The Cocoon (or, How Initiation Works) Part 4: The Third Meeting - WATER
“Let us, when swimming with the stream, become the stream.
Let us, when moving with the music, become the music.
Let us, when rocking the wounded, becoming the suffering.
Let us live deep enough till there is only one direction.
And slow enough till there is only the beginning of time,
And loud enough in our hearts, till there is no need to speak”
On the day I fear the most, I am invited into the most brutal of the four stages, the one which the previous two have been preparing me for.
Even though I see this day coming for a long time, when it finally arrives, it is too soon. I am not ready. I am craving the silence and solitude of the mountain top or the warmth from the fire, but they are nowhere to be found.
Instead I am called into the pressurized depths of the wild ocean, which has since time out of mind been a metaphor for the sacred womb of the cosmic Mother. The mothers’ womb holds no feeling of safety for me. In my own distorted experience, it is a place of soul suffering: of being absorbed into the all-consuming emotional vortex of the wildly unpredictable and rapacious wounded-feminine in all her longing, need and insistence on merging with my own energy; until I lose the place where she ends and I begin.
With all that I am, and all that I have, I resist and struggle against this. I am still struggling when I pull my truck into my baby sister’s driveway one chilly Friday night. There in the brisk coastal evening air, she reaches out to me in the dark and leads me to a seat by the crackling fire burning merrily away under the stars. She hands me a bowl of soup, runs me a fragrant bath and tucks me into a soft bed. My sister was born to swim in deep water and her steady gaze and her fierce love holds me fast against the freezing cold at this depth which is squeezing my lungs tight. This is her territory that I am in now, and she will not let it consume me. This is the only thing I know as I close my eyes and drift off to sleep in my cozy bed on her living room floor, holding the hand of my sleeping boy as he dreams.
“In the fluid horror of the dark deep, I am invited to meet my own adaptability, supple strength, fluidity and resourcefulness in the motif of the octopus. As I watch myself in octopus form, tentacles curling gracefully in and out, shifting with the current, methodical, slow, magical, measured my frightened, ragged breathing slowly give way to the kinaesthetic mysticism of measured inhale and exhale with the octopus, and the Big Task facing me starts to lose its power to halt my forward motion, to freeze me in place.”
Photo by Isabel Galvez on Unsplash
In and out, in and out, in and out. I am breathing underwater and not drowning. This octopus-vision becomes more real, at times, than my reality and I drift in and out of it for close to two days. As I find my own way to breathe underwater I am invited to notice that the alchemy that I am participating in has transformed this experiential exposure to all that is dangerous in the distorted or wounded feminine, to something I am willingly surrendering to, it has become a water-birth. The transformation, once it has done its work, is so powerful that I find I no longer want to leave the depths. All that was frightening and distorted in my own inner wounded-feminine is now being faced and surfaced and healed. And I marvel at this.
This return to the ancient power of the healed sacred feminine is my third homecoming, and yet it will not be my last.
The depths which once held such terror for me has now become another home, and I now understand that what we fear the most, we are eventually called to face or forever live a half-life – where something holds power over our soul in some way. This is now the third frontier I have been called into in under two months and its fast, much faster than I would prefer. But I realise also that its fast because Divine created me and Divine knows I can do it, and there is a timeline at work here which sits outside my own limited knowing and I am called to submit to it in humility and powerlessness. I discover I’ve stopped fighting such things. And so I continue to willingly co-create my descent into annihilation, tasting the freedom from all of who I was, on the other side now. So close I can touch it.
In the moment where I need to show up and do what must be done, the octopus energy merges seamlessly with my own and I am a woman again, holding steady eye contact with these boys of mine who began their own journey into the world in my own womb. I hold their hearts with a fierce and tender strength which has been gifted to me on the mountain, in the fire, and it moves like water between us. Reminding us that we belong to each other, that nothing will ever change that. That no power on heaven or on earth has the ability to separate us from the Love that holds us fast, holds us steady, even in the midst of unbearable words which have to be said, measured, tasted, held.
The miracle which happens in that moment is mine alone, and I will not write about it; for some things are too sacred to write down, as every Indigenous wisdom tradition will teach us. My initiation has now become theirs, and they begin to willingly co-create with me, in step with my breath, watching the inflection of my eyes, paying attention to how I hold my body. Listening to the steady beat of my heart as I tuck them in and read them stories. Grinning as they slurp the maple syrup from their pancake-empty plates.
With all I am, with every movement, every laugh, every gesture, every carefully-weighed word, I am telling them: it is all going to be okay. We are okay. We are held, we are loved, we belong. Their deeply attuned selves understand at some level that the Cosmic Mother has anchored their own mother deeply and my own fearlessness becomes theirs. They become wilder and more free than I have ever seen them. And I wonder to myself if this is what it means to be a mother, to walk into the fearful places first, so that you can show your children that there is really nothing there to scare them. That Love always has the final say. That this isn’t a dogma or a doctrine or a nice idea on a bumper sticker. That this is a gritty, lived reality which becomes a sure foundation from which to build a life. And I realise that these boys of mine, for whom I would lay down my life in the blink of an eye, are watching me very closely, and have not missed anything. Are paying attention to everything I do, everything I choose, and that it all matters.
The cocoon has passed me through its most brutal transition stage yet, and though I do not get to understand this at the time - I am through the worst. All that is left now, is the grounding.
All this unraveling, unfolding, unfurling is releasing me, releasing life, releasing grief and joy and deep pain and hope in equal measure and I understand now that part of the work of the cocoon is to crack us open so that we can expand to hold new frequencies, new pools of energy which we have not had scope for before. We cannot possibly understand this until it has happened to us, it is only available as wisdom in the rear-view mirror.
In the moment, it simply feels like dying.