Month: Apr 2023

The Road to nowhere

When accident and trauma reduced the space I could exist in, it took something from me, something that I took for granted when I was abled and brave. The freedom to move, to trek and to wander. I could just get up in the morning and decide that I was going to lose myself somewhere and I didn’t have to think twice, now everything is done with careful measures of how much I have got in my battery, what I may need that energy for, how much I can spare? and how long will this keep me out of action if I do it? Is it worth the drain I will experience? It keeps my sphere of exploration very contained and very carefully managed – it is what it is, I can’t change it so I live with it but my word, it’s so annoying.

I recently sat down and did a little bit of brain dumping about my relationship to my body and nature since my accident and it made me really examine those thoughts and feelings that I honestly thought I’d mastered. I realised that the trust I lost in my body after my accident hasn’t really returned. I relied on my body to keep me moving, to be strong and fit and then it broke and I never really trusted it anymore. This affects how I move in the world and how much (or little) I physically push myself. I stopped appreciating my physicality, how powerful I can be even though I’m only small. I noted how little I look in the mirror since my accident, how I lost touch with my body and my outer shell because I felt that it was irrelevant and pointless in my smaller bubble where I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to see a person I no longer knew looking back at me.

I looked at my relationship to nature and how that has evolved. Don’t get me wrong, I love nature, I love being outside with the trees and the plants and the mountains but where nature had been a source of joy and adventure, especially when I was young, it was now ‘therapy’, a place I went to feel better and get a bit of exercise. How sterile this has made my friend. I appreciate everything nature contributed to my recovery but I have lost that abandon I used to feel in nature. The woods were a place to hide and climb and discover lost worlds, now they are a sensible stroll through and then back home before I get too tired. This is not how I want to exist in the outdoors, not at all.

I also find being outside confronts me, it reminds me what I lost, what I lack, so I don’t take the time to be ‘in’ it. How heartbreaking this is for me, for the child within who would wile away the hours wandering through pathways and along hedgerows, talking to birds and jumping across streams. It made me realise I need to find my magic again.

Whilst sitting wall staring through recovery I would often get notions, notions that were far beyond my capabilities. Notions were a blessing and a curse, they were a nod to hope, to rising again, but also a frustrating smack in the chops of my reality and how it was tying me down. I had a notion last year to do a pilgrimage, I wanted to just walk to some undefined location and see if I could find bits of me that I had lost along the way. The idea of setting off (like The Fool) with my rucksack, some sturdy boots and a map was one that enthralled me. Reality told me, I couldn’t just go for days and hope for the best, it had to be carefully planned, with lots of rest and time. There were lots of St Patrick walks around here but these hold no interest for me, I am not concerned with the cultural colonisation that St Patrick brought (why Ireland celebrate this terrible man I have no idea, but this is a whole other post for another time). I just couldn’t find what I was looking for, things were either too long, too far or too remote.

So that itch remained unscratched until I read ‘Listen to the land speak’ by Manchán Magan. In this book he has a chapter on Oweynagat where he talks about his yearning to undergo a rite of passage, a journey of inner discovery and he travelled as far as the Himalayas to find it, little knowing that on his own doorstep in Ireland there was such a place. I’ve known about Uaimh na gCat (Cave of the cats) for a while, the famed home of the mighty Morrigan, a place of spiritual and emotional transmutation and this is where I got excited, I’m going on holiday in June to Sligo and will be a mere half an hour away from Rathcrogan where the cave sits. So this will be my pilgrimage this year, I will be entering the cave to shed skin, to look into the abyss, to lose and find myself. I’m no longer afraid of the dark, it’s time to find the mirror and stare myself in the face again.

A black and white image of a the inside of a small cave

The Invisible woman

I can not believe that it’s almost the end of January, I have been silent, waiting for inspiration to strike, getting through what can only be described as the sweaty armpit part of the year. What a grind late December through January feels like. Even though my birthday is in January, it’s a day of popping my head above the oppressive parapet before retreating again until Spring.

Speaking of which, Imbolg is on its way and it’s definitely currently wrestling with the tail end of January to burst forth into the world. Imbolg. A time of new beginnings, new ideas, changes in direction. The main thing though that stands out for me about Imbolg is the sense of hope it brings. There’s just something in the air right now that despite the quagmire of shitty politics, just feels buoyant and free. An extra layer of fresh, light air above the grey smog.

