Our Collection of Selves

I love this face. 

This is the face of the one who prayed for, longed for and brought into being the one who sits here now typing these words.

This is the face of one at the intersection of then and now, holding at the precipice of what was and what was next to come.

We are our collection of selves, those transformed and decomposed whose lived experiences wrought us into the ones we are in the here and now, choosing what to hold and what to release.

This face is the one coming home, in the pause, in the terminal moments of Maiden before the rise of the archetypal inner Mother really began in earnest. 

This physical journey in these lands last summer was a part of the liminal space between, the beginning of the end of a phase in that confusing mixture of being neither one, nor the other. The amorphous chrysalis phase of being an imaginal soup and feeling mostly undefined and uncertain about what emerging would look like or how to accomplish it. But in true mirroring of nature, there is no accomplishing in the amorphous soup of that pause. There is only learning to be in the process, learning to trust that something, however slowly, is unfolding. There is only surrender to that transition of letting one life deconstruct so that something, without having any idea what that might be on the other side, can formulate. Interfering does not help, though it is tempting. The start of my Saturn return came with a jarring disappearance of my usual creative process, to such a degree that I have, at times, felt very abandoned by it. Though not a complete absence I was certainly not used to waiting for words to come and being met by none. It’s been like a two and a half year writers block for the most part. There was so much I wanted to ‘do’ about it and yet, most frustratingly, doing was far from the answer. As a dear friend told me near the start of this phase of time, ‘you’re just kind of going to have to live these next few years’. What she meant was this is a phase of being, not trying to overcome, not chasing an old version of life or the creative process, but just being in what is as it transpires. Patience is hard as hell when all you want to do is be creating and be in flow with your purpose and the life you visualize coming together. But when the chrysalis comes and wraps us up, there is no amount of trying or striving that will hasten the process. In fact, if anything, that kind of effort will short circuit things and slow the process down even more. Surrender, while it feels like the last thing our mind wants us to do, is the only truly coherent option. We have to dissolve, to die to something in order to ever arrive at the emergence of something new. In our greatest periods of transformation that can feel entirely self-annihilating and leave us particularly inclined to grasp at the familiar self that is ceding to what is being constructed from the raw materials of being broken down. But in letting that go, in letting ourselves exist in the no man’s land between dissolution and renewal, we allow the creative genius of the process to lead us to where we need to go without having to have a fully formed understanding of where that is or what it will look like. Rarely does this happen on our analytical timeline. We don’t get to schedule the chrysalis around what is ‘convenient’. This process is almost always a ‘Stop, Drop and Roll With It’ of the soul. It demands the maturing of our trust and faith to encompass the unknown and the mystery more completely. It looks like trial and error, like surrendering and then panicking and then reorienting to surrender again, growing that capacity over time and through practice. Ultimately, that trust is rewarded as the raw materials start to realign and the clarity starts to form from the confusion, setting the path before us in a new way. 

This is where I’ve been the last two and a half years, inwardly feeling on standby. Learning, surrendering, reorienting and coming back to trust over and over for as many times as I’ve fallen off. 

This is the face of one at the dawning of the clarity that comes on the other side. Standing on land that felt like homecoming in the way that bones settle when they feel the dust and clay that constructs them is all around. Content to be, to trust, to observe and to keep praying through the mystery to find her way back to the faith that even confusion has coherence and purpose to it.

I fucking love this face.