This Year

The past 18 months has been exceedingly strange and difficult.

Since it has been just over a year since my last post, I think an update is needed.

At the end of last year I was cocooning, hoping to rest and recover from burnout, only to find that as 2024 began my energy continued to slip away. By February I was spending much of my time in bed, doing very little, and this became the pattern for the first half of the year.

During that time I started seeing a naturopath who told me I had a thyroid issue. This turned out to be a valuable realisation, because within a few months I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease.

The naturopath’s dietary advice left a lot of be desired, however, and after losing weight and an only slight improvement in my condition, despite spending many hundreds of dollars on fancy supplements, I gave him the boot. (He was quite rude to me at my last appointment, so I knew I’d done the right thing.)

I re-read Medicine Woman by Lucy H. Pearce to remind myself of my ability to take my healing journey back into my own hands—even if that meant accepting the way things were for a while, with the bouts of depression and mood swings and lack of will or motivation to do anything.

From Medicine Woman by Lucy H. Pearce

After a while my energy did improve slightly, and I could sit in bed knitting madly, and listening to music or Manda Scott’s Boudica series on audiobook.

By July/August I was much improved from the deeply fatigued place where I had been. I started to see a dietitian, and to eat and regain weight.

I have also been voraciously re-reading books this year—When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone, The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, Diving Deep and Surfacing by Carol P. Christ, and At the Root of this Longing by Carol Lee Flinders, and much more—and revisiting these feminist texts has been so enlivening. I also treated myself to a discounted bundle of four issues of THE RADICAL NOTION (since print issues will no longer be available), and I’ve been impressed with the quality of the writing and thought in the articles—perfect stimulation for my hungry, restless mind.

Though in spite of feeling better (though still far from my ‘best’), the last few months presented another diagnosis of possible thyroid cancer. Thus I had surgery at the beginning of December to remove part of my thyroid (which turned out to be far less traumatic than I thought it would be—virtually no pain!), and while the suspicious lump in question turned out to be benign, two small incidental cancerous lumps were found. There is, therefore, some chance that similar lumps might be found in what remains of my thyroid. So, decisions will have to be made in a couple of months about what to do next, which means this particular adventure with the medical system is not quite over yet.

While everything remains a bit uncertain, thyroid cancer is rarely life-threatening, so I am not particularly worried about it. I am even feeling better. Whether as a result of the surgery or just a happy blip, I don’t know. But I wanted to write here, when I haven’t wanted to write anything for a very long time.

I still have little desire to return to art-making, and writing will likely remain sporadic. Yet I am beginning to feel more animated and interested in engaging with people and the world. As yet I will probably continue my hiatus here, until I am more certain about how I am feeling and what my meagre energy permits. For now I am still most active on Instagram: @offeringsfromthewellspring and @the_wild_nun, and Facebook.

Cocooning

It’s hard to let go of life when it still has to be lived, but I am so burnt out I have worn myself down to bare bones. I don’t know who I am anymore. 

The world is simply too much, and I am far too little. I can’t make sense of things, outer or inner. What I know seems irrelevant; what I don’t know seems daunting in its immensity.

I have just begun four whole weeks away from home—to look after a sad little dog—and I will be using this time to cocoon. Of necessity, I have released myself from expectations:

I won’t be making any art for the foreseeable future. This is a huge burden lifted. If the creative urge returns, I’ll welcome it; if it doesn’t, so be it. 

I will share writing—most likely of a poetic kind—if and when it comes, but am releasing myself from any requirement to produce shareable work. 

I’ll be reading less, and more slowly*—after reading Iain McGilchrist’s books I’m sure many things will seem flimsy in comparison anyway—and avoiding most online content. 

I’m finding that I need to avoid as much unnecessary stimulation as I can, so will be attempting to be online less, to rest eyes, ears and mind. This is tricky because online interactions with people are a lifeline, so I will still be responding to messages, and posting things occasionally. (I do also have better days, when more is possible.)

My existence feels flimsy, dissolving. Formless and purposeless. I need to find a way to re-solidify, repair, reinvent. I need more entanglement, to be knotted back into life.