Recently, I’ve mostly been pondering on my invisibility, not literally, I think I’m still visible and solid. I mean symbolically, I’ve been metaphorically invisible for some time now, it normally happens to women in their late 40’s onwards where they begin to report feeling ‘unseen’. It’s actually got a proper name ‘Invisible Woman syndrome’. Imagine that, a syndrome created just because women commit the sin of ageing. As I edge a little closer to 50 I am in the age group of becoming a little bit opaque.

Living as we do in a Patriarchal society, where youth equals beauty and that equals interest, being an old lady renders you surplus to requirements. There is of course the argument, that our existence as women on this earth and our right to take up space, go beyond the realms of the male gaze and maybe just maybe, we’re all complete whole people who do and think and say lots of different and amazing things regardless of whether the patriarchy takes notice.

My invisibility comes from circumstance, I disappeared from view at 35, as soon as I became disabled, traumatised and sad. Society is not set up for the differently abled, unless we are ‘inspirational’ then we can just go away and let everyone else get on with it, thank you very much. As soon as my ‘worth’ dropped in terms of productivity then I was boring/lazy/less than human* (*delete as appropriate). Almost as if my ideas, my voice, my intrinsic value became null and void. For someone with issues from childhood around being silenced and invalidated, this was a huge grief-filled mess to get my head around. Again, worth being measured by output and whether or not I’m working my arse off, in a shit job I hate for no money, is a patriarchal capitalist construct, whose sole job is to strip all of us of joy and freedom (I’m beginning to see a pattern here, it’s almost as if the patriarchy is really bad for us).

Going from someone who was perfectly abled to being dis-abled was an eye opener for me. My circumstance changed me but it’s society who disabled me. A society unwilling to make reasonable adjustments so we can get equity. A place where you are not seen and are treated as ‘broken’ because you are not typical (even though most typical abled folks are sick and sad and burning out because of, well you know, patriarchal capitalism). The pandemic is a prime example, people unwilling to wear masks and as a result, throw their immunocompromised comrades under the proverbial bus because the message everyone receives is that “disabled people are less than and therefore do not matter”. As I said, SOCIETY DISABLES US. ‘

Lucky me, I have the invisibility bingo, female, older and disabled . Do I just continue to get more and more ‘thin’ as the years go by until I shrivel away for ever, or do I use it to my advantage? I can use my invisibility to slip through spaces and places without being seen, I can say, wear and do what the fuck I like without eyes judging me, urging me to be polite and fit into the mould of ‘woman’ (whatever that means). What freedom this is, what joy to avoid the tut tutting and the expectations.

In the words of the wonderful Mona Eltahawy “I refuse to allow those who don’t recognize my full humanity to expect politeness of me”.

Absofuckinglutely

A black and white image of a woman walking away from the camera. She is walking along a tunnel of trees and shrubs

Living on the Edge

Happy Alban Arthan all! Winter Solstice is upon us and the light is returning. It doesn’t feel much like it right now, still so dark and cold, but slowly, slowly, minute by minute, the days begin to stretch out until before we know it, it’s Spring Equinox and we’re all about the light and the sun again.

As discussed in my last post, I was going to do a ritual today to mark my Irish citizenship and root into the land I now call home. I completed it this morning and it brought to the fore a thread I have been tentatively unwinding and following recently.

A black and white photo of items on a rug on the floor. The items are a cast iron pot with smoke coming out of it, a lit candle, a lighter, an Irish passport, a large stone, a homemade wand and two pots with dried Vervain and Meadowsweet respectively.
The ritual begins!

But before we follow that thread, we need to rewind back in time slightly, after my accident, one of the things I lost was my friends. Let me tell you, when the shit hits the fan, everyone disappears. There are a stoic few who remain to climb the mountain with you and they are priceless, but the majority float away like dust in the wind. There are many reasons for this but the biggest one is that they just can’t deal with whatever monstrous debacle you are going through. This was a hard lesson for me initially, I got promises of ‘keeping in touch’ that were quite frankly….bollocks.

