The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (29 page)

One day I brought in a walking stick. I'd made it from a slender tree limb that had fallen from one of the branches in the circle of trees at Springbank. This would make a wonderful walking stick, I'd thought when I found it, and I took it home without a clue about how to make one. The next couple of weeks I sat night after night on the floor in the den, stripping off the bark with a little whittling knife until my thumbs were puckered with blisters. When I finished, I gathered up all the shavings of bark and saved them in a glass bottle. I varnished the stick and took it with me when I walked. It became a cherished thing.

Then one day I brought it with me to the solarium, and we talked about the process I'd gone through creating it. I began to see that it was not unlike the process I was experiencing, the blistering work of stripping away the old brittle layers in order to reach the beautiful grain of the female soul. The gathering up of the old fragments because transformation comes not by rejecting unwanted parts of ourselves but by differentiating then integrating them. And finally making the whole thing part of my walk.

I knew suddenly the ways of my journey. The impact and changes that my experience had brought slipped into focus. It was one of those moments of coming together.

When I teach creative writing classes, I always tell my students about what writer James Joyce calls the “epiphany” of a story. It's a moment of enlightenment or recognition when the character comes to realize something, to see something in a new light, and
from then on the character's internal landscape is changed. It's worth noting, I tell them, that
epiphany
actually means a physical manifestation of something, so the character's internal realization comes through some tangible thing or outside action. In much the same way, the feminine journey is a story unfolding, and its epiphanies come through real things, through tangibles like walking sticks and dreams and deer antlers—all of which we might miss without taking time and space in Deep Being.

Of course, not every woman needs to be in Jungian analysis to travel a feminine journey, but we all seem to need at least one refuge of Deep Being where we have the ongoing freedom to tell our truth safely and truly be heard, where we can find the support we need to follow our thread, where the epiphanies can come. We need a place that will help us find the grain beneath all that bark.

We can accomplish it perhaps with a friend or special group, through a journal, through prayer, or through a creative work. The important thing is to find a process that works for you, that allows you to give yourself times of unconditional presence when you can attend your soul with all the acceptance and attentiveness you can muster.

THE PRACTICE OF MINDFULNESS
That winter while in a bookstore I picked up a book on mindful meditation by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. As I read it, I was drawn into the practice and discovered it to be another powerful experience of Deep Being.

Mindfulness is an ancient form of meditation in which one pays attention to the present moment and all that's unfolding in that moment, both within and around one. It's known also as conscious living because the person practicing it is forming an aware and intimate relationship with each moment.

I began to sit in a calm, accepting alertness for twenty to thirty minutes each day. I became attentive to my breath, noting the thoughts and feelings that arose, observing them the way the sky observes the clouds and lets them pass through. In this way I was able to bring attention to the content of my life as it was unfolding.

Mindfulness has been called a powerful form of self-healing by many teachers and practitioners.
⁵⁷
How this process creates healing is part mystery and part grace. Somehow in a slow, hidden way, we're able to be with the depths of ourselves—our true natures, our souls—while at the same time observing our thoughts and feelings and not becoming caught up in them.

When practicing mindful meditation we aren't striving to do anything. We aren't grasping, struggling, thinking, expecting, or wanting but simply letting whatever is there be there and paying attention to it in a nonjudgmental way. We come to terms with reality as it is, bringing all our awareness to it, breathing with it, attending it.

This might sound easy; it's anything but. It took six months before I could sit for any length of time without traipsing off into the endless stream of thought and chatter in my head. I would realize suddenly that I'd completely lost my concentration, my awareness of the breath, any sense of the present moment, and I would have to call myself back a million times.

I like meditation teacher Jack Kornfield's analogy. He says when you start to meditate your mind is like a puppy you're trying to house-train. You place it on a piece of newspaper. “Stay,” you tell it. “Stay.” But does it stay? Of course not. It wanders off, and you have to bring it back. It doesn't help to punish the pup. The pup learns by being gently brought back over and over again.