There is nothing I need to do for a whole month other than take care of myself (and doggo) and try to begin to heal after what has been a year of struggle. I’ll drift through the summer days, wandering, unsure, trying to find solidity.

I barely have the will to be, let alone the ability to become. Though I cling to the reassuring notion that the future is unknown, and therefore contains unknown potentials, some of which I may want to welcome, so I do have to hold on. But right now I must move slowly within a dark circle of stillness and silence. 

*I most likely won’t hold myself to this. I devour books when I am dog-sitting!

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture

No person is their disease, and no one did it to themselves—not in any conscious, deliberate, or culpable sense. Disease is an outcome of generations of suffering, of social conditions, of cultural conditioning, of childhood trauma, of physiology bearing the brunt of people’s stresses and emotional histories, all interacting with the physical and psychological environment. It is often a manifestation of ingrained personality traits, yes—but that personality is not who we are any more than are the illnesses to which it may predispose us. (pp. 83–84)

I’ve long understood that most, if not all, illnesses in these broken times (my own included) are ‘diseases of civilisation’, such that they would not only be rare in healthy cultures, but would also be imbued with meaning that points towards a path of healing (and a likely cure). The Western medical approach—stemming from the misguided belief that mind is seperate from body—that treats disease (even what we call ‘mental illness’) as purely physiological, and to be ‘fought’ with medication or other physical interventions, rather than as a natural and necessary process related to the whole life experience of the person, is a large part of the problem. To quote from a book I love, The Alchemy of Illness (1993) by Kat Duff:

Allopathic (meaning “against suffering”) medicine and psychology take an aggressive stance against disease with the explicit aim of eliminating pain, illness, and infirmity from our world and lives. This is a heroic ideal. It is infused with notions of superiority, expectations of conflict and conquest, that reflect the imperialistic ethos of our culture. (p. 37)

I’ve fallen into that trap many a time, thinking that the next treatment or diet or expensive supplement will be the thing that does the trick (not that such things can’t be helpful). But the truth is that physical and emotional dysregulation are symptoms of underlying causes, often stemming from adverse childhood experiences; and just about everyone has been affected by some degree of trauma—little ‘t’ if not big ‘T’. This trauma is being unwittingly passed on, generation to generation. No wonder the dominant culture is a mess.

What if we saw illness as an imbalance in the entire organism, not just as a manifestation of molecules, cells, or organs invaded or denatured by pathology? What if we applied the findings of Western research and medical science in a systems framework, seeking all the connections and conditions that contribute to illness and health?

Such a reframing would revolutionize how we practice medicine. Rather than treating disease as a solid entity that imposes its ill will on the body, we would be dealing with a process, one that can’t be extricated from our personal histories and the context and culture in which we live. (p. 89)

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022) by Gabor Maté, with his son Daniel Maté, is an extraordinary and comprehensive book that moves ‘from cell to society’ in its analysis of illness, trauma, addiction, and pathways to healing.

I appreciate books like this in which the author has an honest, confessional approach. Maté not only admits to the things he did wrong and deeply regrets as a physician, because the medical system simply did not teach him any other way; but he also relates the truth about his own depression, workaholism and emotional dysregulation, stemming from his traumatic and deprived childhood in postwar Hungary, and the affect this has had on his family. Even in his late seventies, his learning and healing journey is ongoing—which surely shows us that it is never to late to start on our own healing way. 

I was particularly shocked by the section that discusses birth trauma and obstetric violence, especially the story of an indigenous Canadian woman in labour, taunted and abused by nurses just minutes before her death. My jaw literally dropped. That such racist and misogynist cruelty could take place in a hospital, from people who are supposed to care, was truly awful to read. And that this violence affects women in the process of bringing new life into the world, impacting not only on their ability to mother in healthy ways, but on the infant’s experience of life from the very moment they are born, points directly to the source of the problem. When the natural process of birth is unnecessarily interfered with, harm results at the societal level. Maté writes:

