The Beautiful Mess
I am thinking about the thousand different ways to wear a story. Lighting my rose candle in a bowl of water, purifying my thoughts, I reflect on the stories that have been written by the gods specifically for me to wear in this lifetime. How do I wear my stories? I strive to wear even the most challenging stories with equanimity. I often wear my stories with joy. I have sometimes (more often than i like to admit) worn my stories as if they are a heavy wet wool coat, dampening my soul and spirit and adding weight to my body.
Image: unknown
Sometimes I trade in my stories at the used story store for a different story coat. It can and does change my perspective. But like my changing my hair color, my story roots eventually always come through. I've learned that being free isn't about denying or cutting myself off from my stories. Being free is also about wearing my stories and the responsibility I have to my stories and to my karma. How I choose to relate and respond to them is an act of magic. Right?
Yes. Right.
One of the greatest human tragedies I see in the world today is the inability to face life stories responsibly. Or directly.
One of the great lies of addiction --whether it is addiction to substances, sex, materialism or choose your own demon, is the experience that through the addiction, stories can be numbed, quieted, cut off, covered, killed, and/or stopped.
We cannot kill our stories. We cannot stop them from rooting through us. Can I be blunt? If we keep trying to kill our stories, we are causing self harm --and we can actually die. Or at the very least, destroy an aspect of ourselves that is essential to our beautiful, messy humanity. Our stories --great and small --tragic and beautiful --messy and immense, will
always always always
be a part of us. And this is part of the beautiful mess of being human. If we strive to be conscious gardeners of our stories, we can expect to grow new shoots of our humanity which blossom into new flowers, and new fruits which nourish and sustain us and our communities. Our stories can have natural deaths, as the trees drop their leaves in the fall only to spring new buds and leaves in spring. In that, is the secret of resurrection. Death consciousness dies and life consciousness is born.
There are billions of humans on this planet, and each of us has at least hundreds of stories, thousands of stories, seen and unseen. Felt and spun. Traumatic and healing. And everything in between. Many of these stories are stepping stones to our becoming --even the messiest, most tragic stories at the bottom of the pit.
How do you wear or honor or eulogize or creatively transform your relationship to your life stories? Your life stories have shaped you into who you are and who you are becoming. Because of and despite the Beautiful Mess of stories bubbling, steaming, distilling, and changing inside your story cauldron.
Image: Lucy Campbell
You are alchemy (transformation) in the making. From the compost to the lotus. So in a long and round about way
this brings me to a small but true truth:
Writing heals. Writing personal life stories naturally prunes and weeds old stories. It generates a compost that doesn't make us feel putrid and miserable --it uses that compost to generate new growth. It transforms the old into something new. A new relationship to self, to identity, to community, to world, to Soul, Spirit and the Universe. Ancient scribes knew that 'to write' was a form of magic. How else but to create the world?
In writing your personal life stories and spiritual autobiography, you are literally re-creating and re-imaginging your personal universe/world.
It is magic. Simply put: Writing the past RIGHTS it.
Rites of passage with a W
Editing your life stories creates happy endings. You may never jump up and down screaming, 'Yay to my suffering!' But you may just stop seeing yourself as the victim in the story stuck forever inside of the story; or you may resurrect some deeper truth or inner virtue that you never knew you possessed because you are no longer possessed by the story.
Join me for a one-on-one journey into the land of story, (life story coaching, or join my upcoming 4week intensive course: Little Red (w)Rite-ing Hood. Stay tuned for details!
Also, don’t forget to consider a mythopoetic Tarot reading. Weaving Star seeds of mythos with personal life story.
Reach out via messenger if FB at The Wild Matryoshka or email movingthestory@gmail.com to book a session. Sliding scale 75-150 usd for an hour session.
Star card, Crowley deck