This broken world is overwhelming to body-mind, to spirit.
How is anyone supposed to cope?
Most importantly, how are the sensitive ones to cope? How do we survive, healthy, with sanity intact?
Perhaps it is not possible. Perhaps the challenge is to live, unhealthy and with ‘the divinest sense’ of insanity, and to function despite that. To express the dis-ease, the madness, the passion that will not be silenced for it speaks for life, and all that is being lost, profaned, poisoned.
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| Pasque flower, photographed at the Everglades Historic House and Garden, Leura (October 2016) |
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If you strip everything away — your identity, culture, self-perceptions, likes and dislikes — what is left?
Is there a core of love, kindness, contentedness? Or a core of hurts, regrets, sadnesses?
If the former, consider yourself truly blessed. If the latter, how can you heal and transform that core of yourself into something truly worthy?
I am not afraid to say that I am negotiating with my own hurts, regrets, and sadnesses, trying to move towards them with a gentle curiosity. It’s not easy, and I don’t really know how to do it, but what else can a living being do other than keep trying to move towards betterment?
I think that most of us are hurt in some way, wounded by the brutality of so-called ‘civilised life’, and all the little and large traumas — not just those we endure personally, but also those passed down, from generation to generation.
We did not evolve to live like this.
So let’s be gentle with ourselves, and each other, for most of us are doing the best we can. And let’s begin to work towards healing one hurt at a time — stitching up, salving, singing over them — until our core selves become what they were always meant to be.
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| Rockrose (November 2020) |
Words and images from my Instagram project @the_wild_nun
it has been a tough year. i thought last year was bad, but this? ugh. i've been a little sad lately, thinking about how four years ago i could dance, i could do nearly any yoga pose i put my mind to...now i struggle to walk, do stairs, get dressed. i am still teaching yoga, but down to (two virtual) classes per week due to the pandemic. i have spent this year shut up in a house with someone who has serious untreated mental illness. my country is a dumpster fire, and we seem surrounded by people who are happy to throw petrol on it. it has been hard.
ReplyDeleteat the same time, i have an odd sense that though my body may be failing me, my spirit is growing stronger. my intuition, always good, is incredible at times. and my love of the earth and her beings has become so strong that it is both a torment (given the state of things) and a great comfort. sometimes i am suffused with a great tenderness for it all, people too, and a longing for healing of all the wounds and pain since time began.
i have wondered if so many of us have become ill with these chronic illnesses because the world is, as you observe, overwhelming. it's unhealthy. we were not, indeed, meant to live this way. so we become sick. i also wonder if some of us who are simply very sensitive beings are mirroring the disruption of nature and of humanity as a whole...is it possible the earth is speaking through us? or to us, in hopes that we will transmit the message in some way? do we feel in our broken-ness that of all-that-is? i have lately been pondering whether our ancestors might not be speaking through some of us, as well.
we cannot deeply miss what we do not know, we cannot imagine wholeness if we have never felt it. nor can we jettison the past until we acknowledge all of it and grieve the bad parts. we need a technology of integration, informed by deep feeling from unflinching observation. and we need new stories, new visions, rooted in a farther past perhaps. maybe our illness, our frailty, our feelings, and the images that come to us in the night are needed in some way for the healing process? like the sickness or weakness that precede a shamanic vocation, perhaps there is some kind of gnosis to be gleaned from the experience of chronic illness. i could simply be trying to find meaning in a meaningless thing, but...i don't think so. there is a small but deep knowing inside me that says it has purpose.
It has been a tough year, though I must say that I feel very fortunate to be in Australia, where the situation has been relatively minor compared with the rest of the world. Not that things are great here, as our government is in denial about climate change, but in many ways it is a good place to be.
DeleteI believe that many, if not most, illnesses are diseases of civilisation, and they would not exist, or would be far less prevalent, were we living as human are supposed to live. And that does make me wonder how we are to heal ourselves if we can't fix the underlying problem itself. But I've noticed a lot of people feeling as you do, and having the earth speak through them, communicate in some way, and for the ancestors to show up too. They've certainly been on my mind.
You say that we cannot miss what we do not know, and cannot imagine a wholeness we have never felt, but I wonder if that is entirely true. I think our bodies do know things that our conscious minds do not, that the atoms that make us have lived through so many manifestations, there is some deep, ancient, creaturely memory there that can seep through into awareness. The sense that there is something wrong, something missing, is palpable, and even if we don't know exactly what it is, we can at least explore where that feeling leads us.
I do indeed think that illness has much to teach us, and that it has some kind of purpose and wisdom to be found within. Perhaps the only way out is through. We need to go into the wounds before we can really heal. Maybe it's the same for the earth. Great destruction comes before a new creation.
I'm sorry you've been struggling so much physically. I hope you do find some healing and strength for your body, but your intuitive, spiritual side is also such a blessing. I think it is leading you well through these troubled times.