I’m over it now, I’ve accepted the fragility of humans and our relationships and to be honest the years of human-free time I’ve had in recovery have been much needed. I have two close friends (who are both in England so we connect via computer), my partner and our two lovely doggy children and that’s the extent of my social circle.

Now, here we come back to the thread, I’ve recently been feeling a need for community, I try to dip into communities that are in areas of interest for me and every time I’ve come out disappointed. Especially when I’ve gone into places where I’ve expected more enlightened folk and found it full of…well…wankers.

I’ve always been an edgewalker, even when very young, I didn’t want to fit in, I couldn’t fit in. I wanted to do things differently or the opposite way to everyone else. This has been a constant motif into adulthood, I’m a weirdo, I like weird things; High strangeness, magic, the paranormal, Druidry, Veganism, talking about death, graveyards, folklore and tarot. I’m also politically left (not centre left, not liberal, proper left). Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that people exist out there who also like these things, I’ve found a lot of lovely connections on Mastodon (open source social media place, come find me at Lauren the Hermit) but when it comes to actual flesh and blood, standing in front of me and talking, it is non existent. I know, I know, I live in the middle of nowhere in a place that is still coming to terms with the trauma caused by its own civil war and colonisation and ‘ruled’ (I say that whilst laughing) by out of touch, shouty, older, white Christians. People like me are well hidden and scattered to the four winds and finding like minds is hard.

As a result, I’ve resigned myself (quite happily) to the fact that I’m in a small gang and that’s ok.

Until recently that is.

I have just finished the Foundation training to be a Death Doula, an experience that I went into with a dash of my usual cynicism and with my barriers up. It was around week seven on the course that my walls began to break down, the class watched a short video of a dramatisation of someone’s death in a hospital. It showed the differing reactions of their loved ones and the aftermath as they lovingly prepared the body after death. It was soundtracked by this

https://youtu.be/avabPY3XgRc

And I just lost it, full on snotty crying that burst out of me. A triggered memory from my recovery when I played this song all the time mixed with a feeling of “when I die, there’ll be nobody there” a revelation that I need community. Death is not done in a vacuum, it is having a community around us that helps us to have a good death. The funny thing about that moment is that sharing my vulnerability with my classmates allowed my heart to open like a flower. From then onwards, for the rest of the course, I was open and let the love I felt for that community flow.

This brings me back to the beginning of this post, during my ritual today whilst I journeyed, the importance of community was hammered home, whilst seeking to root into my ancestry, the land that is home and fully embracing my Irish heart I know I need to find community here. I was told by voices linked to the land that it was time to come out from under my cloud of safety and sadness and to begin finding joy. To be free-hearted and to stop taking things so damn seriously. I have had to be serious for so long, to recover, to heal my soul, to protect my fragile heart that there’s a part of me now just dying to be let loose with abandon, a part that was always pushed down (by me and others).

This Solstice with its new beginnings and returning light is a perfect time to begin this new path ( the fools journey has been discovered!) this coming year will be a time for the Hermit to forge community, in joy and in love.

The Rite and the Ritual

It’s cold. Friggin’ baltic as we say over here. It feels like Winter proper. A welcome feeling because the past few Winters have been too warm, making us feel season-less and lost.

Winter Solstice, Alban Arthan is approaching. A time I have grown to love as I evolved from my immature, pre-trauma, sun lover into an appreciator of dark and The Shadow. Solstice is a time of beginnings as the Sun returns to us again. The longest night, a time of stillness and silence before the wheel tips once more into lengthening light. I’m choosing this years Solstice to mark my Irish Citizenship with a ritual. Usually, there is an official ceremony in Ireland where you receive your certificate and take an oath of fidelity, but due to COVID-19 my acceptance came with a bit of a quiet whimper. A brown envelope in the post in December 2021 and a quick photo in front of the fire.

Black and white photo of a smiling woman, holding up a piece of paper in one hand and giving a thumbs up sign with the other. She is in a living room in a house with a large picture on the wall behind her and a lit fire in the fireplace.
Hooray!

