Full Moon's Answer: Rites of Rest

The weather that followed my last post mirrored to me the midseason tension I was feeling in February’s new moon. Dark grey clouds tumbled and wrestled with sunlight throughout the next 2 days—bringing more snow, bringing streaming rays, bringing these energies simultaneously across this big sky. The land mirrored to me this between place I found myself in and presented its own mandorla—coexisting above and around us.

I am caught, Dear Reader, in wondering how much to follow Hemingway's advice and “open a vein” to you. What is useful for me, for you, for participating in raising of our collective consciousness to wholeness? For, truth be told, my heart has been beyond tender right now—my body exquisitely talking to me of the stories she carries, her intelligence. And my psyche has at times felt like it is splintering into unmanageable pieces. So I’m unsure what is useful to share. And yet, in my most intimate of circles, I’m aware that everyone is doing some fundamental shapeshifting right now, though the shifts may look and feel different. My last post felt like it could not embrace the real heart of the matter or the splinter in it—though I poked around for it—I could not find the splinter at that time. It was still doing its work of penetrating, irritating and inflaming, not ready to be discovered, removed, for the closing of the wound. Still, when I look back at my personal intention for February’s new moon: to love myself to wholeness, I think this is really what I was also trying to offer. The practice of holding the polarities of my experience, the practice the sky so beautifully mirrored to me: energetically putting snow and sunshine into one cauldron and letting them boil and simmer.

Last Fall, a couple local friends and I set an intention together to re-integrate lost, splintered aspects of ourselves. Of course, we didn’t really know these parts. We didn’t know who we were asking to come to dinner and then stay, forever. So who we envisioned would show up, and who is actually knocking at the door is taking us into depths we could not, would not have been able to predict. But the invitation was real—a big prayer—and so they are here. We are Peter Pans chasing after our shadows, hoping our Earth Mama will help us to sew them back on.

When she knocked a second time, or when I knocked on her door perhaps—she revealed a little more of herself, of her story. My body showed me how she had died when I was a little girl. This piece of me splintered wholly. Left for dead, hanging, waiting for someone to come back and take her down, give her rites, put her to rest properly after 30 years. Finding ways to wander with this on the Land, the land has helped me return her to the Earth, for her to be received in safety—how she may, if she may, re-emerge still remains to be seen. She is being put to rest in Winter, perhaps she is also Spring’s seed.

As encouragement, I want to say how much the Earth is leading me and holding me in this process. Leading me through the experience of fear in my body through places I find myself in out in nature, leading me in my experience of death in coming upon the discarded bodies of my Elk and Bunny sisters, bird brothers. In finding ice-encoated cottonwood leaves in the creek, frozen, asking to thaw, to continue their journey of death and rebirth in the land.

She shows me the story—the tether to this missing part of myself. She tells it with me and then she also asks me to see a bigger story, a bigger unity, a contented empowerment of my collected self, of the collective. She says the story is the fishing line—commit to reeling this part back in, so as not to entangle myself so greatly in yet another story*. She also reminds me that my body is the land and the bodies of my brothers and sisters are the land too: listen to the intelligence of your body, their bodies, she says.

So here is the invitation.

What needs to be put to rest now? What, or who, needs a ritual, a rite so that new life may emerge beyond this death? The task then, is to do this on the land, to honor what has been and to surrender to the process of renewal that is beyond us. But we can ask for that too, that this offering of surrender may nourish our Earth, this Mystery—and that if it is ours to harvest later, we may see the seeds of that offering grow. Trust in the process, trust that you will be held. Trust that this Mother we all share wants us to come back to wholeness.

*For more about fishing for lost parts, read "Skeleton Woman" in Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes