Waterlands
Returning Home After Ritual
I recently spent some deep time in the Waterlands in community, experiencing the incredible release of ritual grief work.
It has been some time now since I returned home from this rich and cathartic grief ritual, Heart Render, held on Salt Spring Island, BC. I was part of the ritual team holding space for participants to move through grief, and break open calcification of the heart in a variety of unexpected ways - tuning into playfulness and spontaneity, as well as the natural elements and our wild kin.
This ritual asked the question:
What does one do as the world around us burns?
The power of this experience is still settling, arriving back in my body, finding places to anchor in my day-to-day life.
I was the one to carry the old tale this time and offer the council of the story Incanchu’s Drum to our troubles. A story I first encountered in Why the World Doesn’t End by Michael Meade, that travelled over great distance and time to get to my ears. It tells about the regeneration of life after a great fire destroys the whole world, and the possible roles us humans might play.
Despite being in a facilitation role, I experienced some of the cathartic release of ritual - while holding, on one hand, I was also held. I am in awe of and integrating the powerful truths of this collective holding.
I can feel the ripples of a new way is emerging.
The Shape of Ritual
All rituals include three steps: the beginning, the middle, and the end. They are in their nature a form of container. They give us a holding that we can lean on. A pattern or shape that is predictable to contain the unknown of the experience within. They offer a setting for the unspoken within, mystery, the ancestors and other unseen helpers to arrive. They also provide thresholds and limits: both a deep welcoming and a clear boundary. Another way to describe this three-step process is breaking away from society, a time in the ‘wild unknown’, and the return.
Rituals share their form with rites of passage, and with Nature’s birth-death-renewal cycles.
We live in a time of great grief illiteracy, a time where we hardly know how to break free, to go out into these uncharted wilds, and if even we do, we often travel homeless, hungry for a compass or guiding hand and without a welcome back. Grief, loss, pain and the many struggles of our lives are not often understood as opportunities to grow into our gifts.
How could they be without eldership, without guiding symbols or cosmologies?
The Return
What might it feel like to be welcomed home after some time on the vast plain of our hearts, in the wilderness of our joys, straggles, grief, after years of travelling gathering tools? I have learnt that it is precisely this Welcome Back that we need to integrate the wisdom of our experiences, and help our gifts emerge.
In ritual as well as in deep nature connection mentoring, integration is essential. It does not mean returning to life as normal, it means receiving the council of those who love and know you.
This welcoming back home is rarely experienced in our society anymore. I am passionate about changing this, one small step at a time.
We are sent off alone on a path shaped like an arrow, to forge our individuality and chase goals that are always just out of reach. There are few people to catch our stories, perhaps a loving parent, attentive teacher, a coach who entices us to our edges, a partner…. If we are lucky, we find mentors or elders to help ask good questions so that we can transform our experiences into medicine. Only then can we offer what has been alchemized as a gift to our communities.
This is integration. This is the return.
Instead of an arrow, the pattern is a spiral one where welcoming back is as important as adventuring out.
Eldership and Bone-Knowing
Our elders used to mentor us in the essential skills of these cycles, rites and returns, holding the age-old forms, protocols, and stories to guide us. But we are bereft of such wise ones. We don’t ordain our elders any more as a friend just reminded me. We cast them aside as no longer useful in that arrow of progress that disregards what is ancient and time-worn, and favours the new and young. And so we find ourselves with adults in their 30s, 40s and 50s taking up roles of healing, life-coaching, guiding rites of passage and so fourth. That is ok, it is what we have. An elder of mine recently said, “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?” And, as chance would have it, we have the eldership of old tales, the myths, folklore and stories. As Michael Meade writes… “ Traditionally, the elders would speak in stories. Story also means “storehouse” and what can be found in stories is what keeps being lost and forgotten in the daily world. Sometimes a little story can open up an uncommon way of seeing a path forward.”
We also have our bone-knowing: an ancient ‘mineral’ sensitivity that guides us through its patterns into nature, dreams, poetry, and the arts. We are, after all, part of this natural dance, and with just a little nudge, quickly become good listeners, suddenly pick up threads of intuition, and begin to tune in to the drum beat of creation.
