“The wisdom of our ancestors is clear about this: If we do not take the journey inward to discover who we are, the creative potential within us will implode and we will destroy ourselves and the world”.
Betty Kovacs
Jesus said something similar in one of the Gnostic Gospels: If you bring forth what is within you it will save you – if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.
(no wonder the Gnostic Gospels are ignored)
Taking daily journeys into the forest without an agenda is a primary way I enter the territory of my own soul. Climbing up and down hills with care, peering into rippling waters, following the bark and boughs of hemlocks straining to see where they meet the sky intensifies my awe, but only in retrospect. Immediacy is all. Being with every tree, twig or mushroom, open to whatever happens next, I am utterly present to nature/myself. We are one. I don’t plan this, and it doesn’t occur every time; just sometimes. On these occasions It is not until I return home that I realize that I have made an inner pilgrimage that in some way helped me regain a sense of balance, change a mood. release me from climate or personal despair, offer clarity where there was none, align me with gratitude. I feel relaxed and whole.
Renewal.
After such a ‘journey’ I return to practical things like doing the laundry or checking my iPhone. Today I found the above photograph and passage and was catapulted into personal and collective truth with a capital ‘T’ through a reflecting bear image and a few words. My hair caught fire. I needed to write one more story about the miracle of becoming and the two ways that I found ‘my way through’.
A troubled child and tortured adolescent with parents who cared nothing for the daughter that was me I would have been totally lost without my little brother. We took to the woods, two children in flight like birds from the world, found joy and magic as we learned. At the crossroad of adolescence loneliness drove us both back into the woods, each in our own way. Trying to survive.
All we knew was how to stay separate. Our family was broken. My brother went on to become a world class runner. After college I married, as all female robots did and still do When my brother stopped running, he died. Frozen grief severed me from my only companion. I hid in my little house for eleven years.
The spring of my 35th year I had a vision. One fog bound frog-filled night I was forced to stop the car. By accident I had already killed a thousand frogs trying to reach their mating ground. Pulling over to the side of the dark country road, I got out despairingly as I listened to the trilling of a thousand more innocents. Stay off the road I begged them. I don’t know why I looked up towards the sky.
Although the trees were bowed obscuring a fogged in firmament, the sky was miraculously clear. A million fireflies blinked and sparked. Stars lit up the night as shattered shards of a giant mirror rushed together before my eyes. The sky dome was pulsing light.
Stunned senseless I got back into the car. Gradually questions arose, intruding. What had just happened? What did it mean? My mind was struggling to comprehend what I had just experienced.
The sky mirror was whole.
I don’t remember how I got home that night, but Something had intervened and soon I was once again able to enter the woods around my house. As painful as it was to be there without my brother, I was able to feel my grief and anger towards my beloved for leaving me.
I too had finally stopped running.
I found solace among the trees. It wasn’t long before I was also led to the river’s edge where clay bubbled up on Rachel Carson’s beach. Since I often walked there, I was shocked. A small dove grey clay bank appeared like magic inside of a week. I sculpted my first form under a fierce summer sun, my feet soaking in cool river waters. The figure felt alien as it emerged seemingly on its own. My heart started pounding. I was almost afraid of what I had made. Still, I took the strange piece home and placed it next to my bed and dreamed bird images for six months thereafter. The figure turned out to be a bird goddess, but I didn’t know that until I discovered Marija Gimbutas’ book (The Language of the Goddess).
One of her Neolithic images mirrored mine.
An eerie beginning.
What I hadn’t expected was to feel the joy return. As the Voice of the Spirit and Soul of Nature began to override my conditioning, I began to heal.
By the time the Mountain Mother called me to her I was ready. I followed her to my present home…She takes back her own.
And so, ends today’s woodland story.
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Thanks for sharing your woodland story Sara. Your imagery is very powerful. I was really struck by the image of the shards of a mirror coming together and the sky being ablaze with light. It is clear from all your pieces I have read that your personal journey has been very challenging but from it you continue to offer us images of breathtaking beauty. In 2018, one of the wisdom lines I wrote spontaneously was “Sometimes beautiful things are born in desperate places.” You certainly bear witness to that.
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Thank you for seeing through the veil…. yes, some lives are more challenging than others (and many are more challenging than mine) and yet what really matters in the end is that we learn what we need to so we can be present for others… Vulnerability is the most powerful form of strength…
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It’s just so easy to say nothing at all…bolstering invisibility
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O your writing is stunning, bardic, searing. I can feel what you are saying. As I was feeling the power of your words, I came to the part of you making the bird goddess in river clay. I had the same experience before I discovered Marija Gimbutas and then went on to graduate school because her material was on the curriculum. At the time, I was searching for expression of a blooming I felt inside myself that I couldn’t name. Spontaneously, I created an armless, winged and beaked bird goddess before I ever saw her in Language of the Goddess. According to my teacher, her biographer Joan Marler, the bird goddess was Marija’s favorite. When Marija passed on Candlemas, she said I am going to the realm of the ancestors. Thank you for reminding us that we are called by the ancestors and truly their call cannot be ignored, even if we don’t know exactly what we are doing yet. Thank you for your writing. Everyone is healed and uplifted by your journey.
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Wow, this is quite an endorsement – I am grateful, and I thank you with all my heart. I am also excited to meet someone else that was called by the goddess in a similar way…You reinforce the reality that She is always present and ready to make an appearance as soon as we are opening like flowers to these realities that come to us long before we understand what is happening – The Bird Goddesses are our Ancestors – and with their help we can Rise and begin to move as one united Being. As Terry Tempest Williams writes we are indeed women with wings….
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PS I did not know that Maria’s favorite goddesses were birds – but it doesn’t surprise me when I think about it – because it may very well be that she too was called by birds!
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“Taking daily journeys into the forest without an agenda is a primary way I enter the territory of my own soul. Climbing up and down hills with care, peering into rippling waters, following the bark and boughs of hemlocks straining to see where they meet the sky intensifies my awe, but only in retrospect. Immediacy is all. Being with every tree, twig or mushroom, open to whatever happens next, I am utterly present to nature/myself. We are one. I don’t plan this, and it doesn’t occur every time; just sometimes. On these occasions It is not until I return home that I realize that I have made an inner pilgrimage that in some way helped me regain a sense of balance, change a mood. release me from climate or personal despair, offer clarity where there was none, align me with gratitude. I feel relaxed and whole.”
Thank you for this exquisite naming and description of an experience that is also mysterious and familiar to me.
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Of course! you name it too – mysterious and familiar – always the ‘both and”! Your comments always matter – and I always feel heard – what a gift you offer – thank you dear Elizabeth.
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Thank you for this amazing essay that resonates so deeply!
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What a beautiful post, Sara. Luminous and poignant. Physicist Brian Swimme says something similar to your beginning quotes in his “The Universe Is a Green Dragon” — that in following our attractions, in doing the thing that calls us, we hold the universe together. If we don’t, the universe spins apart. I’m glad you’ve followed yours.
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Oh I remember The Universe is a Green Dragon !
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