This suited my Hermit tendencies, a couple of days away with hundreds of other people at a formal ceremony is not my thing at all, but what it has done is make my transition into my Irish identity feel lacking somehow. My Irish roots are very important to me, my family, the O’Donnells from Donegal fled the Gorta Mor (Great Hunger) and ended up in Scotland and then sometime later Northern England. I subconsciously found my way back to Ireland and it is now my beloved home. I feel rooted here, reconnected to my ancestors whose trauma and subsequent uprooting is in my DNA. I have never felt ‘English’ and always like a fish out of water when I was there. I have journeyed to meet my ancestors and they are glad I am back, I am home and healing the relationship they had with the land.

This brings me to the importance of ritual and how in Western Society in general we have lost the ability to mark rites of passage in any meaningful way. We look at transitions as yearly birthdays and New Year. They get celebrated but usually in a pretty perfunctory way. Yet there are so many transitions and rites of passage in our lives, childhood to adulthood, old house to new house, a change of relationship or job, deaths, births, traumas, illness, the stages of menopause and transitions in our sexuality and gender identity. The ability to look deeply at these events and to mark them is something, I feel, that is fundamental to our psyche. We too easily let things pass and wash over us without marking and processing, that it becomes part of the soup that sits in our subconscious begging to be acknowledged and when we don’t, we can become overwhelmed and over wrought.

I love ritual, my spiritual practices over the years have allowed me to look at ritual and it’s importance. Ritual for me, is a charging of the batteries, it focuses energy and I always feel fabulous after I’ve taken the time to craft a solo ritual and then perform it. Ritual doesn’t have to be complicated or involve lots of trinkets and gee gaws, or be held in a sacred well or inside an ancient cave. It can be done quickly indoors or in the shower and sometimes all you need is some paper and a pencil or a single candle and some alone time to sit and journey and process

What delights we uncover when we enter our internal landscape and explore. We are not confined by our existence on the material plane, we can meet whatever or whomever we want and ask questions, listen to wisdom and enter places not possible with our solid, lumpy human bodies.

So, here we are thinking about my ritual for the Solstice, a time where I’ll enter the liminal space to bond with the land I call home and thank it for its beauty and its acceptance, where I hope to hear the voices of generations past who have lived, loved and struggled here, who will hopefully receive and welcome the tie to their home I have now created.

Creating meaningful ritual is the way of the Hermit. It is a door to a deeper sense of self that we miss and is sorely needed. Try it.

A wide black and white photo of a woman in la long cotton robe standing in the middle of a garden in front of a small standing stone. Surrounding the garden is a vast expanse of sky and undulating fields and hedges.
A ritual from this Summer. I’m lucky to be surrounded by this beauty.

The Fool is calling

I mentioned in a previous post (The transition is not smooth) how I’d been feeling the pull of ‘something’. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was calling me none-the-less. That feeling has intensified, there’s an internal bubbling that is unsettling and urgent. The Fool is calling me onward

The Fool tarot card from the Rider Waite Smith deck.
The Fool from the RWS tarot

See the Fool there all ready to jump, a bag full of belongings and a doggy familiar to help guide. Full of innocence and expectation, confident that the leap will be held and supported. We have many instances when the Fool shows up in our lives, the Fools Journey is not linear and also not a one shot thing. I have had Fools journeys that brought joy and clarity but others that brought pain, my latest Fools journey when I stepped off the cliff into the abyss of Shadow brought me to fully embodying The Hermit. I adore The Hermit, I have gained peace and wisdom from them, I have also found that my place in this world is alone but not lonely.

Every Hermit must at times step back out into the world and this is when The Fool begins to call. This time though my Fool is an older, wiser one, one who knows that sometimes you have to look over the cliff edge before you step off it. Where my baggage has been thoroughly sorted and I only pack and carry what nurtures me.

I have been healing for ten years, ten whole years! Recovery is not quick despite what we are told. I have taken the time I have needed to grow my scar tissue. Some of the things that I have been doing in this period to help me, now feel like they no longer serve me. This is where things become scary. I don’t know what to step into. My downtime has been spent following threads of interest, things that in the grind of the ‘real world’ I could never have persued. I’ve learnt about herbalism, psychology, horticulture, garden design, celebrancy, Druidry, death work, tarot, grief counselling and horticultural therapy. I’ve wandered the woods searching for the ‘Other’ and spoken to trees and ancient stones (yes they do speak back). I’ve found good medicine in the energy of the sea and the wind. I’ve stepped beyond what is ‘normal’ into the supernatural and found a big whole wide world of things beyond our realm. A Jack of all trades. My curiosity never ending. A depth and breadth of stuff, some of which is seen as frivolous or weird by a tired and overworked populace who no longer look for magic.

