May New Moon: Defeatist Angel

Several people close to me, myself included, we all seem to be experiencing great duality this past week. Our bodies are tired by the work our minds and hearts are doing—engaged in contraction and expansion in rapid succession. Hearts swinging open and closed the way my toddler Robin opens and closes a cabinet door in gleeful mania just before naptime. The door swings open: relief, shut: grief, open: celebration, shut: tightening, open: connection, shut: control, open: surrender, shut: confusion, open: listening, healing.

It is also a time of incubation—of anchoring into and protecting what feels most precious, most vulnerable—holding onto what is sacred through the swings of paradox.

I have been working with a part of myself who has been named ‘the Defeatist’. She can simmer with whispers of failure or be quite dramatic in her “solutions” for suffering. When she feels what she loves is threatened, she threatens. She whispers or screams not to try, not to bother, not to lean in. She screams for escape. She is powerful, wild, and the mercy she offers feels violent. On a recent new moon, I went to find her on the land. She is burnt, blackened, save for the back of her whose wood is white, multi-pronged tree, difficult to get to on her slippery, sandy, hillside. When we first conversed, at quite a distance, I heard that she wished to be wrapped in red thread. This new moon, I found myself again with her, and an invited friend with a twin defeatist. Basket and bundles in hand, we wrapped her in the fading light with read ribbons and yarn—weaving her a basket, a nest, a place to catch dreams. 

I trust that she has protected me from great suffering in the past: she has an important reason for being. But we have been rather estranged and I wish for our relationship to become less radical. If she is the terrorist of me, I would wish for her passion and her heart, but to find a way to hold her, so that her reactivity might mellow and be redirected.

I do not know how this relationship of red ribbons and burn bark will unfold—for now she sits in her new dress, more conspicuous than before. As my friend and I wrapped her together in our witchiness, hanging bones, feathers, and chimes from her, I heard that I have to become willing to fail. Willing to lose, willing to grieve. Willing to be burned up. Willing to love. And willing to lose it too.

A day or so later, digging for one more tax form, I came across Maya Angelou’s poem Touched by an Angel that a friend had decorated and given me in advance of Robin’s birth:

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

-Maya Angelou, "Touched by an Angel"

I don’t know Reader, if you have a defeatist angel within you, a saboteur who threatens your bones, just as you wish to find courage in some new way, or in the daily soulful vows we make each day by being committed to life. If you might, and feel willing, perhaps you can approach them this New Moon cycle. Likely you may need to approach them as if you were trying to approach a wild animal who chanced across your path: Slowly, releasing mental chatter, dropping into heart and body, and with gratitude for what their gifts may be. If you choose to invite this relationship to be closer, know it is not to solve anything. Simply to begin to build an energetic bridge. So with great respect, I invite you to a conversation on the land with this potential aspect of oneself. Who emerges on the land to embody them? How do we approach with gentleness, respect and commitment this lonely and loyal aspect of ourselves? And are we willing to engage in what they may ask us to do for them—even though we may not understand it (i.e. wrapping a burnt tree with wild red thread.)

If you have been emboldened to form a gathering of wanderers, connecting with them may be a way to work with the isolation that a saboteur may be intent on.

Our first in-person Moab wander day will be this Sunday May 16th from about 8:30am-2:00pm. Please contact me if you would like to be attend Sunday or in the future.

With love,

Inder