From Thich Nhat Hanh I learned a way of being with my wounds while practicing mindfulness. He suggests that as feelings arise we acknowledge them. Yes, I'm feeling this. Then, he says, get even closer to the feeling. Rather than saying, “Go away, fear” or “anger” or “hurt,” greet it, because banishing our feelings will not transform them.

He suggests we approach pain the way a mother tenderly picks up a crying baby. The mother represents your mindfulness, your true nature, the conscious, attending part of you. The squalling child represents your pain, the wounded part of you. When the pain makes itself felt, you can gently pick up the child and hold it.

All that winter and into the spring, I kept picking up the child during my meditation—all the personal and collective fear, anger, betrayal, and internalized sense of inferiority that make up the feminine wound—and holding her in my arms. It got to the point that when the wound made itself felt, I found myself naturally responding, “Oh, there you are again, I know you. Come on and I'll hold and rock you for a while.” Eventually the baby stopped crying.

Once we get the baby quiet, we can begin to look deeply at the feeling. We begin to understand the attitudes, beliefs, and patterns that cause it. We start to see what keeps us stuck in our wounds and what we can do to transform them.

EARTH. WATER. WIND. FIRE
Nature can be one of women's most potent healers. Simone de Beauvoir believed that because women were excluded from culture, we turned to nature, finding transcendent experiences within it. I can't say I initially turned to nature for healing; I turned to nature because I discovered my connection to it and as a result found healing flowing back to me.

Can we say completely why nature heals? I doubt it. But the healing seems to happen more readily when we experience nature through moments of Deep Being. Shooting the rapids in a canoe or careening down a slope on snow skis all take place in nature, but they're not what I mean by being in nature. I'm speaking of being at the core of nature, vividly open to it, while at the same time being at the core of ourselves.

During this time I led a four-day women's workshop called “Women and Mother Earth.” The last day I asked the women to go outside and walk silently in nature, walking with wonder, with beginner's mind, as if seeing everything for the first time. I asked them to put up their spiritual antennae and seek out something natural that spoke to them, then sit with it, trying to hear its message. Finally I asked them to bring back part of all of the object (only if moving it was possible and wouldn't be too disturbing to it or the environment).

We sat outside among the trees with the sea lapping not far away while the women spoke about their experience. What was remarkable was that all the objects the women encountered were healing for them in ways that fit their particular wounds. One woman, who told us that all her life she'd “silenced herself out of fear,” brought back a hollow reed she'd found growing along the water. She told us that as she walked by it, she heard wind blowing inside the reed, a strange, intoxicating, flutelike sound. She heard herself saying over and over, “Make your own music,” until there were tears pouring down her face. She felt herself newly freed to voice herself, for if this reed can pipe its song, she said, so could she. Another woman who'd been uncovering the feminine wound in her life told us about sitting beside a spider web and glimpsing the promise of wholeness that she could weave.

One of nature's most healing gifts to us, though, is its reminder to us to stay grounded and connected to the natural cycles of life. My moment of learning this came at the end of the workshop.

On the first day of the workshop I'd assembled the four elements and placed them on a table in the room to remind us of the sacred presence of nature. I'd filled a glass bowl with water, placed a candle there to hold fire, and laid a feather beside it to represent air. Then I'd gone outside and dug up a mound of earth. My pot was large, and I'd had to dig a fair-sized hole in order to fill it.

When the workshop was over I took the pot of earth back to the hole to fill it in. But a surprise awaited me. Sitting in the hole was a turtle. Since I now couldn't replace earth in the hole, I decided to sit there awhile and try to listen.

I saw how in living my life cut off from my female essence, I'd tended to stay “in my head” a lot of the time—thinking, planning, analyzing, relying on intellect, or else orbiting the high, heady places of spirit. Now here was this creature grounded on the earth, even
in
the earth, in the very hole I'd dug.