The problem is, what on earth do I DO with all of this? How do I show up in the world again? What cliff do I jump off? My Hermit self is not au fait with the ways of society, I don’t like grind culture, I refuse to become part of that again. How do I meld the peace of The Hermit with the desire of The Fool? I don’t think I’ve ever really known what I wanted ‘to be’ and I’m certainly no clearer now.

It is also hard to find a way when everything seems so fractured, is it not just easier to stay hidden in the woods? In truth, I’m not entirely sure I’m made for these times. I want a life of wonderment and creativity and freedom but everything just feels so squeezed and tight at the moment. Or is now the perfect time to find and inject wonderment, creativity and freedom, just when we need it the most?

I have no answers, I’m hoping they come, until then I’m sitting in the liminal, uncomfortable ‘not-quite-there but I need to leap’ space and maybe The Hermit will become The Fool (with ample Hermit-ing time) once again.

A photo of a path made up of large stones and boulders leading upwards into a forest of pines.
A magical place near my house.

Jeff Buckley is magical

Today is Jeff Buckley’s birthday, he would have been 56 years old today. This time of year is always a time when I get deep with my remembrance of Jeff, it’s Samhain season a time of death and purging, so it’s apt that Jeff as a Scorpio is always at the forefront of my life during November.

For those who don’t know him, Jeff was a musician who came to some prominence during the 90’s. His first and only studio album Grace was released in 1994 and he sadly died by accidental drowning in 1997 at just 30 years old. I found Jeff in the Summer of 1995 and he has travelled with me ever since. I think of all the ‘famous deaths’ of people I admired, Jeff is the one that lingers and cuts most deeply.

I have a very otherworldly relationship with Jeff and I think he had a very otherworldly relationship with the earth and its inhabitants. Jeff has a place on my death altar, he has become part of the pantheon of ‘other’ that I work with magically. The archetypes he embodies for me (The Lover, The magician, The creative, The artist and The Revolutionary) are extremely powerful and can be used magically to invoke and transform aspects of myself that I’d like to bring forward.

I light my Jeff idol candle and speak to him often. I love how magic can be so flexible, it doesn’t have to involve prescribed Gods and Godessess and fifty million trinkets. If it moves you, use it. With Jeff it’s easy, his music is the ritual. It contains light and darkness, it transcends just being a nice tune with a hook. It is incredibly healing and cathartic. I have released love, rage, frustration and a myriad of other emotion with his music alone. His voice and how he used it, made it a conduit, a wailing banshee of pure feeling, it feels like being baptised by chaos and fire and light.

I truly believe that Jeff was one of those magical beings that transcended mere ‘human-ness’ I see him as an Undine, a water elemental, he just poured that watery emotional energy into the world. As sad as his death was, it was time to go home and the waters reclaimed him.

Today on his birthday, I’m listening to his music (although listening is maybe not the correct word for it) I’m absorbing it in some kind of mystical osmosis and allowing it, like a river, to wash through me. Jeff also reminds me that sometimes humans are magical and beautiful creatures and that we are capable of wonderful things. A useful reminder that fosters hope. A sigh of relief when things feel heavy. He is the lighthouse to which I sometimes need to steer my boat.

I can’t really adequately express what my internal voice is trying to say because I can’t find the words that do it justice, whenever I put words to paper regarding Jeff I always get these half baked water metaphors (as seen throughout this post) but maybe that’s how it needs to be, Undine Jeff infiltrating with his watery medicine.

Happy Birthday Jeff Buckley. You marvellous wizard. You are missed.

Shedding Skin

In my previous life before the initiation, I was not very honest with myself. Or rather, I let who I was, be extinguished and then moulded by voices of bitterness and bullying. Voices that wanted me, a smart, independent young girl with a free spirit be bowed and subdued by a scared and resentful toxic male.

