Soul Weaver

Full Moon, November 8, 2022

March 2019

“When we connect with guidance inside – the great force of our own psyche means to place Her paw on our shadows.  Shadows – our intrinsic nature.” 

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The painter sits before the blank white paper, thick and inviting.  She listens.  The grieving woman murmurs – gone, gone, gone.  Unbearable. Where we were woven together, there is a gaping and raw wound.  Death’s knife, exposed nerves raw threads, agony. Find me please. Find me, find me.  Large paw in the dark of me, pinned like a cub, under your shadow –   my shadow, anything to anchor me to life.  To soothe this pain.   Is she with me?  I can’t feel her, and I can’t feel him.  Only shredded. 

The painter feels the pain shuddering in her soft places like an echo.  Knows the longing for that great paw to land on her shadow.  She thinks, this task is like spinning straw into gold, impossible but for faith.  Or will the one who grieves make a bargain with the devil, at what price?  There is nothing more to give that would matter.  He came, he loved her deeply, he departed.  

The painter sits, falls into the vast white space. Who is this one for whose paw her grieving sister longs?  To be found in the dark vast place of shadow, to be pinned like a cub.  She wants to paint her into vision, into image.  As a gift.  Picking up the thick fat brush swirling it into a galaxy of blues, phthalo, cerulean, ultramarine, and turquoise she lays the paint down.  Covering the paper in dappled Mystery.  We disappear now into the making, into the paint, our minds our pain dissolving into the medicine.  

Out of this vast blue eye of Creation the Old One appears.  Woman, animal, bearded, maned and clawed, smiling. Her eyes are what kind is made of, her animal face beams a love that melts fear. In her hands a loom, from her ancient paps drip magic, ribbons of  nectar, of essence, their essence, blue and turquoise. Weaving together their love, the one who is beyond body, the one who is left behind, who has not yet found the door to his world.

Her face radiant, benevolent humor shines from her, anointing the woman who stirs the age old pot of mourning, an alchemy of love and loss.  The Mourning woman emerges, looks, knows that she is the den of this old animal woman.  She has traveled with me as a dream, my longing, my shadow, she admits.  Yet I do not know her.  Do I want to?

How can you smile in the face of my pain, how can you shine with life when I am so dead, she asks, confused.   Listen to me, leaning in, whispering –  Wild Survival shadows you. Always has.  That’s me, dearie.  Know this, the seed of radiance is wisdom, and the seed of wisdom is suffering.    

She plants her large furred and clawed foot firmly on the Mourning Woman’s shadow, nailing her to the cross she bears, her work.  The arduous task of grieving, of terrible descent.  

Of return.  

Just bring something back, dear one. There is so much hunger.