The issue is autonomy, an indispensable human need. Birthing practices express the hidden or overt values of a culture in terms of who wields power and how much genuine control people are able to exercise over their own bodies. Modern research finds that maternity-care interventions may disturb hormonal processes, reduce their benefits, and create new challenges. What then, I asked Sarah Buckley—a New Zealand-based physician, advocate, and author of a highly regarded overview of the normal physiology of childbearing—explains the rapidly growing rates of medicalized interference? I expected an answer based purely on medical concerns. In fact, her response was sharply perceptive as to how acculturation into the much broader myth of normal takes place. “Doctors,” Dr. Buckley said, “are the agents of our society’s expectations that we imprint on mothers, when they are very open and vulnerable, that technology is superior to the body and that women’s bodies are intrinsically bound to fail. It really is obvious that the culture wants to impress upon women this view of their bodies as inherently defective and needing high-level technological care.” And that will carry on, she added, “into how she brings up the child to be in accord with the demands of the culture.”

Though systemic sexism tilts the playing field against women in particular, there is also a more specific cause of unnecessary medical interference, one foundational to the Western medical view: a distrust of natural processes and fear of what can, may, or will go wrong. (pp. 150–51)

When it is the culture as a whole that creates the circumstances in which the symptoms of illness and addiction become the body’s way of saying no (to paraphrase the title of Maté’s 2003 book, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress), it can seem like an impossible task to find a solution. Yet there is hope. Maté makes it clear that we are not controlled by our genes, and therefore stuck in inescapable patterns of behaviour or disease. Rather, we are epigenetic beings. The environment—our circumstances and experiences, and crucially, how we respond to them—determines the expression of our genes. If we can change our environment, and our attitude towards it—if ‘we can learn to be responsible for the mind with which we create our world moving forward’ (p. 366)—then we can change a great deal about ourselves, and ultimately the culture at large.

Just as illness is a process, so is healing:

When I speak of healing, I am referring to nothing more or less than a natural movement towards wholeness. Notice that I do not define it as the end state of being completely whole, or “enlightened,” or any similar psychospiritual ideal. It is a direction, not a destination; a line on a map, not a dot.

Nor is healing synonymous with self-improvement. Closer to the mark would be to say it is self-retrieval. In fact, our modern self-improvement culture—which has to a large extent been co-opted by the same consumerist forces responsible for the conditions we have been chronicling—can too easily obscure or complicate the healing journey. When we heal, we are engaged in recovering our lost parts of self, not tying to change or “better” them. As the depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin told me, the core question is “not so much looking at what’s wrong, but where is the person's wholeness not fully realized or lived out?”

This process of self-retrieval, or reaching towards wholeness, though it may have milestones, is continuous and lifelong—and unique for everyone—and it is helped along by our feeling and imaginative capacities. As Maté says, ‘The intellect becomes a far more intelligent tool when it allows the heart to speak; when it opens itself to that within us that resonates with the truth, rather than trying to reason with it.’ (p. 364)

I love that Maté mentions Bill Plotkin and other explorers of the mythic realm such as Michael Meade, and that he is unafraid to relate his experiences of ayahuasca ceremonies, and the possibilities of other psychotropic medicines, alongside other psychospiritual approaches to illness. Modern medicine’s ignorance of (or refusal to see) the emotional, social and spiritual origins of illness prevents it from ever finding the true causes. As Kat Duff has written, quoting Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell, ‘a long personal or cultural history that has repressed the pagan gods encourages illness.’ (The Alchemy of Illness, p. 53) Without contact with the wild source of everything, we get lost, and things begin to fall apart.

Healing, as process or journey, is available to us at any moment, if we cultivate the will to keep bringing our attention back to dysfunctional beliefs and thought patterns, peering courageously into our pasts, whilst believing in the possibility of a different future.

The idea is to retrain the brain, to strengthen through conscious effort the prefrontal cortex’s capacity to break out of a past-based trance and repatriate us to the present. Any repetitively self-deprecating thought pattern can be worked with in this way.

