe of life. And her name in Hebrew what exactly that, Ḥawwāh (Havvah/ Eva) — “Breathe of Life”,  “Living”. Bones are symbols of revival. Of new life waiting around the corner that, like Eve, is only made possible by a necessary death. A death that is a birth-canal, welcoming us into a new world of being.

But something needs to die first to make room for this kind of regenerative Life.

It’s when we have ignored those first gentle but inconvenient tap tap taps on our shoulder, that she comes in full-force. Her boney-body rattling from top to bottom as she demands to be let into our awareness, wreaking havoc in all the places she can — our marriage, our work, our health — until we finally stop, drop to our knees, and listen.

If there is one thing the feminine is, She is deeply inconvenient. She demands that you stop business-as-usual. That you make the changes you have pretended not-to-know you have needed to make all along. She demands that you find a deeper wellspring of safety and security within, not dependent on your perfectly erected illusions of control, so that you can finally stop being propelled like a machine by the cogs of your unconscious fears.

When the Bone-Mother comes to visit, and you know when she is here, it means that you have ignored all the more polite requests she has made along the way. And she loves you enough to painfully, inconveniently halt your life to help you to  rebuild the fractured foundation.

Bones symbolize foundations. When the Bone-Mother comes, something is off in the core (Kore). Kore is another name for the Greek Maiden-goddess Persephone, referencing a dis-ease in the Innocence of the maiden, which for most modern women has been all but snuffed out of conscious awareness for the deep-seeded fear of our inherent female vulnerability (which has been further gaslit by the over-masculinizing “empowerment” culture of modern feminism).

And so the maiden, being the unacknowledged archetype that she is, wreaks havoc in her extreme, inverted form as erased-archetypes always do: as the terrified, unsheltered Damsel-in-Distress, and then over-compensates as the super-competent, over-functioning, doesn’t-need-help Armored Amazon who eventually whittles you down till you are just a pile of bones (the starved one within who is waiting for you to be with her). 

If a woman is not in conscious, right-relationship with her inherent female vulnerability, which is one of her greatest reservoirs of spiritual power, not understanding it and attributing it to weakness and thus fearing it greatly, she will do everything she can to make herself inviolable to pain through all manners of numbing and over-compensatory presentations to the world. But this over-functioning complex can only last so long before this “show” starts to crack, revealing the weepy damsel underneath, which is also not the complete-truth, but for many is spiritually closer to it.

Many a modern woman hopscotches between one and the other archetypal extreme, usually primarily living in one, though often times it is painfully both. Underneath many women’s creativity-complex — the patterns of desiring-and-avoiding, or desiring-and-forcing a creative calling, which both emerge from a disconnect from one’s true female, as in yin, creational power — you often find these two unconscious archetypes intermingling in the most stagnating and exhausting of ways. 

But the Bone-Mother comes, inviting a woman into these unconscious parts of herself so that she can finally, squarely see what all her over-functioning and collapse is truly about.  Stagnation is just as much a dis-ease as hyper-drive. Bone-Mother demands truth. A truth that only comes through surrender. To one-by-one remove all the pretenses and stop pretending…

To stop pretending that you are super-woman and get right with your inherent, god-given gift of female vulnerability.

To stop pretending that you need independence and empowerment when really what you need is to feel safe to be who you are.

To stop pretending that you are weak and powerless and get real with the fact that you are the f*cking mother of the universe and all life comes from you.

To stop all this hiding behind the convenient, “humble” labels of unworthy, discardable, undeserving and open wide (like a cervix) to the profound tension of being sacred — divine incarnation of She-Who-Is-the-Cosmos.

Somewhere between rigid, pseudo-masculine power and swampy, pseudo-feminine weakness is a woman’s true life-force.

Ultimately Bone-Mother demands truth in the foundations, in the psycho-spiritual ground of being — the spiritual core of innocence-and-power which are inextricably One within a woman, not separate but distinct-and-intertwined. A sacred helplessness that flowers into disarming, undefended strength. And a crone-like power sourced from the deep well of humility and spiritual surrender.  Bone-Mother is the guardian of this tension of opposites, these poles which form between them the reservoir of a woman’s vital life-force. 

To unlock this reservoir, Bone-Mother requires that we descend deeper than we’ve ever descended before, to the bottomless bottom of being — through the psycho-somatic womb, our portal, into the primordial well that the womb is sourced from.

This is Bone-Mother’s ultimate domain. She is guardian of the primordial womb-tomb from which all Life springs and returns to, the deepest reservoir of safety and power there is, which we, as women, are made of (the doorway is literally in our wombs). Yet it is so subtle and so simple that you could spend your whole life or lifetimes passing it by when it was just under your skirt the entire time….

That’s why, one day, Bone-Mother comes. From the deepest place of love she comes, knocking softly or violently on the door of your life, inviting you to finally sit with her, and listen.

May 2023. I take a nap on the hill in the field of grass behind my home. When I awake there is a pregnant, dark-gray belly of sky rolling in, thunder slowly roaring and rumbling its arrival, its water about to break. I watch as a “kettle" of five or six Swallow-tailed kites criss-cross the charging air beneath the clouds as if they are cross-stitching other-worlds together that I cannot see….

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It feels as if they are celebrating, perhaps the rising currents of the air and the sweet arrival of Florida summer rain, or maybe that is me. Florida summers, hot as they may be, are my favorite time of the year. The rain makes the rivers gorged like a fat snake and fills the evenings with the sweet songs of frogs. As the storm rolls in, their flight unphased, I also remain in my place as the rain gently begins to pitter patter the earth around me. I notice I am miraculously right at the edge of the rain, just a few steps back and the water has not fallen. I am in one place, between two worlds. And just as the thunder is about to frighten me home, a single Swallow-tailed kite bursts upward from the nearby canopy of trees, flying towards me along that same invisible line of worlds between wet and dry above me. I lift my hands in praise….

