The Forest Lament

There's a storm outside, its name is Bert apparently. There was also a storm inside of me this morning, I just woke up in anxiety. The closeness of the strong gale winds and what sounded like hail on the roof left me lying in my warm bed with the dogs procrastinating about taking them out. It is, of course, especially on wild days best to tire the dogs in the morning so the later walks don't need to be so long. Weighing up in my mind my options for river, mountain, sea or forest, I came to the decision that the forest would be the most sheltered option and if a tree were to fall, I would hear and see it and avoid it as it did. So the dogs and I got in the car and drove up to the forest walks on the side of Mynydd Moelyci by Mynydd Llandegai.

There are people who are annoying me at the moment, some choice individuals whose presence on this planet is "obviously" the reason my mind was not at peace and my anxiety was up. I say "obviously" because what I do know, and what is more obvious to me, is that the itching irritability of the uneasy mind is one of the symptoms of unspent grief. It's just when IN the itching irritability at the inconsiderate idiots of this world it's a super addictive state and much "easier" to stay there than to transcend it. Again, "easier" is in inverted commas because the reality of turning and facing grief, difficult as it might be in the moment, is infinitely better than spending a lifetime restless, irritable and discontented.

The restlessness is addictive, grieving is the recovery. So I asked myself what the story was in this anxiety and restlessness? What was it that I was afraid of?

My right hand flexed and closed, and waved and wove as I walked along telling outloud the story of my troubles. Behind the resentments and irritability was a young voice in me, around 8 or 9, who was as just as frightened of things going well as I was of things going wrong. I knew, by then, how to handle crises but I was not comfortable at all with feelings of hope, optimism, pleasure or lightness. These were difficult to feel because they felt foreign, they were not rooted or lasting. I was scared to feel good things because they would soon be lost.

At this time in my adult life the significant majority of things are going much better than the few things that are not. It is all, largely, moving in the right direction. So many waves of identity have all crashed for me at once, starting with me finishing my term this time last year as a voluntary chair of an international organisation, the stepping up this year of the new facilitators for the death doula courses caused a creeping fear of my own redundancy, my mothers death of course and the crashing and breaking of that wave of identity as a carer and all round hard-pushed overwhelmed spinner of plates.

In the doldrums of identity beyond these crashing waves, I have been through those doubts and fears of my nobodyness and nothingness and uselessness... they're the easiest ones to name. Then came the fears of being harmful, toxic, repulsive and (yes crazy unconscious mind) fatal to some. A residual trauma left from losing my father as a child and fearing it was something I did that killed him. Oh the demons from nothing to fatal, these are the two faces of the narcissist ego. I am everything to the point of being "the destroyer" but I am also nothing. Balance comes in the humility (neither less than nor more than That that I Am).

But then comes the worst fear of all... what if things might just be going (gasp) well? What if things are improving, getting better, what if there is light at the end of the tunnel, or a fraying of the chrysalis, what if the fruits of my long labours are ripening, what if I am successful, what if things are good? Fuck. Maybe some people think this is insanity but I know many will identify deeply. Fear of success is much more elusive and pernicious than fear of failure.

My right hand held the story, then it passed the story into the left hand. The left hand holds the symbolism, my mythology. I stopped in the forest and started to groan. Long groans, the wind, the groaning trees, the echoes all my witnesses.

I saw an image of myself as a child, with all my toys in a semi circle in front of me. My plush toy seal collection, my old battered teddy, the occasional My Little Pony. These were my friends and my confidantes. In this image they were many, like a crowd and among the crowd of toys were also skulls, corpses and gravestones.

I moaned "Oh what a strong image!" I declared to the Wind.

The meaning was manifest for me, these were my childhood friends; the plush and the Dead. So are these fears and anxieties, these are also my friends, these forces that keep me small and safe and away from harm. I realised that if I am to break through to the next layer of self realisation I needed to give these old friends their Death Rites.

"I am not a child any more" I lamented, loudly (no humans were any where to be seen and the weather was wild) and "I have no parents any more" followed. Doubled over by a dead fallen tree I howled, "I am not a child any more and I have no parents now" "these are my childhood rites, these are my growth rites" "I need to send my childhood friends away, all that is dead needs to decay"

I sang that over and over, tears speeding down my cheeks and mixing with the rain "I need to send my childhood friends away, all that is dead needs to decay" and in my minds eye I saw all my plush toys in charity shops as new children found them and delighted in their cuteness and taking them home to be among their collections, I gave many to hospitals when I left home at 19 after they had sat miserably in a cupboard for years through my adolescence and I could see in my minds eye the comfort they were giving to children on the wards.

I saw the bones and the corpses laying down wearily on the Earth and sinking, I could see a small smile on their faces as they finally got rest. I saw the mulch and the humus of the rotting leaves reclaim them.

I reeled, I mean literally, turned on my heel. As if I were now looking for what would replace them, or someone to comfort me. But no, I was "alone", but for the cinnamon smelling decaying leaves and pine needles beneath my feet, the trees, the fungi and lichens and rocks. My dogs were snuffling at a distance. The lament was over and I walked back to the path and back to the car, silent minded, peaceful.

As I neared the car I remembered I had not yet made my ritual offering to the waters today so I took some oats from my pocket; the only water (other than the rain and all the water in all the beings of the forest) that I could see was a sink hole of something stagnant, where the run off from the non-indigenous forestry pooled, a slightly pungent, seemingly oily, orange coloured puddle pool which in this moment seemed really beautiful framed in vivid green fern.

All water is sacred. Even the tainted.

I cast my oat offering to it, bowed and left.

And I have not felt anxious since.