The Turbulent Waters

THE TURBULENT WATERS

I’ve just returned back to my home after a week at a remote camping place by the rugged and exquisite South coast of NSW. We did a lot of walking and swimming, wild food gathering, sitting, feeling the wind and the rythmn of the waves, singing to the churning sea from rugged cliffs as the sun sank from the sky, exploring multitudinous rock pools by day, other universes of diversity and curiosity and magnificence, I slept very close to the earth and retired and rose from sleep in much more alignment with the natural rythmns of earth and sun and moon than I do at home, in my artificially lit dwelling, full of the lures of electronic windows into other, netted realities. I was in the company of a beautiful collection of humans, adult and child and in between, conversation and silence wove their way seamlessly through our days. We sat by the fire and ate delicious food. We were wet by the rain, kissed by the sun, our hair and skin salty from the oceans blessings. Heart happy and grounding back into the more real reality of embodied connection to the earth that sustains us, aware of my own relative ignorance and internal separation from her terrifying magnificence and multi-dimensional power.

In the past few months prior to this trip I had lost all connection to my dreams. Normally a part of my life I nurture and cherish and work hard to maintain a connection with, but through the business of the end of year celebrations and completions, holding a big space for my family, starting a new job, balancing the tenuous weave of my existence in place, my dreams had slipped away. As I slept on my holiday, snuggled in the curve of dark earth, in the follaged shelter of a rugged cliff, serenaded by the ocean tide, my dreams returned to me and each night I received several strong recollections upon waking which I wrote down to muse upon. None of them were easy dreams, there were themes of violence and predation, of lost and unprotected children and three times there were big ceremonies commenced and initiated and then interupted and left incomplete. In each of these dreams I woke with my throat choking with unwept tears and straining against a great tide of emotion. My heart physically hurting and my belly warm and soft and open with feeling, urgent for release.

Yesterday I drove all day, back down the coast, and fell exhausted back into my own bed. Again I dreamt and this time I was in a room of women and there was an aboriginal woman and her children there, beautiful dark skin, but heart broken visage. She was telling her story of dislocation and pain and the need for support and resource. Many women in the room were busy responding, offering clothing and other items to the children, arranging housing and support, but I stood frozen in a corner of the room. All of a sudden a sound arose from my body, a strangled sob and the amount of emotion inside my body was excruciating, tears flooded and strange sounds, desperate keening sounds erupted from deep inside. Eventually I was able to turn to this mother and her two children and tell her that I felt her story inside of me, that my body grieved with her, that I shared her pain inside of me. In my dream we were then back at the beach, at the tumultuous churning waters of a tributary leading from a lake out into the ocean, it was low tide and all the waters of the lake were powerfully flowing out into the greater body of the ocean, we were watching the nuanced rivulets and ribbons of current surging through.

For the past year I have been studying Soul-Centred Psychotherapy, and as I have learnt about character structures and defences I have come to see the ways in which from a young age I was unable to process the level of emotion I felt in my body, there was not a place for it to land and so I split off into other realms of being that felt less distressing, the imaginal and the realms of thought and fantasy became my safe place, because my body was full of things I wasn’t able to express and still be safe. I understand that the misplaced people, and the unprotected children in my dreams are aspects of myself that are trying to come home, trying to find a safe place of holding to be felt and integrated, released and attended, so that I can come to belong more deeply to my own life, my own body and my own story. 

I am doing this work, and it is long and mysterious, meticulously unlocking each nuanced knot and bind of disembodiment and suppression. It may take more than a life time to undo all the choices I made before, to dam the flow, to remove myself from the agony of too much feeling, a lifetime lived within a world that asks for smooth surfaces and self-reliance and productivity. There is a great threshold to be crossed inside of myself, a very nuanced permission needing to be teased out and given, from self to self, to unfurl and to trust, to become and to transmute, the unimaginable into embodied expression, to cultivate the fertile ground, the internal capacity for kindness and fierce witness, the unflinching presence of love within, to allow myself to become all that I was born to be, the beautiful and the ugly, bravely holding all my gifts and all my wounds, compassionate towards my own self-betrayal and tolerant of the parts still afraid and clenched and not yet trusting of the ground, to let the delicacy of a bare-souled foot to lay itself, fully feeling down upon the wild ground of my being.