As the storm comes in closer, I feel a sense of wonder before this unnameable force. I feel the reality of my vulnerability, my incredible smallness in the face of it. And at the same time I feel something noticeably distinct: I somehow feel — tangibly — that the fabric of my own being is braided from the same invisible force as the thunder and charged air around me. It is a palpable sensation: the tendrils of my senses where human and wild were once split — reconciling. healing. fusing back together after a long diaspora away from the home of each other. It feels as if I am returning to some ancient, sacred vision, where world and otherworld are woven as one. And in the wonder of it all, with the thunder intensifying, the pregnant sky breaking all around me, I hear a voice inside say: we are a part of this. We have always been a part of this. We are this. 

And I cry re-membering this old knowing, not in my mind, but in my body…. something that I had intentionally dedicated the past three years of slowing down my life to experience was happening: inside was re-marrying outside, human senses were re-membering other-than-human senses. And I could feel my ancestors on the wing…

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I’d like to tell my story.

I have been carrying a story within me that I have not known how to tell. That I have perhaps been too inside, and not inside enough, to tell it. It feels like the fog is clearing and somehow with the storm my own water is breaking, my story ready to touch ground….

I am returning to the frontlines after having been underground for several years since beginning my Masters in the Poetics of Imagination with Dr. Martin Shaw in 2020. The program was a deep dive into the history of the human imagination, tracking storytelling and poetry as it went from oral Indigenous pasts to the “mundis imaginalis” (imaginal world) of Sufi mystics to the written poetic revolution of the Romantics of yesterday.

Now looking back I see that this program was the beginning of an important shift for me, and I’d like to share about it now, not to “announce” my return, but to help me birth myself out of this long gestation and silence, and maybe also help others who might be going through the similar poetic breakdown-breakthrough.

I have spent the past three years intentionally slowing down my life to the unhurried pace of grass. Without consciously understanding why, my body was suddenly overcome by the great need to s l o w. I had lost the taste for achievement and had no interest in growing my business anymore, at least in the ways I used to. This felt like a very good thing. I craved deepening, not growing, and my only desire was to lie under the Callery tree in my backyard and listen to the cicadas sing.

I answered this call for slowness with the help of myth. Myths and stories extended their furred hands toward me, and carried me on their pelted backs to another world that was behind the veil of this one, and just as real. Returning to school through this program was my way of giving myself permission to slow down and sink into material that felt rich and meaningful and deep to me. I rode on the back of a black bear into the deep woods of myself and followed a fox-woman as she painted a sky with stars. I learned about the fertile language of red bead speech, and I walked for several months with a deer in my imagination who guided me to a quiet, truer center of myself.

When I started my MA I was still very gripped by my linear, rational mind… I was often trying to “think” poetry rather than let it emerge from my body, and my imagination was a shriveled, malnourished thing. But by the time I left that program my imagination was just beginning to grow fur and have wings…

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After graduating, however, I soon entered the “deep woods” (in myth this is usually an initiatory time of great uncertainty). Each step felt like a thick fog — mysterious, slow, and painfully unrevealing. I often felt confused with my contribution to life, frustratingly stagnant, and unable to write the way I used to. While I could not consciously explain it, I eventually intuited that something really important was actually happening: I was getting cooked. I was getting reshaped at the most fundamental level of my being.  What I thought was confusion and writer’s block was actually really precious wisdom flowing from some silent, underground stream. I had become unconsciously allergic to proving a point. To pushing forward an agenda. To appearing as if I had any answers. I was awash in an ocean of “experts” on social media “telling” me their advice and solutions, and something within me knew that another medicine, another language was needed, though I did not have the words for it yet though I tried many times to force them. 

Now looking back I see that I was actually in the midst of a holy unraveling: the messy, meaningful journey of unlearning:

Unlearning Empire. Unlearning striving. Unlearning the straight-jacket of my rational mind around my language and creativity. 

The amazing thing to me is that this was all totally unconscious. I wasn’t lazy and I wasn’t “blocked”. Some wiser part of me was unwilling to participate any longer in a mode of being, thinking, and speaking that itself was the texture of the wider mythic problem, the chasm which split us from our imaginations, our bodies, and the other-than-human world long ago. In the words of Theodore Roethke, I was leaving “the hutch of reason — that dreary shed”, walking away from a one-dimensional, rational-minded, materialistic, agenda-ed way of speaking and pushing through life. And in its place I was re-membering:

how to rest. how to live in my body. how to be guided by the images and intuitions of my imagination (rather than the logical thoughts of my mind). how to speak in the old language, “images dancing on the tip of my tongue” as my professor would say.  

I was learning a slower, more connected mode of being that was more about living in relationship with Life than achieving; more about subjective eros and feeling than objective facts; more about poetry and embodiment than “telling” and proving points.

At the same time that this was all happening, I was cultivating a very intimate relationship with the land where I live and the sweet bend of a nearby black river, and it was this relationship, my first real relationship with a place, along with the bushy tales of myth that were the poultices for my soul, helping me decondition my body, mind, and speech from the white-knuckled grip of an untempered achievement-paradigm and discover my own deeper, truer way (still an ongoing process).

I wrote my Master’s thesis on exactly this: on re-fleshing the deep feminine in culture through the language of imagination. Through my own experience I came to believe in the power of images – from stories, dreams, and our waking visions – to help us break free from Empire’s spell and guide us back to our own natural values and un-trying way of being.

Now it is December, six months after I first started trying to tell my story. The grapevines are yellowing. The sweetgums and maples are turning red. And my aspiration now, two years since finishing my thesis, is as fresh as spring: to help wo/men return to this ensouled current of being in the world through the anti-logos medicines of myth, place, and imagination. 

While I am wary of anyone who has definitive answers to the messy web of mythic devastation we are a part of, I have come to my own theory:

“The times are urgent. Let’s slow down.” — Bayo Akomolafe

Thanks for listening to my story.