Earth and Nature Elements
The Salt Spring Ritual holding team that I work with is influenced by the work of Malidoma and Sabonfu Somé, as well as others like Francis Weller, Michael Meade, Randy Jones, Jon Young. Malidoma and Sobonfu share the teachings from their homeland Burkina Faso, West Africa of the Five Elements of their Dagara cosmology. These five elements, Fire, Water, Earth, Mineral and Nature are present both in rituals, within each of us, and throughout life. An understanding of how to balance them both within and without is essential to a thriving life for individuals and communities.
The Fire element sparks creation, connects us to our ancestors and our gifts, and holds our rage and anger. The Water element helps reconcile, create peace, experience flow and healing, and holds our grief. The Earth element is born from Fire and Water to make our home. It helps us welcome with its abundance of care and empathy, and also shows us how to hold boundaries. The Mineral element, held in bones and stones, holds story, symbols and structure. It helps us remember who we are and why we came here. The Nature element is a vitality of wild kin, shape-shifting, an animism, and the cycles of transformation. It helps us connect, transform, play, communicate.
At Heart Render, the co-designers, Cat Gibbs and Sofia Jain Schlaepfer were especially inspired to center the elements of Earth and Nature. Fire is essential to hold our rage, Water to to hold our grief, and Mineral in the very structure of the ritual, altars, shrines and story medicine. This time, the Nature element in the form of play, time outside in the land, questing and connecting to elements and wild kin was nurtured. This helped participants connect to our impulsive, instinctual child selves, loosened up our bodies and began that breaking up of calcified hearts. The indoor and outdoor spaces and the the flow of events were designed to have a village-feel with clear send outs and welcome backs so that we could viscerally feel the embrace of welcome and return, the Earth element.
The Gift in the Wound
How do we cultivate and practice welcoming back in order to transform the experiences we have had out there, either on the meandering and rocky path of life, or through after a ritual? We call the Art of Mentoring for Gifts.
When we can alchemize our trials, losses, or wounds into gifts, and these gifts are welcomed and needed by our communities, we can live a life of deep purpose.
We belong.
We open up to the truth that we too have a precise ecological niche and are part of the exuberant matrix of life.
Some of the ways I have learned:
We catch our stories: by taking the time to write them down in journals, tell them to one or more deeply attentive listeners. We must take care to choose someone who cares and knows us and has developed listening and questioning skills. And so we can begin by asking ourselves good questions: What actually happened? How do I feel? What does it mean? What is this telling me? How is this helping me? How is this helping me help others?
We can begin to track ourselves and our experiences, spending time regularly in nature walking or at a sit spot and paying attention, using all senses, listening to the elements and wild kin. In what ways are they reflecting back your inner experience?
Courting our dreams is another practice that is similar and draws us into a relationship with symbols, metaphors and deeper meaning. In both cases, with dreams and with nature, we ask What is dreaming us?
Entering the cycles of life: noticing and honouring the seasons, equinoxes, solstices and the traditions your ancestors held for each of these. In the Winter months, slowing down, going inwards, courting the shadow, gathering around the hearth fire to tell stories and mend.
Participating collective rituals or councils of tracking these cycles and the cycles of our own lives like The Renewal of Creative Path that support us in asking good questions. They deepen our awareness of what connects us, what synchronicities, dreams, helpers show up, what are the stepping stones that brought us here, what is the thread we have always been holding.
Joining circles or councils where the sharing of story and listening are held in an agreed upon form, with gratitude, protocols, perhaps too, the sacred. Learning more tools of deep listening both to your own stories and to others through conscious listening or Council practice or through Story Catching.
Story Council: We can court our Wild twin as mythologist Martin Shaw describes his book of the same title through the eldership of the old tales - ‘storehouses’. They arrived out of the earth 10 000 years ago right on time and help us tune into the trembling secrets at the edges of our vision. Many tell of cast out twins, stolen seal and fox skins, necessary thefts of Trickster, or moments when destruction and creation were held together. They help us find ourselves, our trials and joys in a larger story. They offer up medicine in exchange for our troubles.
