Story telling

This is my 200th post! Pretty exciting stuff. I've decided to revisit, as part of a new eBook project on reclaiming sex after birth, my Summer editorial from Down to Birth. Happy two hundred blog posts to me and may the light continue to shine the path less travelled ....

Story telling is as old as antiquity, as old as both written and spoken language. I believe, it is one of the building blocks of what makes us quintessentially human. At the Goddess conference last year, I literally took to heart the charge given to us, to go out, each of us and tell our stories as women. This seemed to be a truly divine and special charge. I was a bit slow to realise that this really isn’t such a new thing for me.

I belonged for four years, to a community of women who regularly, boldly, honestly and bravely shared their stories as women. Many women from this community are still close and special friends. I also edited for three years a magazine that is unique for regularly printing homebirth stories, in a climate that projects and promotes birth as a fearful and dangerous medical event. It shouldn’t have seemed such an important task to ‘go out and share my story’ – but it was, it was my invitation to leave the world in which I felt safe and comfortable and to embark on a journey as a writer.

Julia Cameron, author of ‘The Artist’s Way’ says that sharing truth is like shining the light into the darkness. I have discovered that not everyone wants you, much less applauds your efforts, to shine the light of truth - not everyone wants you to tell your story.

It’s tough because those closest to us, their stories are intimately entwined with our own and you can’t help but share parts of their stories when you tell your own. It is inevitable that you will hold up a mirror to those around you when you share your story – what they see is their reflection. Often what people do is project what they see back onto you, and this is where I believe we become unstuck. When sometime strikes a chord in us, or we feel challenged, wounded or hut, we need to look into ourselves to see what it is, rather than seek to lash out. I’ve been there, and I have done it. Now I pause before I react to try and understand what it is in ME, not in THEM that I'm interacting with.

I understand now why we have created mythology, fables and fairy tales. In fiction there is a safety to share wisdom and insights without upsetting others. I also appreciate why it is so damn difficult to share our stories as women and why it essential, despite the opposition, that we must tell our stories. My fiction is steeped in my own life fiction – there is a little or a lot of me, my life, my trials and tribulations in everything that I write. Those close to me will see whatis fiction, what is fantasy and what is the place between.

There is a safety in writing fiction to explore the places less traveled, and as my friend Catherine pointed out, there is also a safety in reading fiction, to explore both the dark and light places. As writers, when we shine our light, we have no idea how far that small beam will shine or just what it will light on it's way.

(Revised extract from The Down to Birth Summer editorial ‘Sex After Birth)

Of boils and Goddesses

What happens when you mix a staph infection, the Goddess tarot, a Fiction Friday prompt and Julia Cameron’s ‘morning pages’ medative practise?
A trip into the Soul that’s been a long time waiting.

ednesday morning, as I was attempting to slide out of bed, from between Dave and Dylan, there was a blinding pain. When I got out of the shower I thought to look and discovered a raised and inflamed area on my inner right thigh, a hand’s span in diameter almost! My first thought was an ingrown hair or a blind pimple. The following day after a 24 hours of green clay packs on it and some rather persistent nausea, I had to relent and re-diagnose. The painful and vicious ‘thing’ was a boil. I still grimace when I have to say the word …. Urgh!

This is the third time in my adult life that I’ve been struck down with a staph infection. In the past I’ve been really, really sick before the boils have appeared – fevers, night sweats and terrors, nausea, diahorrea and epic lethargy. The ‘a huh!’ moment has come with the skin eruptions. This time though, my body seemed to save all its energy for the building pustules – how nice! Or so I thought!

Three days of green clay last week helped to reduce the swelling, the pain and the heat in the area. The nausea seemed to go, as did the diahorrea and my energy faltered on the side of an upswing, rather than the down swing. Now five days on my boil hasn’t gone away and to my mortification, another raised its ugly head yesterday morning on my neck – on the right side again. Sigh! There is obviously more to it.

Friday I went onto Mystic Medusa’s blog to see what was happening there, discussions about the dark moon cocoon feeling. I mentioned that I had boils – hoping that someone would be able to offer up an energetic explanation for what was happening. Jack pot – there was plenty of wisdom on offer. Louise Hays says boils are about anger boiling over. Really? Hadn’t Anger and I already done the hard yards earlier on in the year – haven’t Anger and I been dancing a passionate tango for years now. Surely there is not more there? Surely? The affirmations to go with boils and carbuncles are “"I express love and joy and am at peace" and "I release the past and allow time to heal every area of my life." The final one made more sense to me … and even more so this morning. After all any type of awakening for me is a slow unfolding process!

Dan reinforced all of this asking me 'what’s boiling or on the boil', where was my life 'boiled'. What was cooking? Not a lot in my oven that’s for sure – for more than a week I’ve been unable to lift the oven even though every other adult can do so. The ignition works but no matter how long I hold the knob down the flame wont stay. Dan also reminded me that our ailments can be viewed as symptoms of the soul – as healers.