My grief is a river where grass grows, my tears watering shores of immobility, of defeat, pouring down the contorting mountain of my body as the pain of the world comes into me to be wailed and released. I feel for the ones who cannot feel. The men, women, and children of war-torn villages who are too shell-shocked to feel the full weight of their immeasurable grief.

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I cry rivers of pain. It never really stops, even when the eyes dry, and the water stops, a constant dull ache hums in the background for all the dying, the clear-cut forests and roaring highways, around me. I have learned to live with it, to be renewed by it.

My grief has become the dark pool where I go to get born. In the deep well of my darkest darkness, at the bottom of the bottom where there is no ground, where wetness and wailing has turned into an open mouth that has no sounds, in that fertile darkness sprouts new life — images, words of light that have wings.

I imagine those words fly across the world to all the little children on the rubbled streets of Israel and Palestine, picking them up one by one and flying them on their winged backs to that emerald mountain behind the sky, that world behind the world where there lives a Great Bird who brings them into his wings and knows every single one of them by name. I cry.
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My grief is my resistance, the place where I lock arms with my soul and resist closure, resist hardness, resist rage curdling into the very shape of that which I am resisting. Bayo Akomolafe, a teacher I respect and look to in these times, whose thoughts greatly inform my writing today, hints that grief might be the appropriate political response, a primary activism, in times like these. I don’t yet fully understand why he thinks that, but I have my own reasons to believe this is true.

My grief keeps me soft and surrendered to the moment rather than cursing it, allowing the moment to shape me, to make me more into myself. It keeps me standing in an internal current of love that itself is the antidote, even if no one else is around to feel it at the moment.

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And from the ground of that life-force that is my grief — eros, that tear-soaked field of love at the bottom of me — has sprouted some of my deepest realizations, the kind of realizations that have pith in them because they rose from the ashes of my dying.​

These visions have given me hints of personal answers, of how I can move forward in ways that feed life and not perpetuate the consciousness that is constricting the world like a hungry political snake. It is impossible to not be implicated in the trouble, we are woven of it — the laptops we write newsletters on and the phones we use to post anti-colonial memes from are made of cobalt mined by the barefoot slave children in Congo. We are unfathomably enmeshed in the tangled mess of suffering, and in the midst of it all, I try in my own little ways, watered by the replenishment of my grief, to create “islands of love” as Miki Kashtan says, to transform pain into beauty in a dying world.

So I gather all my feeling, all my pain, all my tears, and I do as Lucille Clifton says, turning the blood that clots my tongue into poems. poems.

​In the name of turning pain into poetry, on Tuesday, November 28th I am offering a free online Gateless writing salon, "Her Own Tongue"….

inspired by the notion of recovering an embodied language, of pulling “eros”, all of that invisible feeling swelling within us, into words that are big enough to hold the life of the spirit that hides in our everyday, ordinary lives.

RSVP to the free salon

In her essay, “Uses of the Erotic”, Audre Lorde writes about how eros (life-force) is a profound resource within us, a resource “that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” She goes on to say that women “have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge.” Eros, she offers, is “a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman...”​

One thing we can do with all this emotion, not just in times like these but also from the unexpressed emotional build-up of all of our lives, is to “turn the blood that clots [our] tongue into poems” (Lucille Clifton). To create a passageway for all of that feeling and allow the words to pull us forward into our “becoming”, into our next steps of love and generosity, calling us more and more into the fullness of who we are with every word we give to name what has been nameless for so long.

So in this 2-hour free salon we will be inspired by the embodied language of female writers such as Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Denise Levertov, and Diane Di Prima, and open ourselves to the response of emotion and words that want to be expressed through us. We will follow and be nourished by the Gateless Writing method, which if you are not familiar with that yet you can read about it at the bottom of the page here. No previous writing experience necessary and while this is a women-centered space, all genders are welcome.

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​And if you are inspired by this theme, I welcome you to join me for my next 7-week series of the same name. Click the button below for more info. The earlybird discount ends on November 29th and I will keep it intimate with just 8 people.

"Her Own Tongue": 7-week Writing Salon

Thanks for reading this far and supporting my little efforts to "sing over the bones" of a dying world. I look forward to writing together soon.

Warmly,
Brielle

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I walk drinking the night, like an old friend I have forgotten and remembered after another lifetime away from myself. 

The stars greet me. The silhouette of the trees remember my name. Even if you forget yourself, they say, even if you spend one hundred lives wandering away from the depth of yourself, we remember you. Here with hands raised for that always sacred process of forgetting yourself — the thread of you unwinding, traveling far away from the center of you into that great distance of forgetting, and then the spiraling back inward, re-membering yourself whole again.

This is the field you were born in, they say. This is the field where you first shed your fear of the darkness and drank the night wine of yourself. Felt for the first time the comforting wrapping of deep time, uncertainty’s edge interlacing its fingers into you, quilting you to the other side of your interior life. You were following the story of Blodeuwedd then, the woman born of wildflowers who shapeshifted into an owl to survive the pain of man, the pain of life.1 Here two years later, her flight gives you a pathway in the night, of shapeshifting pain into poetry, tears into a portal of wings. 

There you flew. It was through the crown of oak trees on the hill and the Spanish moss. Through a silhouette of foxes trailing through the dark night. Through the shade of the Callery pear tree, and the portal of swallow tailed kites in the daylight — this love affair with the wild you forgot in the forgetting of yourself, but which never forgot you. 

It would take four years to return to yourself the first time, and then 18 months the next, and the next time, only two. This spiral of self-forgetting was like a thread getting shorter and shorter as it wrapped around the center of you. 

With every rug pulled from under us, as badly as it hurt to fall hard each time, we were surely on our way. You could feel it in the thick wrapping of night. The way it remembered you after all this time. There were a hundred stars in the sky who were waiting for you, and after all this time the trees still remembered your name. 

One hundred abandoned lives behind you, in the darkness of the field where you were born, you walked a labyrinth, traced a new pattern in the night back to the center of yourself. There you fell to your knees and dropped hot tears into the grass, wailed again for the woman you lost and loved, and swore with all your fealty that you would never let her go again. And it was then, from your tears, that a flutter of words rose from the wet earth, winged words that surrounded you in the night making you tender and new as moth-like wings.