Mentoring and Deep nature connection: time in nature with the help of mentors to guide us to our edges, to catch our stories, to learn to listen well to the breathing, dreaming earth. Learning ancestral skills, sit spot, nature journalling, survival living, fire quests, and vision questions will reconnect you with this vast community of more-than-humans.
Having even one mentor to guide you in this will be deeply life-changing. Mentors don’t have to be paid teachers or coaches. They can be friends, a parent, a colleague. The vital piece is an agreement to anchoring: returning again and again in an intentional way.
And so as I wrap up these musings and track my own process: why did I begin to write this morning? What impulse, need or intuition brought me to journalling? I remember that I was noticing that I needed more support in arriving back home to my day-to-day life, and integrating the experiences I had at the recent grief ritual. Writing in this way has helped me sort through some of my feelings and experiences, it it has helped me ask the question how did the ritual help me? How can it help me help others?
I remember that one startling nugget that keeps singing for my attention was that this ritual was co created, and an incredible experience of both holding and being held. I noticed that our ritual holding team is growing and evolving, we are learning not just to be facilitators and ritual holders but to become part of a dancing, regenerative container.
We have been handed a beautiful bundle of ritual skills, and we might not quite know where they will take us however as we show up with each of our gifts to initiate a three step process of ritual, the spontaneous unknown mystery will work on us. I began writing because I knew that I needed to welcome all of this home, home to my mind, to my heart and body, and back to my day-to-day life. I realize that I would like to reach out to some of my anchors, friends who are committed to listening deeply and with care and catch my stories.
In doing all of this, I can feel my experience grow, I can feel my gifts singing. And I feel a stronger desire to offer them to the world.
Curious to learn more about Heart Render Grief Ritual ? Contact us to get on our mailing list and learn about future offerings. Interested in joining my free intro session to Renewal of Creation Path and Story Catching this Tuesday Jauray 23rd, read more here. I’ll be adding a couple of more online and in person Story Council workshops as well too. Stay tuned.
Here’s some words I caught my last Sit Spot on the land and home that held Heart Render Grief Ritual ~ My heart is tender and grateful for all who stepped into this powerful, shared space. May the gentle fog keep you soft and slow.
Foggy Sit Spot ~ the ocean has crept into the hills
This ‘Madrona’ has stood by in my quiet questing dropping her blood ochre gifts, shedding her skin over and over as she does twisting and twining curled trunk like body dancing while she holds down the land in times of flood.
We are post first day of ritual heading into the morning integration and wrap up soon.
Grieving together can be a kind of ‘running towards the roar’ as Michael Meade describes facing what we fear, what has been hidden away, in his book, Why The World Doesn’t End. But we are doing it together. It can be absolutely stunning to many of us who have only carried our shadow bags alone.
What do we do in these burning times? How can we walk towards the coming storms?
The waters can take our tears, the fire can receive our rage. The gravity of this spinning earth never lets us doubt the weight of her love for us. The trees and birds, and all wild Kin show us how to root and shake, and dance and ferret ~ how to join in magic of transformation. And the minerals thunder like ancient drums in the very rhythmic patterns that hold it all together. Can you hear them? Can you hear the bones of the earth?
I too am stunned. And the waters on this foggy day say, gentle, gentle, slowly, slowly, spread your gaze softly and wide, be like fog, be like an ocean leaving the bounds of its tides and waves, leaving its salt like gifts for our ancestors, and rising to touch every curl of moss, be lost and everywhere all at once. Be too like ash after the devastating fires, so so quiet and floating, silent and grey, so light, and touching everything - so that your every sense will thrill at the incredible saturation of life’s vibrant colour when it sprouts.
~ ~ ~
Deep gratitude to the lineage of mentors that have carried the bundle of skills, and to the lands that hold us, and the peoples who have tended them for time immemorial.
I love to hear your feed back and am always interested in collaborations.
warmly and wildly,
Belinda White @ The Twining Trail