Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Young Tree

Sitting with eyes closed, for I don’t know how long, deep in the woods of Orcus Island, I heard a noise, which pulled me back to this world. I had been absorbing the silence of those woods, a desperately needed absorbing and silence. I was visiting a friend and staying with her and her family in their tiny, seemingly cozy home. She had a son from an earlier marriage and her and her new doctor husband had a fifteen month old boy.

I had escaped into the woods in need of quite and my own space. I was living alone in Santa Monica and deep into doing what I called my “inner work years”. Unwinding the craziness of my childhood wiring and starting to see it with fresh eyes. I was in a delicate part of this process when I decided to visit Stephanie. I’d met her when she was still living in LA several years earlier. A witch from a few centuries earlier if ever there was one. She was doing women’s circles and trained at the psychic school in Glendale.

The thing about unwinding the wiring of my younger years is that is order to let those experiences emerge and process I had taken down an old tougher shell to allow it. I was in a very porous place. They were in the midst of a storm, sometimes created when two people rush together, get pregnant, marry and have a baby before they get to know just how different their inner landscapes truly are. So here they are in the storm of those two landscapes colliding, in the part where no one really understands what is happening nor is either ready to admit this is where they are and that something is really wrong.

The beauty of it was the mirror for so many of the unhealthy patterns and collapsed boundaries I was attempting to clear myself of. The difficulty was my own issues over not getting things out in the open, as well as the under the table mean jabs that physically hurt that were flying all over the place in full view to only me. Stephanie did not seem able to discuss anything other then telling me all the things he was doing wrong. It was their life but at that moment all I knew was that I was walking in deep muck.

So out I went to climb to the highest point on the Island. It’s not a very mountainous place so this took too little time and I decided to stop and sit and breath in the deep and ancient peace of these woods. I remember how profound the silence was. I remember letting all the noise and insanity of their world and my reactions melt away till there was no noise. Bottomless stillness for I’m not sure how long….. till I heard that slight crack reach in and pull me back from the pool of silence. Just as I surfaced I slowly opened my eyes and saw two young deer standing only twenty feet away. No one moved, their large eyes peering into mine we just took in the sight of each other. Several minutes passed before they decided to get back to the business at hand, searching for young shoots and berries. I watched awhile longer appreciating the contract between this and the home I was staying in. I heard a voice in my head drop the following thoughts: “ You have taken yourself out of an unhealthy family dynamic. To do so you cut the entwined roots and removed the protection, unhealthy as it might be, for a time. You are now as a newly planted tree finding your own way, growing your own new roots. While in this state it is best to watch the environment you surround yourself with as you are very susceptible to strong winds and storms. But with time you will have your own deep strong roots and trunk and will not be bothered by much." It was my wish that day to maintain the peace of those woods in the midst of any insanity. Little did I know how much practice that would take?

Mary

1 comment:

annette said...

I loved this. You gave a voice to a feeling that i too have experienced. I want to visualize that my roots are deep and that me bark is thick enough. Thank you.