Shape Shiftings

My physical healing is progressing swiftly, but the mental process of absorbing and integrating all that has happened over this challenging year of losses is proving much slower and more difficult. My parents have gone, and with them the common context they provided for my connection with my brother. Once again I hoped in vain for a fresh reconnection through this rite of passage, through our shared, complicated loss and relief and release from those sad ancestral bonds, and once again there’s the painful disillusionment of this not happening, despite my best efforts to enable it. I’m beginning to accept my own ageing process, but am finding myself quite unable still to accept that decades-long estrangement from my brother, when I know there could be so much rich and deep connection – the wasted potential of that feels so tragic.

In my recent shamanic journey, the squirrel picked a shining apple off the tree it was climbing and handed it to the shaman who found it delicious, but also discovered that it contained a worm. In the Norse myth, a horned squirrel called Ratatoskr lives in the tree of life Yggdrasil, gnawing away at the rotting side of it, undermining its strength and solidity – or in a kinder interpretation, helping speed along the natural process of death and rebirth. Golden apples in the same myth are associated with eternal youth, fertility and immortality. So maybe there is something in that part of my journey about coming to accept – with difficulty – that I am ageing and will not stay alive and youthful forever? And fertility – well I did not bear any children, in a way I wasted that inner potential of living on in the next generation – I am the end of my particular little branch of our family tree. That was a very painful decision two decades ago, another rite of passage. It gives me the freedom to live unconventionally, with nobody else materially dependent on me, and it gives me the time and energy to connect deeply with and help other children and families, not my own and therefore not clung to as part of my identity and being. That feels like a real gift – to me and from me both. And yet there is the sadness and regret in my heart sometimes, whenever I answer the question ‘any children?’, because I so much love children, yet I didn’t ever carry and bear a child, or bring one up, even though I could have done so. Partly I didn’t out of fear to let the child down and do harm, by becoming bitter and resentful like my mother. I still think that may well have happened, but I will never know, and I wasn’t courageous enough to take the risk to find out. It’s tough to face that reality fully once more, this time in the light of ageing.

I’m thinking of all this now because the other main aspect of that shamanic journey was a sense that I had left a part of me behind somewhere, that something was left uncompleted – possibly in a previous life, but I have been dreaming and pondering around it more in the context of this life so far: I was meant to seek a vision and bring the treasure of it back to my community, but I failed / lost heart, and returned empty-handed. This was never discussed once I got back home, and I carried on living a quiet life, but there was a sense of hollowness, of a part of me missing. My task apparently is to find that part of me and reintegrate it, because it has carried on wandering and seeking all that time, yet also feeling incomplete. It’s a very interesting koan (= paradoxical problem) to ponder and try to resolve. One association I have to the seeking, wandering part of me is my spiritual journey of practicing buddhism which feels like the deepest aspect of my life, but I don’t find many contexts for expressing it explicitly (yet) in my present everyday life. I still haven’t found my ‘orchard’ for sharing the fruits of it, so to speak, and wonder whether I ever will, or even need to? Maybe it’s okay for it to remain hidden and implicit? Having said that, I am going to host a tiny buddhist study-group of sorts in the New Year, with a focus on deep nature-reconnection.

Throughout the journey there seemed to be words and letters of all shapes and sizes floating around, with me trying to gather them all up into a big book. Another image of integration, or at least an attempt to gather everything together somehow, to achieve some coherence maybe, to leave something tangible behind. As I seem to be doing with this meandering blog which I have now been writing for a whole decade! Then again, the Buddha’s ideal was to leave no tracks, like a bird flying across the sky – to simply live and die well, without the need to prove anything to anyone. I’m so glad that after quite a long dry stretch, I’m finding my way back to this dreamlike mythic, open-ended way of musing on life and the world – let’s see where it takes me.

One more week of work before I’ll spend nine days in an off-grid hut by a small lake in the Tamar Valley, with a wood stove, candles and lanterns. I have access to a little boat for those moments of cabin fever, but mostly I’ll just be meditating, reading, writing, pondering life and perhaps making some collages / assemblages – coming into stillness for a little while. See you all on the other side.