Busy-ness, Grief and Coming Back into the World
Greetings from my quietness! I’ve been so caught up in the last few weeks with moving my stuff to a new location, participating in an intense online course about career transformation—it doesn’t (yet!) pay enough to quietly write and bring my ideas into the world so I have to figure out how to make those conditions possible—holiday time with my family, and then hitting the road for an 19 hour drive to spend the next little bit in Utah housesitting for my friend’s property! It’s been a lot and I’m allowing that to just be the state of things without throwing my creativity out the window because I’ve had to set it down for awhile.
So, suffice it to say I’ve not made much progress on my story. But time feels like it’s opening up again and next week I hope to have a proper post for you about it. The funny thing about this story is I think about it all the time. Especially over the holidays when we meet christian ritual at its loudest and sometimes loveliest. The complications this year of imagining that little Jewish Palestinian baby carrying so many hopes against the reality of bombardment and death occurring there today was excruciating. (Cease Fire Now!)
It all brought to mind the Celtic myth of Mis who I fist encountered in Sharon Blackie’s brilliant work If Women Rose Rooted. Mis suffers a great tragedy and becomes wild and mad with her grief. She flies away to the forest and frightens all the people until a gentle musician treats her like a human again and lures her back from her madness. I think in this modern world of ours there are many times when we feel our grief for what is happening, and feeling beyond our control, drive us into a sort of madness. Blackie writes so beautifully about what purpose those moments can bring. I thought I would share it here with you this week incase you need it too.
Sometimes, madness seems like the only possible response to the insanity of the civilised world; sometimes, holding ourselves together is not an option, and the only way forwards is to allow ourselves to fall apart. As the story of Mis shows, that madness can represent an extreme form of initiation, a trigger for profound transformation.
… Mis is the original wild woman, that archetypal madwoman who lives deep within each of us. She speaks for us all: for the rage which we cannot express, for the grief which eats our heart out, for the voices we have suppressed out of fear. This old story shows us a brutal descent into darkness during which all illusions are stripped away and old belief systems evaporate, and in doing so it suggests that the extremities of madness or mental breakdown, with their prolonged, out-of-control descent into the unknown, might offer us a path through which we can come to terms with the truth. Like other legendary geilta (the Irish word for madwomen) Mis is driven to extremity in her grief, shape-shifting into bird form, flying away into the hills and woods, growing fur and feathers, eating wild and raw food, leaving the intolerable world behind her. But a geilt cannot emerge from her madness and come back to the world until she has achieved some kind of personal transformation. Through her ordeal – her removal from society and her time spent in the wilderness – she must find a way to reclaim a more authentic sense of identity and belonging.
Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted
In this new year may we all find the transformation we need to reclaim the world we want. Back next week with more from Scotland and our story.
Susie