The method is an experiential one, requiring commitment and mindfulness. It needs to be not only done but fully experienced. Only when attention is present can the mind rewire the brain. “Conscious attention must be paid,” Jeffrey Schwartz insists. “Therein lies the key. Physical changes in the brain depend for their creation on a mental state in the mind—the state called attention. Paying attention matters.” (p. 424)

This idea of attention echoes what Iain McGilchrist has said: that attention, far from being just a ‘cognitive function’, ‘is actually nothing less than the way in which we relate to the world. And it doesn’t just dictate the kind of relationship we have with whatever it is: it dictates what it is that we come to have a relationship with.’ (Ways of Attending: How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World, 2019, p. 28)

Reading The Myth of Normal has been yet another reminder for me to re-devote my attention to what matters, and to rediscover the healing path I had mislaid for the past several years. It was always there, waiting for me to set foot on its dark and unknown way once more.

As Paul Shepard says in Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998):

Our world does not make us; nor do we make ourselves; we are the continuing creation of the interaction between our organic structure and the way we shape the world around us. It’s possible to do it badly. It’s also possible to do it well. We are an epigenetic phenomenon: our development is elaborated continuously during our entire lifetimes as it has been down through the ages. (p. 38)

My Devotion is to Her: A Poem

My devotion is to Her.

My thoughts turn towards Her.

I listen to what She has to tell me.

My silent singing devotion, my poetry, is dedicated to Her.

I ask that She blesses and comforts me in my time of need.

I ask for Her benevolence, generosity, and fierceness.

 

Gifted with strength I will overcome this dullness, 

And transform in the womb of my pain.

My own blood rebirths me each month.

I honour it as a sign of Her hand upon me, 

Her heart beating next to mine. 

This devotion grows stronger in me, 

as I trust in the process of psychic death, 

as I welcome change, and accept the fickleness 

of my own internal weather.

Please, Mother, send me a dream to send me on my way. 

Send me blessings from the darkness.

(Reworked from text, October 2018)

Nectarine blossoms with bee, August 2017

The Wild Nun: The Divinest Sense / At the Core

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.

Pasque flower, photographed at the Everglades Historic House and Garden, Leura (October 2016)

*

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.

Rockrose (November 2020)

Words and images from my Instagram project @the_wild_nun

Greeting the Wild Nun

Dear readers, I seem to be becoming more and more quiet in this space. Life seems to be getting the better of me, and I am struggling to find not only the energy to make art, but also the motivation. I don’t lack ideas—in fact, I have far too many!—but I do lack impetus and focus. 

This is the ongoing challenge of living with a chronic illness: traversing the difficult times with as much grace a possible, and then beginning again, again, again.

So, in an attempt to redirect my attention and energies back towards what is nourishing and restorative, and away from detrimental distractions, I have made a decision to take an extended break from social media. Mostly this means Facebook, which I intend to avoid for the next month (though potentially much longer). The only exception will be to share anything I publish here. 

I will also probably be posting less often on my Instagram account: @offeringsfromthewellspring

By consciously avoiding the worst of the online world, I hope I will be drawn back towards what I need: nature, sunshine, beauty, myth, making, and healing work in my studio.

However, wisely or otherwise, I have created a sister account on Instagram to explore a new creative project, an alter ego of mine: @the_wild_nun

I intend to share most of what I post in the voice of this new persona here, but do come and follow her journey on Instagram if you feel so inclined. She’s an hermitic creature, much like the Solitary Woman of a story I once wrote; but she does like some company from time to time. 

And so I, she, begins …

*

My unknowing is both shameful and a place of beginnings.

It is only by journeying into the darkness that I will find my way. I can no longer shy from my uglinesses, my weaknesses, my flaws, or the hidden things that scare me. I need to dive down deep into myself, to find a passage through the underworld, and then back to the surface.

The Wild Nun is me and not me; she tells all the truth but tells it slant. She is a dweller of two worlds: upper and lower, inner and outer, conscious and unconscious. She bridges the gap between, and sees in the dark, unearthing treasures.

When I cannot speak as myself, I will speak through her. When illness, fatigue and depression silence me, I will use her voice, create with her hands and heart.

Her name is Veejma, the phonetic spelling of the Polish word wiedźma, meaning witch, hag, harridan (source: Max Dashu, Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700–1100).