So by Friday afternoon I’d assembled an interesting collection of wisdom – none of which was really geling with me.

Saturday was the New Moon, a blissfully, watery beginning to a new lunar cycle. As I wrote here I make wishes on the new moon and then I pull two cards from my Goddess Oracle deck. It is always spot on – the wishes and the message from the Goddess. I drew my cards in the picnic area at the foot of Mount Tibrogargan and thought how very pertinent to where I was situated at the beginning of another lunar cycle.

The Goddess messages for this lunar cycle came from the Haiwaiian Goddess Pele at the top, ancient British Goddess Sulis, from the healing spas in Bath.

Pele bought to me her the wisdom, that of awakenings:

….when necessary
With dramatic, fierce volcanic eruptions
I wake you up
With lava and fire
I say “pay attention”
-Goddess Oracle-


I’ve had for the last week a restless slip stream of energy, wanting to get on, break out of the nurturing cocoon that I’ve been hibernating in, reconnecting with my Self and filling the cup that was sorely parched. It’s what has been in the forefront of my mind, this need to re-emerge, but perhaps the plan to exercise my new butterfly wings is a little premature. Dramatic, fierce volcanic eruptions sounds a little like a boil wouldn’t you agree? This illness is saying ‘pay attention’, but attention to what?

This cycle the wisdom of Sulis permeates the lower stream, filling in the details with her the wisdom of the illness/wellness dance. I often take the lower card to be the energy that is passing through and out of my life, or something that is unconscious. Rarely does it represent the here and now – making me realyl pay attention, looking for the hooks and the connections.

The healing waters at my shrine
regenerated
revitalised
brought clarity
mended holes
opened vision
allowed flow
with energy flowing
The dance of life resumes
- Goddess Oracle-

Friday I finally got around to writing my article for Down to Birth about my experience of losing my Self in my mothering experiences to date and how devastating it has been for me. I’ve been thinking quite a lot on how to nurture and nourish myself in small, simple, loving ways and the second part of my article went through the importance of having time and space to ourselves. It’s no surprise then that a lot of the wisdom offered in the paragraphs on Sulis are about how “have you been ignoring your own deep requests for more time, more space, more attention.” In that regard – I’m glad that I have awoken to this need and I’m consciously working with it and alerting others to it as well. I’m getting accustomed to making my needs a priority, nourishing my energy and allowing new ways of being me that support this healing process.

My friend Catherine, using 'The body is the barometer for the soul' by Annette Noontil told me boils or carbuncles are, ‘stirred up emotions that you let out, because the stagnation of a concept has come to a head.' That about sums up where I am at the moment and the fact that I have had my eyes opened to what happened with my connection to my Self over the last four years.

“It came to pass that I built a succession of cages around myself – like my own internal labyrinth of imprisonment. Somewhere at the centre, somewhere on this transition through motherhood I’d dropped the Self off and forgotten to go back and pick Her up. Then I’d got busy, distracted and forgot that She even existed.”
‘Finding my Self’ - article for Down to Birth Autumn

Knowing all of this … I still have my boils! As always I ‘get it’ – the yin is well functioning, but don’t know where to go to from there … a serious yang deficit. And then I stumbled onto it by pure accident … a gift from the Universe?

One of the lovely astrofiends on Mystics Blog had suggested that I meditate while I was in my cocoon. Mediation is something that I love, but I always struggle with. I need a guided meditation to get best effect and I never seem to find any good meditations … and then I realised that my Goddess Oracle book has mediations … there is a meditation to travel to and with Sulis … and the title of the meditation … “Recalling and rebuilding your inner fire” and suddenly all the lights went on for me.

That’s what all this has been about. All this musing on nourishment, nurturing, finding the Self etc etc. It is about going back and connecting again with my inner fire – this is the elemental essence of my Self. And by a beautiful stroke of synchronicity, Fiction Friday’s prompt had been about fire … and after my character Brigit danced by/with the fire, she talks about why she dances with the fire what it means to her:

“When I dance with the fire I no longer have to be cautious, or show restraint – I can be impulsive, temperamental, and wilful. I forget that this is a 21st version of Hades.”

She bent down and pulled on an old V neck jumper.
“There are beings called salamanders – elemental beings of fire. They say that the faces you see in the fire are them. Salamanders are Will itself. When I dance I find my will again.”

She threw the stick to him. He caught it one handed, feeling her sweat and the heat of the fire still radiating from the metal.
“Your turn now.”
Fiction Friday 7th March: Fire; dance with me

I understand now that Brigit was throwing ME the fire baton … imploring me to find my Will again, to seek out my face in the flames, to connect with my ‘Will’. Fire is also about the imagination and creativity. It’s also about the burning away of the impurities in the first process in alchemy.