I carried this heavy and biting energy with me throughout most of my life. A fire of potential and purpose dampened to smoke. My heart desired creativity and the catharsis of sharing art and putting my heart into the world, but as a young girl of 7 until I was a teenager and able to exercise some sovereignty over where and with who I spent my time (alas by then the damage was done), I was receiving messages that I was not ‘good enough’, that my pursuit of the things that made my heart joyful were “not a way to earn a living”, that my desires were “silliness” and women like me who were “too clever” should be “seen and not heard”.

Drilled into small-ness and rendered invisible by an insecure narcissist. As a result of this I always jumped around from job to job, never quite scratching the itch inside me, not really knowing what was missing. Jobs that made me depressed and retreat further into myself. This reflected in my relationships, either being too closed off by walls or too needy for acceptance and love. I tried many ways to find who I was, to find the missing piece of my complicated inner puzzle. Some more successful than others. Learning and teaching Brazilian percussion being a particular high note, getting lost in the rhythm, removing my logical Air brain and those dissenting voices gave me a peace I’m still sorry I walked away from. But I’d always get to a stage where I was just getting good and I’d shut off the tap. The fear of success and/or failure, of not being ‘good enough’ steadily dancing through all my endeavours.

Now I’m here ten years since being reborn, I’ve used my fallow time of being buried to dip my toe in a few directions and it always comes back to being creative, giving of myself into something and putting it out into the world. Gardening became my outlet, creating life and beauty that no one ever saw because I couldn’t ‘people’. I needed solitude, I needed to gather. For eight years I wrote a blog about my accident, trauma and recovery, I retired it when it reached a natural end but also because I thought it was bad, I was reaching out into the void and no one was reaching back, so I concluded it was because I was ‘lacking’ somehow.

As I hit the ten year anniversary of my accident I began to feel that familiar feeling again, something welling up inside me that wants to be let out. A desperate urge to now ‘do something’ after 10 years in much needed limbo. A burning desire to take what I’ve learnt and make something with it. I’m feeling ‘out of sorts’, restless and impatient. It brings me back here, to writing, a place that feels comfortable for me. I have a need to be heard, to hear others and to share with those who understand, how after such a rite of passage, you are never quite the same again.

It scares me to try again, to invest energy into something that I abandon just as it finds its feet, but this time I’m coming armoured. This time I don’t care about being good, I care about being authentic and indulging the part of me that wants to write. The voice that smothered me for so long no longer has any power. I want to test myself, my ‘silliness’. I want to see how I can grow not just plants, but community and love, using words. To finally satisfy my longing for creativity and to let that little girl in the picture below know that what she has to say is important, that her voice can be heard, that she, in her robust and courageous little body, is enough.

Photo from the 1980’s of a young girl wearing blue trousers and a blue top and grey boots. She has a handbag over her right shoulder and is stood on brown patterned carpet in a room with a brown table and a brown cabinet with bottles of alcohol on it.
Me sometime in the 80’s. Surrounded by a sea of brown decor.

on being buried

Content warning: themes of death and dying.

It’s Samhain here in the Northern hemisphere. Everything is dark, cold and damp. The high energy and heat of Summer feels long gone. I love this time of year, the Celtic new year, the beginning of Winter when all is slow and quiet.

I feel in many ways my own life runs parallel to this time of year, the alchemy of trauma catapulted me into my Autumn years much sooner than I anticipated, adding the change of Perimenopause to that just beds it in deeper.

I used to personify Summer, all frantic and full of go go go. A lot of that was masking, trying to avoid staring into myself so I wouldn’t have to be alone and in the stillness with my feelings and thoughts. That was a place I did not want to visit, it was vast and deep and scary.

I was also terrified of death when I was younger, the thought of it used to create a rush of adrenaline up through my body that made me want to run and hide in a place where I could escape it. I couldn’t and wouldn’t entertain it. Combine that with our reluctance in the West to even talk about it or acknowledge it and to pretend that it won’t affect us and it’s a pretty potent mix. So Summer was safe, it was bright, it represented life. The dark half of the year was barely tolerated and I dragged myself through it every year just waiting for the first touch of Spring.