The turtle, moored in
my
hole, created a framework of meaning that took me by surprise. I recognized just how much I needed to find my berths in nature and stay grounded in them. For it is this
that keeps us present in our own skin, whole and natural and awake with our feet on the earth and our hearts wild and free.

I emptied the pot of earth on the ground beside the turtle and left her in the hole. After that I sought new ways to connect to, to burrow down into, the earth's slow rhythms. I began to follow the cycles of the moon, to know at any given time when it was full, when it was dark. Every day I took some time outside where I forged new connections with the animals in my yard, including the spiders who came to spin at night, the plants, trees, and mosses, the sky shifting with the seasons. Such moments grounded me. They caused me to feel the slow rhythm of the earth, to surrender to it and to honor my own natural rhythms. And in such awareness there is always healing.

Ultimately nature heals because it reminds us that as humans, we
are
nature. We are earth, water, wind, and fire. The same cycles and rhythms that move the moon, drop the rain, and draw sap through tree veins operate inside us as well.

The Matryoshka Doll and the Motherline

The wise old crone came in my dreams one night. The first time she'd come was at the outset of my journey when she'd encouraged me to trust my own Feminine Source. Now, as usual with her appearance, this dream, too, marked a turning for me.

I am walking through a country where there has been fighting and oppression. Plants and crops are dying, and droves of people are walking along the road, leaving. I'm among them, exiting the old country that can no longer sustain life, when suddenly the Bishop appears. My old nemesis. He holds a stone tablet with the Ten Commandments carved on them and tries to hit me with them, but he's so weak and shriveled with age, he can't manage it. I grab the tablets away, stuff them in a paper bag, and walk on, leaving him behind.

I come to a new country where things are growing, then to one particular cottage with flowers making an arbor over the door. Inside I find the wise old crone propped on a bed, her lips fire-red, her hair long and white as the sheets. “Look in your paper bag,” she tells me, all the while smiling as if she's up to something.

Peering inside, I notice the tablets are gone and in their place is a magnificent Russian nesting doll. As I lift the doll out of the bag, the old woman starts to sing an exuberant song about being a woman. About beautiful breasts and beautiful wombs. She holds up a mirror as she sings so I can see my image in it, and I'm struck by the beauty I see there. Then I notice I am also able to see
her
face blazing through the glass, too, giving a dual image of my face nested inside hers.

The dream signaled a healing transformation taking place inside me. Patriarchal law, represented by the tablets of stone, was being changed into a feminine doll. I recalled that Marie-Luise von Franz wrote that often a doll in a woman's dream could be a symbol of the divine Self. I thought, too, of the Russian story of Vasilissa, the girl who had been given a doll by her mother. Vasilissa kept the doll in her pocket. It acted as the voice of wisdom and intuition, helping her know which way to turn when she was uncertain. And the crone's song was a healing song, the mirror a symbol of reflection.

After that dream I began to envision myself differently, to experience the Feminine not as wounded, but as something beautiful, exuberant, wise, and unspeakably valuable. A gift from the wise mother.

Later, while browsing through a small shop in the mountains of North Carolina, I came upon a Russian nesting doll, painted red and yellow with inlaid wood. I admired it so long that the sales clerk said, “I see you like the Matryoshka doll.”

“The what?” I asked.

“Matryoshka doll. It means ‘mother' in Russian.”

A warm, almost electric feeling flowed through me. I bought her, naturally. At home I opened her up and found another doll inside, then another and another. I kept opening until six dolls lay in a sloping line across the kitchen table and I came to the core of her, to the doll at the center.

Opening the Matryoshka doll spoke to me about the need to discover Herself—the Feminine Self, the feminine soul—deep inside and to open her layer by layer. It is uncovering the doll at the center that causes the exuberant healing song about being a woman
to break out inside. Women, long denied the healing symbol of a Divine Being who is like ourselves, will find female wholeness forged in us as we peer into the mirror and see the real beauty of our feminine selves, which means seeing Herself's reflection nested in our own.