I loved the suggestions of Melanie Tonia Evans to sit with feelings and just allow them space.. today it is a lot of sadness along with memories of my past.. Maybe sharing some old poems of those few difficult years of breakdown alone at the coast made me realise after sharing them in therapy yesterday how much inner work I did during that period. It seemed as if something deep and old was rising up about the ancestral inheritance I carried and then gifts came from relatives who helped me to piece together some of the fragments of torn apart lives.
My sister’s death in 2014 was sad but a kind of release too, just knowing her spirit did not have to suffer that earthly imprisonment in a wrecked body any more. Re-reading the piece yesterday about the Gnostic and the broken winged angel that mentioned that image of a woman in an asylum staring out the window at a bird seems to be about my sister and how it was to witness as a younger sibling the decimation of a person by larger collective forces. I have seen a similar theme in my other sister’s life and its seems wounded Mums often favor the sons and maybe download aspects of their own killed off energies into their daughters who may then have an epic fight to rise out of the muck..
Having anger with my Mum was never easy.. its used to shatter her but she would not allow any of the anger at her own mother’s neglect and abuse which, on some level is understandable as Nana was not mothered either and then had to raise a young daughter all alone many miles from any support of family with no war pension due to her husbands death from War injuries. So that was carried down and has played out for each of us siblings in many ways to the point my brother is now denying his two sisters money… Its crazy when people won’t look at the past because it traps them..it truly does. But such is unconscious life.
Yet another part of me berates myself too for relying on that money.. Its been pretty impossible to work since the head injury but maybe I could have tried harder. I just don’t know but my injury and breakdown pretty much decimated me for a long time too and I like to think that whole thing was necessary and had some kind of meaning, but it was also most probably an outplaying of me being then driven my reactive emotional neglect. After those years of breakdown and isolation, returning home soon came to be about caring for everyone else’s damage as well as my own.. Maybe these patterns take a long time to break out of.
So today while I feel all of this grief, I also feel the desire for life and change.. This sadness is not the end for me, nor the entirety of me. It is ancestral and deep but its only one part of the story, giving it meaning is important to me so that the pain of my ancestors can be acknowledged and given a voice in some way and so I can speak for the wounded feminine..
We transform our pain into love by sitting with it long enough.
That way lies freedom for me.. A bit of my purpose but not the whole of it I guess.
As a star child I find my places of refuge from sadness and I know myself as part of an interconnected web of souls all undergoing variations of similar archetypal themes, which is why psychological astrology and mythology has so often fascinated me. But my love of the Divine Feminine too shows me there is more to pains besettting humans and the earth right now.. The Divine mother and Goddesses were very close to me during those lonely winters at the coast.. they held me in my sadness, they helped me face the destructive forces inside myself, my family and my culture as well. So if I hold this sadness I sometimes have to realise it is larger than me and I am just a channel for it at times.. this allows me too, to find a happiness and life outside of it. And I have to remember it is a fertile ground of creative life not only for me but for many others who give voice to it here.. for are well not all just feeling the same pain as well as the desire to give birth to a new life full of so much more than our ancestors could?
To me this is about waking up. Sadness in some ways lets the old pain out and then a new joy can arise in the place where we opened our hearts to it.. And we can take care of ourselves in the midst of it, too. Finding the places, people, values and occupations that bring us life and joy….Sadness is not the end and it can be regenerative.. Knowing how we are put to death emotionally and in our regenerative vulnerability as well as in other ways helps us hopefully to stop that happening both for ourselves and for future generations.
Emerging From The Dark Night 