Grief and Sacred Rage
‘ When a woman is at home in her wildness, rooted in her instincts, and attuned to the voice of her deepest knowing, she is a formidable presence… (and) thunders after injustice’ Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves.
I sit here letting my body feel into those words, exploring where do they land and what wounds they are poking at . I can sense the rising deep within my cells, before those words make an uncomfortable home in my throat - a clear indication I have something to say and yet at the same time , nothing at all . And there is it - how much have we swallowed down, how much we have we left unspoken and what of my wildness have I sacrificed to fit in, to belong, to be socially acceptable.
And so when I recount my journey of reclaiming my Wild one this is where I start …. with abandonment.
When I was 5 years old - I watched a tree being felled, I can still feel the noise of the chainsaw vibrating through the air and I can smell a certain scent lingering on the edge of my breath and a strange sense of a something reaching out. I can still feel a panic rising in my chest and I can taste the word on the very end of my tongue - ‘STOP’. My little body was feeling so much and my heart, racing, filled with so many feelings and questions - Does the tree know its about to be cut down and killed, will it hurt that tree, does that tree feel pain, could someone do that to me and why are we doing this to that tree. I didn’t ask these questions, I didn’t shout stop - here I abandoned my Wild Self , the deep knowing in my animal body for the need to belong to my family. And that abandonment isn’t something I am ashamed of personally, nor anything I blame my family for, its more a disheartened recognition of how our western society forces us from a young age to make a choice between our wildness and our belonging.
And so I use this as starting point for where I abandoned my Wild One, my animal self , in favor of life of compliance, of fitting in with the Western ideology…. on the outside at least….. but this is what happened inside me … I was constricted. I was like a caged animal. There was a fire burning and burning , hot and strong, and every so often I would explode - it was destructive & scary, ….. and I was told my anger was bad and needed to be controlled and was a problem. It was not nice to behave in that way and to say those things and to act that way and so, my anger, much my like my animal self, was hidden by shame.
But ….. why should I not be angry, why are we not all angry? I would say if you are not angry there is a problem. Our world is being destroyed, our kin are dying, our Mother earth is begin raped and ravaged, destroyed for profit, our children are going hungry, our seas are full of pollution, are forests are burning and societies are failing, ……I could go on & on about what is happening and what legacy we are leaving, but we all know this and yet do very little.… in the words of my glorious friend Jane@ Wildmoon Wellbeing - I am ‘fucking furious'‘…… my sense is we should all be.
And so as you pull back the cover from this anger and fury what you find is is grief and love, all the times you did not say no, or yes, for all the times you did not stand up for yourself, for your children, for the tree who was cut down, for all the losses, for all the tears you could not cry and did not cry, from being strong when you need to fall apart, for all the times you kept quiet instead of speaking out. For all the times you passed up your wildness to belong, to fit in, …… and for not knowing for how to transform all of this into something powerful enough to make a positive change ….. to become that formidable presence that thunders after injustice.
Join Jane@Wildmoon Wellbeing and myself on Saturday 15th October 2022 at the Wellness Space, near Leominster for a day of Grief and Sacred Rage. Lets unleash our Grief, Our scared rage - to walk ourselves back home and into love.
Details can be found on my Facebook, or by following this link:
https://wildmoon-wellbeing.com/grief-sacred-rage
Stay Angry, little Meg’, Mrs Whatsit whispered. ‘You will need all of your anger now’ -a Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle 1962,