I am taking the Wild Nun’s hand and letting her lead me into the underworld where radical healing is found. A new journey is beginning, a new twist in the path, a new shadowy entrance into myself.

Detail of my painting Rainmaker (filter added)

The Burying Of Things

The burying of things beneath layers of denial, avoidance, fear and pain. 

Elsewhere, things are dug up—the blood and bones of the earth, torn from her stony belly, turned into things unnatural, things desacralised and wounded. 

Our own wounds and the wounds of the earth are one and the same. We deny both, to our peril, and to our shame. 

It is only when we stop digging up the inner life of the earth, the memories of past ages; and only when we stop burying the blood and bones of our own wounds, that we will be able to put everything back where it belongs. 

Then, we will plant seeds in the good earth, the good rich soil, and our wounds will heal as a new world grows.

Medicine Woman, by Lucy H. Pearce

We are not anomalies. We are not sick individuals in a healthy context. We are the litmus test. We are the indicators of systemic illness. What we are experiencing is an autoimmune response on a species-wide scale. We have become allergic to our culture. We are infected with patriarchal symptoms which are affecting us all, starting with the most sensitive – the life-creators and nurturers – women. (1)

In Lucy H. Pearce’s 2017 Nautilus Silver Award winning book, Burning Woman, she hinted that her next book would address ‘The message of inflammation, of adrenal fatigue and autoimmune disease — all of which are on the rise … especially amongst women …’ (2) Sister to Burning Woman, this new book would be called Medicine Woman, and I eagerly awaited its arrival. Hence, I was excited when I was given the opportunity, along with about thirty other women, to be part of a discussion group exploring the reality of living with chronic illness; and it is both an honour and a privilege to have made a very tiny contribution to the new book, which was birthed into the world in October.

Just as Burning Woman invoked the fiery archetype of women’s forgotten and suppressed power, Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing invokes the potent archetype of the healer who is not bound by or to the system of patriarchal medicine that currently restricts our ability to heal or transform ourselves through the embodied wisdom of our illnesses.

Medicine Woman is a courageous articulation of Lucy’s personal experience of illness, both her own, and that of her family members; it is an exploration of the toxicity and dis-ease that permeates Western/techno-industrial culture, and the ‘unquestionable institution of patriarchal medicine’ (3) in particular; and it is a handbook to support and encourage the healing of others. Like Lucy, I believe that, while we may be sick as individuals, in our own unique ways, ultimately, it is the culture that surrounds us—or perhaps the lack of it—that is making us unwell. As she writes:

What if the sick women of the world, so often labelled hypochondriacs, neurotics or serial complainers, are picking up perfectly on the signs that something is wrong? What if we are registering the cultural and chemical imbalance of the modern world in our highly sensitive bodyminds, but mistaking the main issue as being only in our own bodies, rather than the body of the world beyond us? What if we are doing what women have always done – feeling the communal pain as though it were our own – and trying to make it better? (4)

While it is true that chronic health conditions are becoming more and more common generally, and that Western medicine does not (yet) have many answers or effective treatments, this is further complicated when it comes to women. For not only has the male body and experience of illness been considered the norm (both culturally and in medical research), thus ignoring the very different biology and experience of females, it is also woefully common for women to simply be disbelieved, for our suffering not to be taken seriously. We are seen, to use the title of one of the chapters, as being mad, bad or sad, our illnesses ‘all in our heads,’ and therefore not legitimate, not real. In addition, it is still women who do the majority of care of others ‘within a culture that encultures them not to assert or attend to their own needs.’ (5) Under such conditions, women are literally exhausted to the limit and made unwell. 

We have internalised the message that there’s something wrong with us, rather than there is something wrong. (6)

As Lucy makes clear, historically the Western medical system has been closely interwoven with the powers of the State, the penal system and the Church, as well as a male dominated Science. This system has typically denied other ways of knowing and healing, such as those found in indigenous, nature-based cultures, and especially the healing knowledge that was once held by women—the witches, herbalists, midwives and folk healers, who practiced a democratic ‘people’s medicine’. We have, therefore, lost much of our understanding of illness, and the methods of healing that can bridge body, mind and spirit.