Wednesday, October 18th — nighttime. the moon is a small waxing sliver, ice cream with my landlords for coping, Israeli bombs raining on Palestine

I am not in my normal sense. I am in some other reality, the tremble of grief at the edge of me, my mind feeling how I imagine pregnancy-brain to be, spacey and out of time. I have wept every day since Monday when my heart first broke free after many years from its slipknot of numbness toward world crises. It was a rupture. When crying becomes wailing becomes pathetic sounds. Since then it has been a spontaneous river of grief that wells up each day when it wills, and then goes underground again for some time. Today it came in multiple waves, pulled out by the prospect of connection, of reaching my hand across the world to connect with someone, allowing tenderness to touch tenderness in the midst of it all. I didn’t realize how much I needed that until just the thought of speaking with someone who also had a pulse in the pain brought tears to my eyes. 

I am grateful for this grief, for the ability to feel pain that is not mine, keeping me be in touch with humanity, with my humanity, making my heart big enough, broken open enough to hold the world’s suffering (Joanna Macy).

What’s going on in the Middle East is devastating. In Israel, over 1,300 dead. And in Palestine the numbers climbing past 4000. Literally 6000 bombs dropped on Palestine in 10 days. A hospital holding over 500 people  — of doctors and helpless patients and women and children seeking refuge— destroyed in literally one second of a missile strike. All those people, gone. And half of the dead in Palestine are children.

So
many
little
children.

It’s a genocide.

Prayers for the children. Prayers for healing. Prayers for immediate ceasefire. Prayers for the wisdom that grants peace.

I think what has finally allowed my heart to break open after years of being numb to events like these is the unprecedented level of inhumanity we’re witnessing, the brutal killing in droves of innocent civilians, and the fact that thanks to social media I’m able to see these things with my own eyes — to not just read about them in the protective distance of newsprint, but to see what it really looks like when missiles strike homes and hospitals and crowds of people waiting to cross borderlines. It’s horrendous, it’s gut-wrenching, but to witness it cracks open the heart.

And I think it’s important during times like these that we don’t allow our ourselves to close our hearts to the grief, that we don’t allow ourselves to abandon the world. That instead of conveniently turning a blind eye, that we keep a pulse on the pain of the world every day, not to incapacitate ourselves, but to stay tenderized by grief, the heart open and still feeling, plugged into the field of human suffering, feeling what the world is feeling, grieving with the soul of the world. (I will share a resource at the end of this to help you stay abreast of what’s happening on the ground if you aren’t already). Grief is a spell that opens. Grief is the watery Opener of the Way. Bayo Akomolafe calls grief a decolonizing force:

“Grief exceeds the boundaries of subjective privacy we have come to identify it with. The feeling of irreconcilable loss, of sadness, of depthless pain is more prestigious than the human figure. Grief exceeds us, broods on watery surfaces, attends to browning leaves as they waltz to the earth, and lives in the ongoing fables of gods and goddesses in their mythopoetic demise. In a single tear, in its passing, the universe wrinkles. Grief spills. Grief is territorial. A world-making and -unmaking principle. Perhaps no less worthy of the geologist's attention than the storied stones that occupy her thoughts.

In this sense, it might be easier to understand why western globalising modernities act like breakwaters to hold back the flood of grief. Like ramparts erected to stop a horde of monsters. It is because modernity needs to protect its most precious idea: the stability of the individual. The coherence of the self. The inviolability of interiority. The integrity of the citizen-subject whose productivity feeds the city. And so we will keep building towers of steel and frozen grief; we will keep building highways. We will whisper to those who wilt, urging them to "grieve for a time and then get back to work", or better still, "pull yourself together." But whether we intend to or not, we will not allow them to spill open, to explode. Atlas, manly and stern, may carry the weight of the world on his back, but the one weight he cannot bear is the weight of a tear allowed to fall freely.” - Bayo Akomolafe

I share this after 10 years now of closing my heart to the grief of the world. When I was 23 years old I decided to stop reading the news because it is all too much to bear. I didn’t have the spiritual resources then to hold it all without becoming totally defeated and collapsed by world events. Now I do and it feels honestly like a medicine to open my heart to it all.

The friend who I spoke with earlier said that when we grieve, it’s as if we are releasing the grief that someone on the ground can’t yet fully feel because they are still in shock, so close to it, so in it. I don’t know if that’s true but I like the idea. All I know is that in the sounds I’ve allowed myself to make in the past few days - there were no thoughts in that grief. It felt like I was one in a million voices the earth herself was using to release her shrill cry. No thoughts. Just sound.

And in the middle of it all, I wrote this poem.

In times like these, I think one of the best things we can do — in addition to calling and emailing our state representatives, signing petitions, and sharing on social media — is gather all our grief into our arms and make art. I read something on social media that said:

Grieve. Integrate. Act. Rest.
Grieve. Integrate. Act. Rest. yes, this.

Grieve first. And then take all of that feeling, all of that space we cultivated in our cracked-open hearts, and alchemize it, giving voice to (and healing) the suffering of the world through writing and poetry and art. In charged times like these, it is as if creative works comes straight from the depths of the earth, the world soul herself pressing her pain, her yearning, her re-imagined worlds, into the topside world through us.

From Gaza to Mount Qaf - a poem for all the children of war, 
and for the western heart that cannot cry 

when I see with my own eyes men weeping like children 
as they hold grey, lifeless babies in their arms, 

or a toddler’s ashy body wobble like a rag doll as she is moved 
onto the white cloth that will be her wings to the otherworld, 

or a whole family of children wailing over the bag that holds their father, 
and his wife screaming in fires of hysteria because the pain 
is too raging to fit in the confines of her skin,

my whole body goes numb, the machine of my heart shutting 
down,
    down, 
         down, malfunction, malfunction, cannot compute, from an overload 
of inhumanity, of an impossible but real, reality of pain.  