And I’ve got why my boils aren’t going away. I’ve been plastering the heat rising with cool earth. I’ve yet again been smothering and suppressing the fire. Now I need to play with, rather than against the energy. I need to put hot compresses on my skin, I need to draw all of this ‘poison’, these impurities of the soul out, and allow them to flow out like tears for the soul.

I need to be brave and go dance with fire … but first I need to go down to the depths with Sulis.

Post Script: since writing this earlier on today, I’ve got my MP3 recorder to do the meditation. The boil on my leg has expanded ten fold in size … it is desperately trying to make its way out. I’ve put a hot compress on it and rested up in bed (it kills to even sit) … so we’ll see what transpires tomorrow?

Fiction Friday: Haefestus

This Week’s Theme: Write a scene that ends with your character saying: 'I never want to see you again.' Haefestus … The name rather than rolling elegantly off her tongue seemed to slither out like a sadistic viper. Her soul sister Jules was adamant that this was who she had been dreaming of. The dreams had begun suddenly and seemingly without reason. It made no sense that the God of love and mystical restoration should be her nocturnal consort. She did not need his special love – she was not crippled, nor was her heart or dreams broken. In a month’s time her first collection of short stories would roll off the printing presses and into book stores. There was no more lingering in the shadows of self doubt, of literary torture. This was her small but powerful proclamation to all the nay sayers in her life – the artist in residence who had told her at uni to go out and get a life, her family who had insisted on her getting ‘a real job’, the passing acquaintances at parties who laughed and asked ‘No really – what do you do for a living’, to all the editors and their rejection letters she had collected over the years. Curling up on the couch, she stroked the crumpled and dog eared tome Jules had lent her to read. The book, Women Who Run With Wolves, was velvety with age and use. She ran her fingers over the now rounded page corners that reminded her of the malleable corners of an old cotton pillow case. After all these years, when anxiety began to rise, she would seek the tactile reassure of rubbing something smooth and soft to rub between her thumb and forefinger. But I’m not anxious … am I? And she opened the book again. Haefestus, now crippled, refused to give up and die. He fired his forge with the hottest fire he’d ever built and there formed for himself a pair of legs, made of silver and gold from the knees down. She knew those legs of silver and gold well and the pyroclastic shock that blew through her body like a nuclear blast, each time her hands touched the cool metal in the dreams. Lying naked and in a state of ecstatic bliss beside his warm body, she would be unaware of those legs until her erotic exploration bought her to the nob of his knee cap. Haefestus, now crippled, refused to give up and die. This line seemed to haunt her. It seemed even in her dreams Haefestus was tenacious – twenty eight nights of the same thing. Jules kept insisting that the dreams were trying to tell her something if she would just listen. She’d blow Jules off with the same nonchalant comment, that is was just a dream. Jules would remind her it had been an entire month of the same dream – how could it be just a dream. If the dream was trying to tell her something, she was adament she didn't want to know. All in her life was perfect now. Looking outside she could see nothing. It was the dark moon and only a few stars pierced through the night sky and the light pollution of the city. The longer she stared up into the sky, the more it felt like she was being drawn into a vortex of nothing, into a knowing within her soul. In a breathe she would know everything if she could just surrender. If for a single moment she could completely let go of everything and just be. Then she got it. With the potent sleep brew half finished and cooling on her night stand, she lay back into her pillows and allowed her eye lids to grow heavy. She thought of him, Haefestus, his warm body beside her. She thought of the never ending abyss of surrender. Then he was there beside her. This time she lay quietly beside him, drawing him to her and allowing him to touch her. His lips and his finger tips were synthesthetic upon her bare skin – visions and memories awakening with each touch. It was kaleidoscope of visions and memories that played through her body, rather than her mind. She was seeing it somehow through his touch and the response of her body - all beyond her control. The rapture of his touch unleashed the torrent of suppressed pain, sorrow and disillusionment within her. In the orgasmic maelstrom the epiphany climaxed and then washed through her. She was whole again - mended together with his tiny lines of silver suturing that thrummed beautifully in a synergy of both pleasure and pain. In the dark she could sense he was still there with her. She reached out to touch his legs, anticipating this time the cool metal but there was nothing. All that remained of him was his essence that clung to her body, smudged through her soul. She fought to find the words to thank him, to honour him, to express her joy and fulfilment at understanding finally, to finally say his name with the love that she felt for him. But when her eyes opened and the world within her bedroom came into view, the words that rang out shocked and distressed her. I never want to see you again. This prompt comes to us this week from the creative genius of Paul Anderson.
get the Fiction Friday code	about Fiction Friday
Technorati tags: fiction, fiction friday