More generally, illness itself is considered something of a taboo in our culture. To be sick is to be seen as weak, a victim—labels that are so very easily attached to women.

We are neither explicitly taught nor supported in our culture how to navigate illness, physical or mental decline or change as an integral part of moving through life, precisely because illness is seen as degenerate, sinister, a threatening other state of being to be avoided. We are not shown how to move through illness internally, how to assimilate its changes or how to engage spiritually with it. We are merely taught to avoid it, and to fight it: to resist change at all costs. (7)

When illness is seen in entirely negative terms as something to be avoided, denied, ignored, or suppressed; when we are made to feel ashamed for being ill, especially when our illness is ongoing and/or unexplainable; and when we believe ourselves to be victims, then it becomes impossible to see illness as a gift, a message from our sensitive bodies that something is wrong, that creates the opportunity for transformation, or greater understanding. Illness is, after all, an unavoidable part of life, an element of what it means to be human. It should be embraced as one of the ways in which we develop as people, and as a warning, an alarm that sounds when things are out of balance—in our bodies, communities, or ecosystems.

Our bodies are displaying the symptoms of the truths we cannot tell. If our voices cannot be heard, then our bodies will tell the truth their way. Our bodies are protesting: they are calling time on this way of living, for an end to busyness as usual. (8)

I have said myself that I eventually came to see my illness is a gift, an ally, an enabler, giving me the opportunity to spend time on my own development, to read and learn much, and to pursue my creative and spiritual work. Though it can indeed be a terrible thing, I am strangely grateful for it, for it has made me who I am. 

Sickness is a gift, wrapped up in the oddest, scariest, least obvious of wrappings: it brings us, if we will let it, back home to ourselves. (9)

One of the greatest gifts that illness gives to us is a return to the core reality of our bodies. The conceptual and philosophical split between mind and body which is endemic to Western/patriarchal culture (thanks, Descartes!), is, I believe, one of the foundational problems that afflicts us. The understanding of ourselves as ensouled bodies and embodied souls has been lost, and we’ve been cast adrift from our sacred materiality. Yet perhaps the tide is beginning to turn:

Woman Healing understands through her lived experience that her body has power and life of its own – and that it is her sacred duty to stay connected to this and honour it. She recognises that she cannot leave her body as a form of escape from her illness or the perceived dangers of the world for very long and remain healthy. Instead of trying to control life with her mind, the Woman Healing learns to feel into her body, come fully into her body and live from this place. This is where she can access and root her power. (10)

To me this is a key piece of wisdom. All of us, not just women, need to (re)learn to fully inhabit our bodies, and to work within the physical and energetic limitations that have been placed upon us. In a culture that bases so much of its worth on defying limitations and exerting control over nature (and people), this is a transgressive idea, but one that I think is crucial (I have written some thoughts about limitations here). 

Lucy writes, ‘So many of our health problems come from not just external stressors, but the inner stress of ignoring our biological and emotional cycles by forcing our bodyminds to fit prescribed modes of reality, rather than shaping our culture to fit our biological realities’ (11). Similarly, we change the natural ways and cycles of the earth to fit with our desired lifestyles, rather than fitting our lifestyles to the natural ways, cycles, and physical limitations of the earth. Neither of these approaches is sustainable.

When we heal within the Feminine we do not treat the body as an independent machine, but the human as one cell within a larger body: a family, a community, a shared history. Though each of our sicknesses is unique to us, and our healing must be initiated by us, it is not individual – it is a community practice. We heal together. (12)

The section of the book that affected me the most was the evocation of Medicine Woman herself as ‘a lost feminine archetype of healing’. It is she who holds space for us as we transform, as we move through our natural cycles, and learn how to accept and live in the moment. There is much we can learn from her.

There is also much we can learn from this book. In order to heal we need to be prepared to feel deeply, to accept the realities of our bodies in their fragility, and ultimately, their mortality. We need to learn from the natural world, and (re)connect with our biological cycles. We need to be prepared to face the darknesses in ourselves, the deep hurts and traumas that have trapped us in stories that do not allow us to claim our inner wisdom and power, or to see the meaning inherent in our illnesses, and in life itself.