Then Autumn swept in, or rather it cannoned in, exploding the lid off my neatly boxed emotions. Everything shot out and left me breathless and spinning. I was completely shattered, shards of who I was, the walls I’d created and what I thought I ‘should’ be all went pinging off into the aether. My efforts in the early days after my accident to gather it all back in and shut the lid were in vain, there was absolutely no way that person was returning.

Then came the burying,

my first era gone. A ghost of a person floating around the earth, floating around the house. Not in my body, just observing from the in-between. The pain of losing myself so raw and heart wrenching. Everything I was, just lost. The grief of this time was all encompassing, a distressing and harrowing place where I was isolated but also completely at a loss to what was happening and how to stop myself from fracturing more and more into the abyss.

Being so unprepared due to my earlier reluctance to tolerate uncertainty and tolerate myself meant that I could not cope, I could not escape into masking by ‘doing’, my accident had taken my energy, my physicality. All I had left was inertia and wall staring and this meant I was finally facing myself. It was overwhelming. I had no capacity to contain this wild wolf that had been unleashed.

I wanted to die.

After a few gut wrenching, distressing years of this is when my relationship with Death started to change, for a while it was only the death of sleep that gave me comfort. The pause of the coma-like state that helped me endure being alive but not alive. It was around four or five years post accident that the fight I’d been putting up to ‘just get better’ was spent and it was then I started to release my resistance to being ‘ultra-alive’ (to stave off Death and Shadow) and slowly fell into the entombment that the darkness offered.

It was here I began to walk alongside Death, I began to talk to it, to understand it. I realised that honouring the archetype of Death allowed me to accept my second epoch, the new me that was forming from the long arduous labour of rebirth. Death has enabled acceptance of self, ALL of it. My spiritual work now involves Death, I embody the Hermit, the Cailleach in her wild elder self is a teacher. I look to Death when things get tough. Nature is imbued with Death, it is everywhere. I am not love and light, I do not spiritually bypass any longer. Life is gritty and earthy and dirty and has Shadow, we deny ourselves such roundness and richness when we push it away.

I’m lucky because I got to die to myself and I came back. This has given the gift of clarity and a rootedness I never had. You don’t go through the initiation and come back the same person. So welcome Shadow, welcome Death my greatest teachers. Without whom I would not have such strong boundaries or compassion or courage.

Am I still scared of death? Sometimes it can still grip me in the dead of night but what is more scary was my first life where I gave away my power and didn’t honour myself.

The Transition is not smooth

I’m 45, not old but not young. A weird in-between place made even weirder by trauma and near death. I’ve spent the past 10 years since my accident, pulling the threads of myself and trying to weave them into some sort of coherent cloth. A cloth that serves to honour who I am now but also allows me to be ‘out there’ in the world.

Have I been successful? Well that depends on when you ask me. I may have found myself and learnt to love and respect myself but the bit about functioning in the world is not something I think I’ve figured out yet. Or maybe I have and most others are doing it wrong?

Just when I’d righted the ship and learnt to have balance in amongst the turmoil of heavy grief and post traumatic stress I am once again being thrown into the initiation of change with Perimenopause.

I’m suddenly lost in the woods again.

The feelings that are getting unearthed are a throwback to those early days of trauma, a mixture of feeling aimless, hopeless and alone. I’m not sure I’m ready for another rite of passage through the fire. The last one was so hard and so hollowing. Am I full enough to be emptied again?

There are moments of clarity where I know that this is another transition from one state to another, an induction to my elderhood and like all initiations it will not be easy. I would like to walk this path without treating it like a disease to be medicated and bypassed, instead letting it power through me and take me to those corners of myself that still need revealing.

Things feel so full of paradox right now, I find I’m craving community, to talk with wiser souls than mine about what is to come but I’m also longing for solitude, for the cave walls to shut me in and free me when I’m ready to unfold. I know myself yet so unsure of who I am at the same time. Happy standing still but yearning to move forward to something.

The pull of The Hermit making me root down and the call of Cailleach pushing me to shed another skin and inhabit the body of the wise woman who I still can’t quite find.

So here I go again, becoming an edgewalker once more. Neither here nor there. Setting off through the trees, the Fools journey, tentative, unknowing and vulnerable.