I have to follow the still, small thread, hazy, like a whisper,
of unbearable pain, pulling on its thread like a rope 
through the protective fog of apathy, that robber of grief, 
allowing this thread to pull me further  and further still 
through the false cloak of spiritual neutrality; and even further 
past the burning fire of my rage which wants nothing more 
than to name a villain and point at him with my one, long, craggy finger. 

I have to follow that thread of pain to its core, 
to the core of the core where my heart is silently breaking, 
and stretch its skin with all of my might wide, wider, and wider still, 
so it is, as Joanna Macy says, big enough, broken enough 
to hold the whole world. 

And when I do this, when I finally stretch wide enough 
to reach the place that has no words, 
where there is only the sound of a great tearing, 
the walls around my heart finally crashing down — 
wailing and water and guttural sounds and an open mouth 
with screams that have no sound — at the bottom of that breaking
(which is actually bottomless and only goes underground for a while)
there is a silence.            
					blank silence. empty space. a trembling void 
that knows no answers, that knows no thing, 
that only knows how to lie there heart-bare and wait. 

And it is there on the ground of myself, 
tenderized by grief, soft with unknowing, 
that I hear a crack in the earth, a tearing in the sky. 

A flock of words tear in, rupturing through the silent night —
winged words that rise from the earth and lift off the page 
and make their feathered way to the wailing villages across sky. 

There they fly to all the little children lying on the rubbled roads 
of Israel and Palestine and one by one, they pick them up, 
place them on their wings and carry them through the night. 

Over oceans, past stars, they carry them to the farthest point 
at the edge of the sky, to the world behind the world,
that emerald mountain behind the sky where there are no religions, 
no sides, only a great feathered being of love 
who brings all of the little children into its wings, 
and holds them close, and sings them 
goodnight.

RESOURCES:

1. Here is a google doc TOOLKIT provided by USCPR of ways you can help stop the Palestinian genocide. It has a link to a website that helps you very easily call your senators and representatives one after the other (it does the work for you) to demand ceasefire, as well as links to people you can follow to stay abreast of the situation live.

2. “great feathered being of love” in the poem references the Simurgh from Sufi cosmology.

In service to honoring the revelations I received this week, I’m going to be more rhythmically showing up to the spirit of the written word here, specifically through the long-avoided act of telling my own personal life stories. Since beginning this Substack I have unconsciously resisted taking up an “I” in my writing, (how many women resist taking up an “I” in their own lives?) doubting that my own experiences of wandering had any salt worth sharing. But this body, this woman, like any other, is a knowing-instrument, a portal of revelation, and my daily life, if I should live it in the ways my writing moves me to live it, is prima materia for transmissions, like the storytelling of my favorite folk-writers who simply live well in their places and write soulfully about it. So as every woman would be good to do, I’m going to write about my own life.

I’m digesting my experience after having just spent several days with a group of women around the age-old knowledge of the womb as organ of revelation and transportation.  When the witches in times of yore flew across the skies, it wasn’t actually on broomsticks that they were flying. It was across the starlit void of their own interior nightscapes that they were traveling via the medium of shamanic journeying. With eyes closed, sometimes with the help of plants, they would “travel” or send their consciousness out across the imaginal landscape to receive answers to the questions of their lives, or to retrieve information from great distances, or even to help find people who were lost.1 The notion was that Spirit was not limited to geography; that we live in an animate universe that is constantly communicating to us across the apparent boundaries of physical space and time, but through a language that most of us have lost in the one-dimensional fog of modernity  — the language of the imagination. 

I’m most interested in this practice of “direct revelation”, learning this oracular language of spirit which guides us through images under our eyelids, if only we are sensitive enough to notice them. I find great comfort in the fact that my thinking brain is actually extremely limited, and that there is a vast wellspring of knowledge available from a source that is an entirely “Other” category than my brain. With eyes closed I tune off my rational mind and drop into my womb as portal, making myself porous and receptive for images or intuitions that reveal themselves to me. I wrote a great deal of my Master’s thesis in the Poetics of Imagination like this, cycling in and out of non-rational incubative states where great ideas poured through like a tap of water.

It’s too sacred and too soon for me to share about what happened this week — sometimes the most sacred things deserve the most privacy — but I will share that this experience was a long answered prayer: to be in community of an incredibly niche hive of women who share this rare crossover of values of animism, imagination, bees, and female regenerative power. The feeling was of a deep home-coming and simultaneous grief, a birthright returned to me after too many generations away: of woman’s access to a spiritual source of wisdom within her and through her body, her womb as portal and microcosm of the spiritual womb that holds us.  

Where would we be as women today if every year since our menses we privately gathered in a collective of women to be educated by elders on the wisdom and power of Spirit available to us through our wombs? Literally millions of women were killed during the Inquisition for having this living power and connection to the spirit world. If you dig away the layers of numbness that time has buried our hearts in, it is quite devastating to consider. Millions of women killed just for having a relationship to the spirit world that speaks through the plants and the old wisdom ways. It’s a pain that ignites in me an angsty devotion to these ways…

That in spite of the brutal attempt to snuff out our access to this female spiritual power,  
and in spite of the fact that literally millions of women were killed, 
and in spite of the fact that who knows how many lineages of knowledge were lost, that the womb is enough. 

The womb is always enough. Through this portal called my womb, the ways live on.

Below is a poem and a short piece I wrote during and after the experience.

For overflowing rosehips
and fleece of fallopia
and Magpies resting in the moon-tree.

For hawthorn 
and wombs of apples on the branches 
and all the bees.

For blooming grapes
and vulvic figs, portals 
of fox dens in brambles of blackberries.

