Self-Care: Caring for the Bond with Self

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I apologize for stepping away for a while. I’m sorry I didn’t see you at the dance, didn’t show up for the ritual, didn’t speak to you in the kitchen or the check-out line, that I seemed more distant than usual over the phone, less perky when you popped into the clinic. I needed to breathe myself back to life. I needed one eye turned inward, one ear cocked for the whispering of my own blood in my ears. I had to go to the fancy grocery store braless in my pajama pants to get the fish, greens, and dandelion tea. Because when an underworld shamanic journey shows you that’s what will scour the slick walls of your throat and bowel until they shine like abalone, you make it happen.

I was terrified the whole time that you might not want me back, that I might fall behind, that the space I occupied might have healed over. But I did it. And I made it back. My hair’s a bit of a mess and I’ve got a funny scrape on my chin, but I woke up giggling this morning, giving my gall bladder a massage, and my eyes are twinkling in the way they do when I know everything’s going to be alright. It’s a welcome bit of crazy, a bit of fire, a bit of dysfunction that somehow makes the rest of this chaotic mess bearable, maybe evening meaningful. And I’ve brought back some words for you.

We need each other to survive with our skin so soft and exposed to thorns and claws, hailstones and midday heat. But living as we do so tightly bound it can be difficult to know where we end and others begin; where the scent in their nostrils becomes our inhale; where the tear glistening on our cheek becomes the sweat trickling down their neck; where their dreams become our dreams and we forget what we came here for. When it is dense and dark enough, and there are many layers of minerals and microbes packed together, we cannot tell our roots apart from the soil. It takes light and a great shaking to differentiate and excavate.

I remember when I began to shake. When I shook off the marriage that censored and neglected the wild in my belly. When I shook off the job that left me battling alone for a mission I myself was beginning to doubt. When I shook off the community whose blindness to what I loved most in myself was causing me to question it. The hardest part was, and still is, grieving the loss of the inevitable gems created by the pressures in each life that sloughed off of me – the moments of deep connection, inspiration, and creation – and encountering the despair over believing they are either hopelessly irretrievable or I have forgotten how to recognize or embrace them. The truth is that my suffering is rooted in believing those gems were who I am, and that by losing those moments, relationships, and circumstances, I have lost myself. And that because I couldn’t hold onto them before, I will never succeed at seeing myself lived fully into this world.

Our awakening requires a longing for our essential selves and for what the soft animal of our body loves, without shame, apology, excuses, or negotiation. Sometimes it takes isolation and uprooting to find a sense of homecoming in more fertile soil. So I despair that my unwillingness to take such a risk again means I am doomed to failure. But through feeling compelled this time to stay, I am recognizing the wisdom in what a former teacher once told me: It’s easy to change our circumstances. What’s hard is changing ourselves. It takes time to reclaim who we are, layer by layer, and great hope, courage, and endurance. Especially when we have lost ourselves, many times, and when we have lived enough life to know just how much the odds are stacked against us. But I have also lived enough life to know that I simply don’t have the will to live without my essential self, and that a commitment to that self must come before I can know where, and with whom, I belong.

When we know who we are, the doing overflows from that place and the opportunities come. But so often, we get it backwards. We think we need the opportunities to do the right things so we can feel fulfilled. These are difficult times, where it seems like in every moment we face impossible choices of how to allocate our time and energy between daily tasks, long-term security, and self-care. But self-care, as I am coming to understand it, is “caring for the bond with Self”. And if we do not put rooting deeply in ourselves first, everything we do is wasted time and generates more confusion and difficulty. We won’t be able to act with integrity. We will make choices misaligned with the real needs of ourselves and others. We will encounter road-blocks and failures, and be left empty.

But being rooted in self, no matter what happens, we have a sense of purpose and the pleasure of our own company. Yes – there are sacrifices. Mine are exhausting, numerous, and probably similar to many of yours. I consider it a privilege that I have been able to chase the dream at the center of my life. And I also know that the breadth and depth of my gifts bring a particular brand of suffering. If I were a mother or a merchant or an orator there would be a place on the list of careers for me. But a shamanic poet must always tend the ember within herself and weave hearths where she can, even when that means the grief of times when she is training her mind away from the way it loves to listen.

I am living the uniquely ecstatic loneliness of choosing to embrace who I am to literally keep myself alive, and knowing that who I am stands in opposition to the workings of the machine. My work is becoming about how often and how far I am pulled off center, and how long it takes me to realize it and find my way back home. That is how the ancient battle to survive plays out in me – no longer tooth and claw, stalking prey while watching for the predator, running from starvation and exposure – but living in the vulnerable, aching tension between nurturing my soul life and caring for my livelihood at home, at work, and in relationships. When and why do I surrender? When and how do I fight? When do I show up and when do I hide? What do I give and receive?

I look to the animals – their cunning, resilience, and foolish luck – the shifting of the seasons, the images that surface from the depths of my own silence whispering “try this” and the chills that erupt up my limbs in response: “Yes, that’s it”. This world can reveal to me through the intricate workings of its chaos how I might move in the spaces between. And it can bring me closer to myself by reflecting what I offer and require by nature. But it cannot show me what to do. It is my job, through living, to figure that out through the instinctual wisdom in my core, just as every other thing that has ever lived has done. Our true work is not surviving, or even creating or achieving, but remembering what we are in our core, in defiant rebellion against everything that would have us forget, and living from that place, for better or worse.

At the end of the day, we all have moments when we flower, when we nuzzle at the center of the pride, when our bodies become food and our bones become dust. From the vantage point of galaxies it’s all one beautiful dance of starbursts and decay. While looking out through these eyes, the moments that matter most are when I see my struggle so intricately, mysteriously, and gorgeously entwined in it all. I see how we move together, and how any victory, especially the small ones, in either my worldly life or the life of my soul, are a cause for great celebration. Because are all here now in this, figuring it out together.

Nancy

Read the partner poem to this piece, Savannah.