Start Again: Reimagining Reconciliation

So, Mum died. She had suffered so terribly for so long that her last weeks of peaceful deep sleep and a quiet slipping away without fanfare was the most perfect end to a very complex and, at times, tragic life. Initially I was elated, for her, for me, for her soul free to dance again with my father and her lost babies and her beloved dogs. I was high on the beauty of death for a long time. I found myself stilling into a mourning practice of long walks and folding cranes. Provided I stayed contained within myself it remained a blissful if emotional state. Contact with other humans was a risk; they might jolt me or misread me. So I stayed internally very very still.

After 40 days of this mourning I began the pathway of return, picking up again the threads of my life. The hustle. Due to some unfathomable miracle there was an amount of money that came to me from Mum's estate. Enough for a new hoover and a holiday but not much more. It gave me a taste of what life might be like with "enough" in my bank account for a time. It took the pressure off me to hustle for a living. For a very short time, of course, because that finite and precious amount is now gone.

The holiday was a different kind of "trip" to the one I imagined. In truth I have holidayed very little in my life. I travel with work but I never ever relax. I had high hopes of meditating by the ocean and sleeping all day. Instead, inevitably, I skidded in sideways putting my out of office reply on at midnight and flying at 4am. My nervous system was tamping, as they say in Wales, at the prospect of switching off and doing "nothing". I went to walk the Camino de Santiago to complete what was disrupted by Covid in 2020 and instead of settling into the comforting ways held by the trees and walking in beauty and grace, I was raging.

I then went to Greece for a recovery conference and after months of self-contained inner processing and wondering where all my friends had gone, here I was with 100 fellows and nothing but loving kindness and hugs. I wept and wept at the raw painful ecstasy of being held and my friends there held me, one holding my face for the longest time watching me just flood with tears and pain. I also danced like a demon on the last night, proving myself as the eternal party animal in this sober environment I danced greek style in the circle, shaking my bones and whooping while they applauded me on. But when the party came to a close in the small hours I couldn't stop, I begged them all to keep dancing and I lay panting and spent spreadeagled on the dance floor weeping once more as someone sang Georgian lullabies through the karaoke mic.

The grief of leaving that human connection bore me across the Saronic Gulf to Agistri where I took a small ocean front studio and for 5 days just quietly lost my mind. I took long walks in the pine woods and was embraced by Olive trees, I swam in the ocean at sunset and I was followed on my electric rental bike by something I swear was Eagle sized. These extraordinary privileges registered in my psyche logically and I retain them now as treasured memories but in the moment, well... I was not in the moment. I was locked in a depressive vault somewhere deep inside. And when I stopped moving, when I withdrew from my more-than-human kin for this longed for rest, I just was awash with the most inconvenient grief.

As I made my Return. First to Athens where a friend took me to show me the sights. Then back on the plane, and home to my dogs and cat and beautiful cottage, I started to feel better. The air-hostess that served me breakfast was called Persefoni and I smiled wryly as I realised my trip had been a sojourn in the Underworld encountering all the demons I suppress with workaholism. My home itself rejoiced at my return, I reverently touched the rock guardian in the slate mantelpiece and sank gleefully into my own bed while my dogs danced jigs around me.

Since coming home, a few days ago now, I have been caught in the cruciform stasis of my own process versus productivity. I literally have no money left now, I don't regret it one bit, hoover and holiday would surely have been what Mum would have wanted. I felt the urgent panic of the Hustle waking me urging me to work but the soft animal of my body, as Mary Oliver would say, did not have hustle in it yet.

Oh no, it seems that I have only just begun to grieve Mum. I see her photo on my altar and waves of deep longing crash in me. For herself, for the Mum she wasn't, for what could have been, for what was, for the struggle, for the overcoming. But also for my purpose, my identity, the predictable and consistent grind of caring.

So, how then, can I make a fucking living? I know how to hustle and I know how to grieve but I do not know how to do both at the same time.

The answer came through yesterday in conversation with the wonderful Pat McCabe, Woman Stands Shining. I had the opportunity to ask her a question and I asked her about Ancestral Atonement and how can we, Europeans, make fair restitution and reparations for the healing of the collective soul for the legacy of Empire? She told me my question went right the heart of what the matter is right now. And she thought about it momentarily before saying...

Reconciliation cannot come from the intellectual mind. Some things are irreconcilable. The slave trade is irreconcilable, the treatment of the first nation and indigenous peoples is irreconcilable. The mind cannot reconcile the irreconcilable. Perhaps, she said, it is about making amends to Mother Earth first and she also said that Ceremony goes beyond the thinking mind. My body jolted in the recognition, and in the validation too of the path I've been walking. Later another person asked about Water and Woman Stands Shining suggested a 30 day commitment to making offerings to water.

For those who followed the recent 6 months of the Lost Rites: Encountering the Mystery series this will come as absolutely no surprise. The Waters were ever present throughout the weeks and months of our shared inquiry. Oceans, rivers, deep lochs, the Sounds of water, Orcas and then internally the fascia and fluids of the human form and the tides of Grief.

And I just quietly realised for myself that I need time and space to do the Real Work. The days of hustle are over, I have to surrender all these fears of homelessness and destitution that are very real and have repeatedly dogged my life to date and I simply have to SLOW down, I have to start my days in reverence of Life and I have to converse with the Waters. I have to admit to myself, to my sense of God and to any human that will listen that I need HELP and I do not know how to make a living and grieve at the same time but if I have to choose one, I can only choose Grief.

And it came very clear to me that this newsletter and membership that I started has to be the anchor for all else that I do. I need to build a membership so I am communally funded, many many people contributing small amounts means I am free to wail into the river and report back how it went. I can grieve for myself, for my Mum, for the World at this time and I can do it simultaneously for my own process and on behalf of those who do not have the privilege of grief.

And I take Woman Stands Shining's invitation to shift the focus into reconciling first with Mother Earth and allowing Ancestral Atonement to other humans and more-than-humans to flow from there. So, I have renamed this newsletter and shifted its focus only slightly. It had previously been dedicated to Peace Building in Communities, it very much still is but I am widening the scope of what I define as "communities" to what I have always known, but shied away from being explicit about... that we are in community with ALL of Life, all of our kin and not just people.

The Peace Building in communities that I felt called to write about will still be here. But I have for now come to the new name of "Reimagining Reconciliation / Dreaming Pathways in (seemingly) Irreconcilable Times" and all I can commit to do at this time is take it to the River, to the Ocean and the Lakes and come back and write about it. And I just pray that 1000 or more people maybe might consider that worth $5 a month to follow...

Thank you for your patience those who subscribed in June and then received my silence. I am back, slowly and gently, but I am back.