For these sacred passageways,
my womb and yours, back to the great remembering —
that nearly forgotten power still raging 
in the fiery wombs of yesterday.
© brielle elise

The Womb is Enough

She had only bits and pieces of artifacts. Remnants of a lost past. The wisdom of her motherline was a half-remembered tapestry of tattered rags hanging from the branches of ash trees, and at the same time, was still miraculously intact. Like a braid of scar tissue, stretching all the way back from her first foremother’s memory to the present day. Scar tissue healing and twisting the torn threads, mending and making right what was torn, and in the scarlines telling the story.

There were millions of women she had never met who were braided in that scarred motherline. Women who were burned and buried and tortured and torn for carrying in them the seeds of renewal, the seeds of Life. They and the spirit of everything they knew was quietly tucked there, in the portal of her womb. 

Despite the tattered rags, despite the lost lineages, despite the scars, her womb was enough. Everything she ever needed to know was there. Every star she ever prayed to. Every constellation she ever traced in the sky. Every animal print she ever followed. Every song she ever sang. Every poem she ever heard whispered from the earth, was there, tucked like stars into the ancient sky of her womb, ready to fortify any woman who came with open hands, closed eyes, and open lips, ready to receive and follow and carry forward what she heard and felt and saw…

But the impressions are enough. A tiny seed implanted in fecund darkness has always been enough. These image-seeds will spool into threads that lead her like a labyrinthine back to her own image, back to her own source if she trusts them.

When she is done, or rather, when the images are done with her, she tips the glass vessel forward, pouring the offering back, allowing all the creatures to swim back where they came from — back to the wellspring, back to the fountainhead, back home.1

≜≜≜

“Waking the Well.” I imagine: 

An underground cauldron. Black and brimming with images — your images and mine, and the ones our foremothers molded with their hands still buried somewhere in the belly of the earth. Stags. Bears. Crane goddesses. Madonnas with child. Big-bellied Venuses. Bee priestesses painted on guard-shaped vessels. A river of living symbols waiting for the right time, the right state of mind to pour through — a crack in the ego’s density, a loosening, a shaking of the fur and an opening of oneself, a porosity of being, the eyes and ears open to the Below for a current we can sense but not see. 

The word ‘wake’ derives from the Old Norse word ‘vǫk,’ or ‘vaka’ which means ‘a hole or opening in ice.’ This is what I am trying with much resistance to do in my own daily life — to carve a hole in the frozen density of my being each day that is big enough for just a few drops of those underground waters to splash through. And to shape myself into an empty space, a vessel that is hollow enough to hold that water and carry it into the world.

The word ‘wake’ also derives from the Old English word ‘wacian’ which means ‘to remain awake, to hold a vigil’. There is an old Celtic practice from the British Isles called “waking the well” by which people, often women, would sojourn by foot to a well in the middle of the night in order to ‘wake’ or hold all-night vigil by the water to receive guidance for their lives.2 Imagine it: 

Crescent moon and stars overhead, a woman walks out in silence across moors in the middle of the night to an east-flowing spring. It is the same wellspring her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother visited, and their mothers before them. The same enchanted well that her mother bathed her in whenever she was a sick wee one. The same sacred site that her friends would visit every Beltane to wash their faces with the age-defying first morning dew in the hopes of attracting a lover.

Arriving at the well, she does as her people always did: she walks from west to east circling the well several times before depositing a small offering, a stone or tiny pin of bone. She then rips a piece of her skirt, dips it in the well, and ties it to the Hawthorne branch above while muttering a prayer to the well’s guardian spirit. And finally, she sits at the well’s edge with nothing but a heart full of questions and stares into the water, its surface reflecting a tangle of bough and starlight. For hours she sits in vigil gathering answers until sunrise. 

This practice of ‘waking the well’ was also sometimes referred to as well-weorðung, or well-worship in Old English. Eventually this ancestral practice became prohibited by the church, which called seeking spiritual or medicinal help “at trees or springs” or “anywhere except in church” the “devil’s craft”.3 However the pagan practice was so deep-rooted that the church could not abolish it altogether, so instead they did what colonial christendom has always done: stomped out the ancestral gods with christian ones till the old gods were forgotten — nearly forgotten, that is. Where people once prayed to goddesses and the land spirits, they now prayed to christian saints. Where well maidens were once consulted for matters of the wells, now there were male bishops and priests. Where there was once only a tree and stone circle ‘round the well, now there was a church a few paces away. And the maidens who still came to practice their old ways, men inflicted violence on them. A poem tells the story of a maiden who was violated by a male authority after going to worship the well:

So the ways went underground, its traces hidden in tattered, decaying rags over wells, and buried in words like “worship” and “worth” and “weird”, which all derived from the Old English root word for destiny — “Wyrd,” the name of the Old Norse spinning goddess of fate Urðr (Wyrd).4 The Old English name for witch was “weirding woman.” In her study of European women’s folk religion, Max Dashu writes that “weirding encompassed foreknowing and prophecy and all the shamanic arts.”5 I like to think that this is what every outcast “weird girl” like myself secretly always was inside though did not learn it till later, a descendent of Wyrd — the goddess of destiny, of wisdom.

≜≜≜

Women Who Glow in the Dark

I sit at the water’s edge, my eyes waking its black water surface, the dance of the west-flowing water passing under my gaze. Before long I slip into trance, allowing the images to pass under my eyes as gracefully as the water before me, doing my best to hold onto the ones that possess a curious numinous charge. 

One image stands out particularly, carrying the phrase, “woman who glows in the dark”. Moments earlier, I had slipped my naked body into the dark water and am totally captured by its golden glow. The waters’ amber tannins turn my body into a votive and I am in total awe of my body glowing like a honey lantern in the dark. I remember a book of similar title “Women Who Glow in the Dark”, that I read by Elena Avila a year prior on Curanderismo, a folk medicine practice of Central and South America where medicine and shamanism cross-pollinate to birth the healing of body and spirit. In this lineage the cause of physical disease is seen as having a spiritual root, the body unable to be healed without the healing of spirit. This art was often practiced by women who worked as multidisciplinary traditional healers.

