It is time to start speaking about what is in the shadows. It is time to wake up. It is time for an archetypal call to action. A calling to all women to reclaim their deep wisdom. A calling to all men to learn to hold their brothers. A deep, guttural calling to look where you have never looked before and learn to dance there first, with this I will share a story:
Teenager: “what’s to live for? it’s all fucked!”
Woman (looking earnestly into his desperate eyes): “Yes AND what I know is that we can start planting trees, it’s not too late and women are going to learn to do magic.”
Teenager: blinks at her speechless, decides not to die.
Typing this now I have chills all over, that last part lands in me like meteorite. It shakes me to the core. It wakes me from my quiet slumber. A slumber made possible by a cloud of “there is nothing to be done”. It stirs in me a quiet wonder that moves up through me. Moves in the gentle way a seabed quakes, enough to awaken a tidal wave from a pregnant ocean.
From this place I can sense parts of me I have put to sleep. From here I wonder what would happen if I brought them to life, if instead of letting them lie, I placed those parts of myself in spaces and experiences that would nurture them. What if I placed them in the gentle hands of my teachers?
The parts I have shut down, labelled as annoying or useless or inconvenient include my sensitivity to life in and around me. It includes my sadness, curled like a sleeping cat, around my heart, it includes my innate ability to connect with another and have a visceral sense of their experience. It includes my menstrual cycle, my love of the moon, my love of the waters, light and the beat of life. It includes a deep-seated unease towards the blindness we have collectively adopted to the cliff edge that is fast approaching us as a species.
It is time to get real about where I am at. It is time to make small and deliberate actions in the small now.
It is time to learn to play in the unknown, navigate with my fear, to learn what it means to live firmly against the fabric of the life, entangling myself with what is not yet here. It’s time to learn my magic. For this reason, I have enrolled myself at The Sourcery.
At The Sourcery I am the curriculum, here I am simultaneously creating and being created, destroying, and being destroyed. Birthed and grieved. It is a process of radical, constant transformation. Here, I am introduced time and time again to my nothingness, my intrinsically unwritten nature.
“Yes, you can and gently now step by step feel forward into the dark where perhaps nobody has been before, that’s where you need to be; dancing, feeling, creating and growing from”.
In deep contrast to the conventional education, where I was constantly being filled and scribbled over. Where my voice was silenced. My breath coming and going, unnoticed. Where my quiet hum of creativity lay conveniently dormant in my shadow, conveniently dormant in my unfelt life.
I am learning that I can go alone into my own healing while staying in contact with others. I am learning that I will thrive in the dark, that I was built to be in the unknown. I am learning, at long last, the magic involved with toiling unbroken ground.
The cornerstone of this process is this ancient sensation that wraths up through me like a lick of snake tongue. Electric, blue it holds me full. It’s called Fear. Bit by bit I learn a new language with which to commune with Fear. This animal in me, that arrives, quick as a flash, pulsing through me has my immediate attention. It grabs my attention and slams me fully into the moment. It is an ongoing process, that requires me to feel. To turn up and be honest. Learning to feel and navigate with fear brings me nose to nose with this beast called magic. The field of possibilities opens and the next can emerge through me.
This process requires authentic initiation.
This requires taking radical responsibility for the mess.
This requires me to stay in contact. It’s an act of art, it’s an act of community, it is not a process to go through alone.
This requires a Sourcery to hold me in owning my magic.
For me right now, it looks a lot like committing and failing. I commit to get up at 7am and sit for 35mins every day then I fail to show or get there late. I experience the fogginess created by lack of clarity then I learn. I learn that I am the only one responsible for the energetic messes I create. I can instead choose to say, “I will not be there at 7am tomorrow”. This is not right or wrong it just creates a certain result. Fogginess or clarity, connection with the space or not.
It requires me to regularly meet and check in with the other two women — my team, my context, my space-holders(1). It requires me to go into my own deep dark and heal emotions from the past.
It requires me to be and stay in relationship with myself, others, and the spaces I interact with.
It requires losing my way time and time again and finding my way step by step, breath by breath.
It requires being witnessed.
Held accountable.
Heard.
Through all this I am cultivating my ability to choose. To choose my response, to choose how to act, to choose what to create and when. I’m learning to choose to go first, as a woman, heavy with past wounds and drenched in shame and labels. Learning to re-orientate back to my own human heart, to bravely refuse to accept that ‘WHAT IS’ as the only option, it’s about planting seeds and, as a young woman in 2022, learning how to do Magic.
(1) A space holder is not a teacher. A space holder has no “power over” or “knowing more than”, which traditionally the word “teacher” implies. A space holder is someone/(or many) who add their conscious attention to the space and use it to navigate to discoveries which increase my awareness. It is a way of “going with”. An effective space holder, creates transformative spaces and it is powerful to experience this.
