she spins a new pattern. her song is sticky yet true. delicate yet strong among the thorns.
she spins where it is sweet.her story catches me among the brambles. what is YOUR new alphabet? what story are you now weaving? what is the new pattern emerging within your life?
you are changing! your life is woven by love. love weaves through every letter and every space. stories can be sticky when you are the fly caught in the web. conditioning and karma are true. the wheel is always a wheel. it turns and turns and turns. and you choose to stay on or walk off. stories are also miracles when you are a spider. you co-create among sweetness and thorns. you eat the pesky nuisances with great grace. you are patient. you wait. and wait.
and spin again a new song.
Image: Penelope and the Suitors, John Williams Waterhouse
You know why I love fairytales because they spin a good yarn which always leads us to the center of the truth. We may not be able to see it clearly with our cultivated eyes. Sometimes it is good to have the eyes of a peasant. So much sophistication in the brain and we lose our seeing. There comes a time when we must put back the rose colored glasses. No, not the ones that tell lies and paint the world a hue that it isn’t. No, the glasses that see the story of the rose inside of the mystery. Fairytales are deeply imbedded with insights. Initiations. Alchemy. Spiritual Truths. And inside of those mysteries, are places where we can insert ourselves, and lean in to the story even closer. For example, the story doesn't tell us what happened to Red while she was in the Wolf's belly. The story doesn't tell us what happened to Beauty's soul while she was sleeping. Or what happened to Persephone when she was taken to the below below by Hades.
Those parts of the stories are mysteries unique to place, time and each individual Red Riding hood, Beauty and Persephone out there. Your soul goes through these same passages. Cyclically. Seasonally. In times of chaos and strife. In times of confusion and in times when we answer the call to transformation, or are sideswiped by it smack dab into a wolf’s mouth.
Image: Amelie Flechais
I know, and you know that the subterranean doesn't always have a language. It has sensations. Picture images. Watery. Dreamlike. Windy. Turbulent. Echoes of archaic memory, ancestral memories, collective memories. Bones of stories once told and distorted by too much sun or too little sun. We are conditioned out of seeing the story in its rightful heir. We are conditioned to project our modern interpretations onto a language that was born from another time. To step into the story, to step into the tale, and to understand the way it works upon us, as we spin the raw material of our lives into the story of our own making, fate, destiny, past, present and future and mystery woven mysteriously within, we must step into a different kind of seeing, sensing, hearing and understanding. We must allow for the space of the story to breathe. Through the breath of the wolf. Or the strange night air on the night the 13th fairy hurtled her curse. We must listen below how we know to listen. Especially as this world becomes more and more mechanized, cultivated and spun. And it will. It is getting over processed, overseen, over storied. We have to travel under the story and slow the spin way down and step onto a different land. A more watery way of listening.
Image: Anette Pirso, Mokos
Sometimes we step inside the fertile darkness with awareness of what we are doing. To listen and understand the how of the story working her way, embroidering her roses upon our skin. And we wait in the dark like seeds in earth, souls in chrysalis form and we wait and wait and wait and we do our work and we wonder if it is working. Sometimes the medicine is bitter and it hurts. Sometimes we have to be silent for 7 years or more and make clothes out of nettle fibers without speaking a word about what or why we are doing. Sometimes it is simply an inner blind faith. You know what your soul is on about, whether you want to believe it or not.
Sometimes it fragments us and shatters our former identities. Soul is potent. Story is too. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes there is no medicine to take away the pain. And sometimes, the soul sets up these dark story passages and initiations, changes and transformations for its own growth so we can evolve and emerge differently. and one day, be it from a kiss (no, it doesn't have to be from a significant other it can be the kiss of loving something in yourself) or we are rescued by a hunter (we rescue ourselves by keeping our arrow pointed towards the bull's eye center of our soul's purpose). Without realizing it, we integrate shadow with light, light with shadow. Repression with the present. The inner masculine with the inner feminine. Soul and ego or fill in the blank for your specific contrast/polarity that you are weaving as your Great Work of Alchemy.
and BOOM!
BOOM!
we are released. we are liberated. and it is a different kind of happily ever after because it begins again on a path that looks like where we started ago ago. The spider is blown off the web and she crawls up a new tree and begins to weave again.
we are free. and we stand solid. emerging with quiet, humble strength. fierce knowing. wisdom. experience. maturation. blossoms and wings. a tapestry showing the strange fibers and fabrics and a golden thread weaving in and out from the edges to the center. our scars reveal the work of our true beauty.
Collage: Stasha Ginsburg
All this to say: Story Medicine is Divine magic. Fairytales are not meant for children only. Happily ever after, while it may sound trite is a true step on this path of human becoming in terms of our own fierce and undying loyalty to loving ourselves, all of ourselves, every ounce of ourselves and our stories. The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the strange, the distorted, the forgotten, the fractured, the messy, the awesome and the ones that detail the becoming. Scraps and into patterns and into shapes and into wholeness.
Perhaps we all have a bit of the Ancient weaver within the seams of our souls, a Callieach at the end of the world, where ego and soul are etched together on a loom. She weaves and weaves while the trickster Raven pulls out the threads with its crafty beak, so that the story doesn’t end mid way, unseen, unknown. Un-integrated. She weaves it again and again and again, while trickster pulls out another thread, flying off beyond the sun, where we are gifted the possibility of transmutation. From out of the suffering, compassion. From out of the pain, acceptance. From out of the sorrow, love and understanding. Truth and freedom. From the domestic to the wilds and back again. Howling the Whole Story into a once unseen perfection.
Image: Call of the Wild, Unknown