Women who glow in the dark. Women who keep the light of the old ways. Women who are still spinning the luminous threads of Wyrd. Weirding-women. Wisewomen.

Somehow I know this phrase is a guidepost for my path, and it becomes the foundation of my soon-to-be three-day wilderness vigil two weeks later.

In the litany of images and wisdoms, I find answers to questions I came to the waters with that day in preparation of my wilderness fast. “What is my role here?”, I ask. And from a still, small voice within I hear: “You’re already doing it, you’re doing it right now, you only need to open your eyes to see.” There is a notion that thoughts do not only come from inside, but that they also come from outside and the in-between.6 So I thank the water for its wisdoms, for this new name — woman who glows in the dark — and tuck these luminous threads into my heart, and silently carry them forward.

≜≜≜

≜≜≜

Waking the Well: a revolt, and a new name

What does it mean to well-worship or to “wake the well” today? In a time when egocentrism is metastasizing like a cancer destroying all that is beautiful across the world? I believe as a species we must suffer the limitations of our worldview for any change to be possible. The extremes of untempered egoism need to destroy us in order to crack us open and initiate us into something more beautiful — either compost, or maybe a different kind of human: the real human being. I personally believe that we cannot change the world… the world is dying, devastatingly, in its own artistic, perfectly unfolding way. But while we can’t stop it, perhaps we can grieve beautifully.  Perhaps we can make art out of our grief. The kind of art that changes people. Maybe we can, to the best of our ability, be the still-beating heart in a slowly-dying body of declining organs.8 I think we can do that by learning how to become conduits of what is still alive, what is still breathing in the world — allow that to spring up and pour forth into the words we write and speak, and the communities we serve.

As a writer and artist I know that this is actually the hardest thing to do. To stop all my writhing in resistance and distractions, and hold myself still enough to drop into the receptive center of myself. To become a vessel that can catch the ascending current, and speak, write, draw, spin, weave what I hear and see from that place. It is the hardest thing to do because it goes against the entire way of being that our collective culture molded us into and is built upon — a way of being that clings to certainty, that deeply resists the unknown, and that despises the ontological reality of our vulnerability before a greater Mystery. This unconscious contempt for Yin, the Receptive, is deeply engrained into our bodies and minds for thousands of years. This is why I suggest it’s the proper “revolt” for the times we are in. By revolt I mean a going forward by going backward to a way of being in which we regularly make ourselves porous to an invisible current beyond ourselves, actively seeking that Mystery, traveling by foot in the middle of the night under the stars just to sit for hours to commune with it.9

After some weeks of publishing this Substack I have decided to rebirth it with a phrase that has a stronger, older charge for me:

This phrase claimed me when I was studying Max Dashu’s book on European women’s folk religion a year ago. It more captures the pith and feel of the groundswell that is this blog’s inspiration, and I feel I am actually ready for it now. My hope is that it feeds the ones who are still out there glowing with starlight in the dark, holding vigil by their local and interior waters, speaking their words, their stories, their questions to the water, and waiting for the answers to carry that water into the world.

So I dipped her into the well and when she rose up, she carried on her shoulders a new name: Waking the Well.

≜≜≜

In the early mornings, before the sun’s warmth raised the dew each day, you snuck out like a hungry teenager, running out under a field of sky gods in search of yourself, out there to the prayer shed, that warm caved temple tucked in the corner of the land, where you laid flowers at the feet of chthonic mothergods and molded yourself into an empty vessel to pour offerings of words onto the page.  Each morning was a pilgrimage. That daily walk across the dew-soaked field, dwarf-dandelions under foot, the sorrel’s flames at your ankles, that brief time extended in your memory like every step was a walk to the center of yourself. Like every single step mattered. 

Because it did. You were changing your religion. You carried in your arms the bone memory of your motherline — a pile of books, old stories, the archeologies of mothergods resurrected from the ruins of time. Every image mattered. Every story mattered. Every moment in the presence of a thick-thighed, fat-bellied stone-mother mattered. You were doing the only thing you knew how to do: following the images.

Of bearmothers, crane-goddesses, wide-antlered stags — following the votive-images across the hollow dark, trusting that every belly-shaped, rune-covered, glowing votive would lead you like a labyrinthine back where they all came from: back home. Back to that pregnant center of yourself, that hive of golden darkness, where She who is just as much earth as sky, wing as stone, dark as light hums with a cauldron of chthonic sweetness — handfuls of living images that endlessly feed the hungry. 

Part Two. Cicada: The Shaman’s Prayer

So you walked. Every day you walked to that hive on the corner of the land and hummed yourself alive with images that knew your name. All you had to do was learn how to be still. All you had to do was to show up and lay there like an offering , allowing the mind to drip down like honey into the pregnant void so you could become an invitation, a valley praying to be filled by rain.

For was it not there in the depths of your deepest secret that everything you were looking for bloomed? There, where there was no trying, only resting, only waiting. You only had to learn how to stop moving. You only had to learn how to be as still as the cicada as it waits to be tucked into its old skin. You only had to learn that sweet prayer of waiting, there on the ground, or on the bark of an oak tree, you only had to learn to become a tender, iridescent, new thing, waiting patiently under your old sheathe for the images to surround you, for those wet wings that would birth you into yourself and help you fly. But first it was the waiting. It was always the waiting.

Part Three. Vessels: Feeding the Hungry

And it was the most important thing you could do. To fashion yourself into an empty vessel. A living symbol of the grail for these times, when women’s wells are wrung dry of their water, their minds pulled in a thousand directions, their egos a tired, beaten down train sputtering: shame. achieve. eat. You were becoming the slow offering cup. You were becoming a vessel of living waters.

This was not whimsical fantasy. This was not self-absorption. This was activism. This was feminine spirituality. This was deep ecology.  You were feeding the dried up riverbeds. You were clearing up the contaminated aquifer. You were giving roots a well of water to reach their long furred arms into. You were giving the soft animal of womens bodies a bed of words to curl into, that old forgotten tongue of body and spirit, reminding them that when the moon comes out each night they grow a pelt of fur and run on all fours till morning.

