I went to a bush tucker walk in our Botanic Gardens here in my home town last night with two friends from school, one of whom I have known for over 50 years. I must say being in the presence of these friends perhaps had more effect on me than the actual demonstration buffet dinner and walk. Though towards the end of the walk (which took place as dusk was growing) we found ourselves in darkness down in the gully of the rainforest walkway with mist surrounding us, the only thing visible were the tiny lights illuminating the way forward. By this stage I was shaking and cold. I often get the shakes when I am out in the evening surrounded by others because this kind of group sitution is not in my comfort zone. I participated because it was a loving gesture, for my birthday from a friend who is very kind and wanted to do something for me, knowing this was my first birthday following my Mum’s death just under 2 months ago.
When I came home I opened the present that she and my friend who attended last night s well as two other school friends contributed to. It was a beautiful George Genson silver bowl which now I come to think about it was like a bowl I used in the dream I had years ago when I was stranded on an island far from the mainland and my task was to use this to empty a deep dark pit of sludgea which I have come to feel lately was my ancestral inheritance. Spooky realisation but on target really when I think about the big dreams I ended up having last night about my PTSD unravelling and being in a huge jet airliner that had gone out of control and was just about to crash.
I awoke around 3 pm thinking of what my friend had written in my card, “I have so many memories of time spent with you and your Mum and Dad at the pink party they gave you for your 21st birthday”. Going through my mind at 3 am was a photo that I don’t have here of my father who died only 2 years later looking at some photographs in the kitchen on the night of that event. It was in this kitchen that he told me the news he had terminal cancer just over 22 months after this photograph was taken.
As you might imagine I had a break through at 3.30 am when I awoke with all of this perculating inside of me. My body which is usually tight then goes through a contraction which then gives way to an expansion which feels like a falling away of the ground beneath my being, loosened me and I found myself crying for everything that I was suffering at the point in my life, lost as I was doing my secretarial diploma one month out from my first termination of pregnancy which I kept secret from everyone except my then best friend and boyfriend. And then the next which was to follow a short time later.
I guess it is not unusual that my 56th birthday looming between the Lunar Eclipse of Wednesday at 11 Leo which squares my Mum’s Saturn and my own natal Neptune in the third house of siblings (Mum had none, my siblings and I are not close now the dead sister I was close to was the only one I really related to) and the Solar Eclipse that is coming on the 15th of February opposite my Uranus in Leo in the first house would be bringing up big emotions. I found myself surfing waves of sadness and grief this morning which showed me how forced I was by all of those events into a deep isolation where in following years I had little to do with those friends who I left behind when I left teachers college and was not permitted to return by my father. I then was forced out and away when I travelling overseas after my father died living away for nearly 3 years moving to a bigger city only a few months after my return because my mother had at that point remarried.
I felt the deeply entrenched barriers of sadness and resisitance that have keep me apart and ‘safe’ from these earlier relationships in later years dissolving deep within both my being and heart, this morning and it’s happening again as I write this. No one can really know how it felt for me to descend then into addiction from 1983 – 1993 when I finally got sober, to move away so many times from everyone I knew and loved, to feel there really was no place for me or home with anyone, while suffering the even deeper fear that in any relationship if I expressed authentic feeling, grief, longing, need or wanting I would be Judged, betrayed and abandoned (which I often was because as an addict unable to know all that consciously I unconsciously was acting it out).
I also saw how my Mum tried her best to help me in practical ways in later years after that second relationshie ended, but how also we could never bridge the deeper emotional abyss that kept our pain separate defended agains and yet osmotically connected (does that even make sense?). I then thought on the walk I have just taken with Jasper of how maybe up to this point the isolation I have lived has not even really been mine but inherited in some way. And has felt nearly impossible to break out of. At least until now, of how so often, it has made me both an island to myself but also forced on a far deeper journey into the underworld or dark night.
I found myself about 4 years ago exiled by certain member of this group as they did not understand the rage and anger component of my earlier attachment traumas. It hurt a lot at that time to be excluded from events which were then posted on Facebook. I had opened my heart and suffering to this one friend and then been shamed and judged and only later received a kind of begrudging apology which to my mind and my therapists mind did not come out of empathy and yet this friend also said to me . “I have lived a very protected life.” Yes, she found a man who stuck by her side. She did not go through a further 4 broken relationships. How could I not be angry and sad? How could I not be?
The only consolation for today is that I finally feel that I have an eagle’s eye view of everything. I descended to the depths of aloneness around that time where I didn’t see much of this group apart from one friend who was able to validate me. I was amazed when the entire group turned up at my Mum’s funeral back in December. Were they there for her or for me, since they all loved my Mum, and saw her trying her best to help while keeping the door well and truly shut on taking any accountability for the pain and wounds she handed down? Mum was a part of the Neptune in Leo generation. They had their own inner child so negated and silenced and following generations bore the psychic burden or brunt of it.
For me, maybe, just maybe, today with the shedding of these tears I was being washed clearer in some way. In a book The Twelve Labour of Hercules Alice Bailey outlines 12 mythological tasks, one for each zodiac sign. The labour for Aquarius (which rules my Mars Saturn Moon Sun Venus Mercury Jupiter and South Node) is the diversion of water to clean out the muck in the Augean stables. I was discussing this with another Aquarian friend on Thursday, as she was asking me “why is it that so many people are terrified of feeling anything?” In that case we as the water bearers feel it all while we can appear so aloof at times, really we are not. We feel it all so deeply with our hearts in ways it can be hard to verbalise, express and articulate.
For myself I feel the Leo component of this eclipse though stirring up and releasing so much pain that has been stored in my heart. As I feel autumn in the air arond me today, I also feel a darkness lapping at the edges of my consciousness of painful things now passsed. However, I have borne enough of darkness to know it also has moments of light contained deep within it. Not unlike those little lights that illuminated the way on my rainforest walk last night I will keep knowledge of the light that can be found in my mind and heart and body and being close and in those activities which bring me comfort and joy.
I am realising things I could never have understood before and maybe my Mum’s death was necessary for this to take place. All I know is that my soul is on a massive journey with so many layers and at this point it is very, very far from over.
Emerging From The Dark Night 