In order to be able to fully heal we need two things. We have to be prepared to die. And we have to be fully prepared to live. To live more fully, differently, more vibrantly than we ever have before. To seize hold of life in one hand and death in the other and dedicate ourselves wholeheartedly to both. To die to our old bodies, our previous conceptions of self. We know that we are uncomfortable with death. But we may find we are also uncomfortable with life. (13)

Reading Medicine Woman has certainly challenged me to once more take a more proactive role in my healing, to face some of the things that are still holding me back (including my discomfort with life in this profoundly life-denying culture), and to understand the importance of my own healing in a communal and global context. It may not provide all the answers, but it certainly asks the right questions. 

Indeed, throughout the book there are many questions and creative tasks which are designed to help readers engage with and integrate the material in their own personal way. I confess, I have not yet had the time to answer any of the questions; yet in simply reading through them I found myself feeling confronted and challenged—and while this is initially very uncomfortable, I know it is necessary to bring unresolved material to the surface, and to recommit myself to healing in my own way.

We are in the midst of a time of collapse and great change. Our culture is sick, and we are all suffering. What we need is a revolution, in more ways than one, but especially in the way we approach medicine and the treatment of illness. I applaud Lucy H. Pearce for the brave work she is doing in writing about this subject, not only with well-researched evidence, but also with poetry and feeling. In speaking the truth about the suffering of women, she is starting a conversation that creates the environment in which the work of transformation can begin.

If you have a chronic illness, or even if you don’t, I urge you to read this book. Medicine Woman can be purchased directly from Womancraft Publishing in Ireland, or from other online retailers.

I will end with these final words from Lucy:

To heal is to be a conscientious objector to the culture of war we have inhabited as normality. To heal is to risk moving closer to death and return bringing back more life-force to our planet and deepen our understanding of our interconnections. To heal requires that we inhabit the Feminine more fully and reject the divine right of toxic masculinity to dominate.

To focus on personal healing in our culture is an act of powerful, political rebellion. It is an act of spiritual revolution. It is also a profound act of service – one which will ripple up and down your family lineage, out into your community and the world beyond you. To insist on healing for all peoples in this time is scary. But it is needed. (14)

References

1. Lucy H. Pearce, Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing, Womancraft Publishing, 2018, p. 115

2. Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman, Womancraft Publishing, 2016, p. 154

3. Medicine Woman, p. 12

4. Ibid, p. 114

5. Ibid, p. 38

6. Ibid, p. 21

7. Ibid, p. 133

8. Ibid, p. 41

9. Ibid, p. 153

10. Ibid, p. 201

11. Ibid, p. 211

12. Ibid, p. 241

13. Ibid, pp. 181–182

14, ibid, p. 262

Wise Words: Our Most Precious Talisman

The abandonment and dishonoring of the body and its Powers is an ontologically disastrous error. In her brilliant and heartfelt essay “The Woman I Love Is a Planet,” Paula Gunn Allen writes that our bodies are our most precious “talismans” connecting us to the earth: “Walking in balance, in harmony, and in a sacred manner requires staying in your body, accepting its discomforts, decaying, witherings, and blossomings and respecting them.” In other words, one of the most politically radical and effective things that any of us can do is respect our bodies—and the bodies of others—in all of their manifestations and transformations. This includes respecting aging, fatness, weakness, male softness, female hairiness, bodily waste making, and even our sickness and death.

…

In our healing and transmutational work, Paula Gunn Allen insists that first of all we need to cherish and honor our bodies, “singing Heya-hey to our flesh”:

The mortal body is a tree; it is holy in whatever condition; it is truth and myth because it has so many potential conditions; because of its possibilities, it is profane and sacred; most of all, it is your most precious talisman, your own connection to her. Healing the self means honoring and recognizing the body, accepting rather than denying all the turmoil its existence brings, welcoming the woes and anguish flesh is subject to, cherishing its multitudinous forms and seasons, it’s unfailing ability to know and be, to grow and wither, to live and die, to mutate, to change.

(Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1993, pp. 254 and 257)