You were picking up the Fates’ invisible thread and feeding the weaving…. With every votive-lit, pilgrim step to that yellow cave temple, you were doing what your favorite artist was encouraged by hers to do: to keep praying with images… to never stop feeding the hungry.

∞

“Artists thrive in the deepest layer of mulch.
We seed those pockets where the search has reached deepest.
We sit down deeply into the compost from which all imagery rises.
We sit down into that darkness, that somber place,
uncertain whether any image will rise 
from those containers in our soul that never dry out,
where deep memories spill forth even denser memories
until we marvel at the wellspring
and do obeisance to the source,
Her Dark Matrix.”
~ Meinrad Craighead, excerpt from Crow Mother and the Dog God.

((note the title of Substack has since been changed to “Waking the Well”))

I’m beginning this Substack journey from the floor of my candle-lit den in my home in Alachua, Florida (occupied Timucuan land). It’s night time and quiet, save the comforting sound of my husband’s devotion humming through the walls. Nearby, about 15 minutes by the way the crow flies, is a dark river known locally as the ‘Santa Fe’. ‘Holy Faith’ snakes her way through forests of cypress, palmetto, oak and pine. Her waters are stained by the tannin of leaves looking like a strong black tea — ochre red in the shallow, and black in the deep. When I close my eyes I see her how I last saw her: her obsidian waters quietly sliding west through a hall of cypress knees, her white steam curling into the sun’s first rays.

The landscape here speaks of old knowing, of mysteries twisted in the ancient tangle of Spanish moss and the dark water’s dreaming of never-ending trees. I am beginning, for the first time, perhaps a decade late, to feel that these waters course through me, that my own veins are made of the same sweet rot mysteries of these lands.

These dark waters remind me of the black madonnas across Europe that I love so much. Behind the veil of colonial Christendom and its historical destruction, there is a pulse of depth that can be felt in an older, more feral Christianity. A gnostic christianity with faith in Mary Magdalene, fed by an underground stream of pagan origins. The darkness of these black madonnas speaks to me of the great Unknown and nearly forgotten ways of communing with it.

I write here before an image of the Virgin of Montserrat above my desk, one of my favorites. Her blackness shines like soil in the night. I imagine that she is the wellspring of these waters, the source of their dark mysteries, the sweet rot of her wisdom brimming up from below, welling across the land, into my veins and onto the page…

This Substack will be a home for my independent research and writings… what I hope to be a brimming archive of myth, poetry, creative imaginations; ancient images, stories, and facts from pre-patriarchal pasts; and most inspiring for me at the moment, the way the land speaks to me, the way my own inner wilds respond to these dark river lands. I imagine this will sometimes flow into my own personal ruminations on the initiatory times we find ourselves in, to help give my grief a tree of life to water, to help me personally make meaning from the apparent meaninglessness around us, all in service to the great turning. I hope these to be thread-lines like the Santa Fe herself, replenishing the dried up riverbeds of modernity, and guiding myself as well as my readers back to the wellspring, that Wordlessness that preceded the Word.

This will be the fertile ground for my personal research, which is currently and perhaps for a long time will be steeped in women’s old ways of knowing. Ways of ‘unknowing’ that arise from in-between states and from Otherness — from closed eyes and the wild dreaming of landscape, from something that is both of the same substance and wholly Other to us. 

This will be the continuation of my postgraduate research and study in the Poetics of Imagination, which I completed in 2021 under the supervision of storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw. In my dissertation I sought to answer the question of, how can we re-dignify the deep feminine in culture through the language of imagination? What are the images that we need? What most lingers in me since then is the way that my best ideas were revealed to me. I learned to trust the moments when tiredness pulled me as invitations into the unknown via a nap on my office floor. It was there in a near dreaming state that meaningful ideas dropped into me as if from some source other than myself. I proceeded to write my entire dissertation in an intermittent rising and falling of incubative states, so that the paper itself was birthed from the same essence as its topic, the primordial womb. 

It has been a long pause since then. A slow cooking and re-gathering of myself, wondering how to keep following the labyrinthine thread outward and inward to the center. Finally something is moving in me and with a lot of joy I am ready to continue writing and wandering into the wild landscapes of myth and untamed pasts.

The title of this Substack is a play on words between two phrases that I love very much: ‘weaving the worlds’, and ‘waking the well’. The latter, ‘waking the well’, is a phrase that I came upon during my studies of European women’s folk religion. It refers to a practice of  ‘wyll-weorðung’, or ‘well-worship’, by which women would hold night vigils at wells to give offerings to the Old Goddess, and receive guidance by direct revelation through ‘waking’ or gazing into her waters. 

The former’s image of ‘weaving’ evokes the Old Goddess herself, as the earliest known European sources mention her as a spinner, a weaver of destiny. My inspiration for this Substack is to weave word and image, mythos and logos, as an offering to the wells, to the dark rivers, to the trees, and to the invisible thread that strings all things like beads on a breathe, in such a way that it helps replenish the dried up well of our bodies, the part of us that needs images and meaning and contemplative silence to survive. And in this way, that it helps to knit our two bodies, our two eyes back together — this world and otherworld, inner and outer landscape, seen and unseen. My great hope is to help us return to a more sacred way of moving through the world, as real human beings, in reverential dialogue and active reconciliation with all that is holy.

I imagine this to be part spiritual pilgrimage and part animal tracking, following the wild tails of myth and undomesticated histories into the sacred unknown, and I’m inspired by the idea of forming a deep communion with  the lands that hold me. My task as I see it is to stay loyal to the listening, to the un-knowing, to the dark water’s dreaming….

If you wish to enjoy this soulful provocation with me, I invite you to join me by the waterside and subscribe. I expect to produce at least one writing every fortnight. While many writings will be free, a paid subscription will give you full access and will support my independent research and writings, and for that I would be deeply grateful. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Brielle