But I also wonder if there might be something collective to be gleaned from this dream. I remember being in a home that I was visiting with my young first-born daughter many years ago, when she was still young. Someone was watching The Rabbit Proof Fence on television, we sat and watched it for a time. Clearly a mistake on my part, a moment of neglectful advocacy for the tender hearted child in my care. I should have removed my young child from the space because before we knew it there was a scene of white men arriving and tearing children from the arms of their wailing mother. I tried to take my young child away from this vision, too profoundly distressing for one so young. It took me so long to soothe the distress from her body and being, she was so deeply traumatised by the viewing of such brutal and unnatural betrayal of the mother /infant bond and the unthinkable pain that would stem from such unfathomable violence. Her grief was enormous, her pain unbearable. When I think about this now I wonder why we are all not more distressed about these very dark aspects of our shared history. I wonder what it would be like for us to no longer hold ourselves back from the vast body of grief and horror that lies at the heart of our National history. For us to turn to one another and say I am willing to feel your pain with you, inside my own body, to weep the tears with you, to sing the keening song of our collective loss. What if we were able to use our whole embodied expression to lend feeling to the pain body of this story that we share as a nation, to empathically understand the enormity of what has been done, the masacres, the slavery, the colonisation, the loss of culture, language, knowledge, the removal of children, the rape and torture and murder, the incarceration. What if we were able to open our hearts to empathically share the burden of these stories with our fellow Australians of indigenous descent? And on a another level, collectively, the systemic and family and domestic sexual abuse and violence, the epigenetic trauma, the addiction and mental health issues, suicide rates, the inequality and pain. What if we could share the burden, of feeling the grief and horror of what has been lost and desecrated and broken in this modern age? The agony of being so brutally severed from the natural systems and ecology of our true existence in a diverse microcosm?

This is my work to do in my own small life, to attune to the stories of my own pain body, to attend to the recurrent hungering for ritual and ceremony and collective holding that will allow the great vast body of feeling that has been withheld, to break the sand banks and stubborn edges of encapsulation, so that the waters can flow, the feeling can release, the tears can fall and the pain can be given voice, so that the waters of the inner lake can merge again, in the wild tumultuous dance of the twirling tributary, turbulent volatile waters, surging out into the greater body and vast collective rythmn of the ocean, the coherent body of all our waters merged and integrated and pulsing with vibrant cohesive life.

I feel changed by this time upon the wild earth at this fecund threshold between land and sea, changed by my dreams and the musings that arise within the interface of my own mytho-poetic threshold, through personal memories arising and insights emerging. I feel changed by the giftings of place and the teachings of landscape and all the ways they interact with our own internal, rugged landscape. In the porous breath that unites the personal and collective consciousness, and the soft gaze that blends and melds the inner narrative with the outer one. That potent gushing tributary that I stood beside with my children in the bold summer sun on our camping trip is a part of me now, I have dreamt her inside of me and she has taught me things about new possibilities of being and the courage to let our inner landscapes change, even when that means embracing the chaotic and uncomfortable upheavals of change, letting the old safe shape of things go, so the new can birth herself eternally, in the inner and outer landscapes of our collective being.

I wonder, who is this desecrated indigenous woman of my dream? No doubt she exists in the greater world around me and it is true that there are so many who are willing to come to her aid. She also lives inside of me, the one who has been severed from her deep ancestral roots of belonging to a truer more earth-embedded way of being, to mother-tongue and culture, force fed the hollow, brittle, plastic equivalent to belonging our modern age offers. She has been brutalised and what is sacred within her has been desecrated.

What arrives within me in the wake of this dream and this visit to the wild waters of our coastal getaway, is the way in which for all of us, our consciousness has been colonised, it has been sanitised and rationalised and cut off. Encapsulated from the great, vast body of the collective unconscious. The way in which we seek to know the world and to solve the problems of our time are so narrow, so brutally bullied into the linear, mental realms of a colonised reality. And yet there was a time, in the distant past of each and every bloodline, when we sought to know the world and to gain our answers and collective direction from dream and ritual, through dance and story, signs and symbols, songs and numinous pathways, through the vibrant living interface with landscape and the animate consciousness of the Earth. A world view in which we are but a strand within the majestic tapestry of diverse agendas, all seeking cohesive co-existence and innovative ways of thriving and belonging.

In my dream and in my lived reality I am choked with feeling, excruciatingly hungry for a revolutionised consciousness that makes space for truth and embodied integrity and integrated wisdom and a myriad of tendriled pathways to embedded and embodied knowing. I ache for and excruciatingly seek the cohesive circle of ceremonial holding, strong enough to offer witness and embrace to the birthing of what has been unlived within, and the great tidal purge of our collective grief, so that we may meet life awake and emptied, on the other side of our unfelt pain, our collective trauma, that we may gaze at the spangled night sky and the treasured rock pool and the winged ones and the finned, the standing beings and the creepem-crawlems, the ancient stones and the rhythmic waters, the tendriled light and the dark earth, within and without, and be available to receive the new dreaming for a new way forward together, upon this planet, grief literate, collectively shouldering the true measure of our wounds and our histories and deeply listening at the sacred wild edge of a de-colonised consciousness, for the whisperings of our shared hearthsongs, beyond the separation from our own feeling bodies, each other’s stories and the earth upon which we depend.

© Lucy Pierce 2018