The singer of all songs...

Although my questions on sexuality were active in my summer explorations, so too was the re-emerging performer that Calleach had returned to me through the midwifery of my dreams, the alchemy of my healing. My artist had gone under in the early periods of recovering from my sexual trauma, the voice that had protected me had buried itself in the ground. I would learn in my shamanic studies in the autumn, that not only was it the voice that was buried, but it was some of my soul parts carrying the medicine of the way i expressed myself in the world. Without my tools, there could be no art. Without the art, there could be no expression. Without the expression, there was no medicine. The second shamanic weekend of this year in the apprenticeship, in the time of the east, we were to re-claim wounded parts of the maidens that continued to live in us all. When I journeyed on this, i was shown an array of images of dancing with my father as a child. My feet pressed on the tops of his, while we waltzed around the kitchen floor. My childlike eyes were wide with wonder and awe, at this magnificent embodiment of the masculine that was my dad.

Images of us singing together and him reminding me that I needed to stop singing from the front of my mouth. A crashing and choking of the unhinged beauty that flowed like a river from my essence, one of the first obstructions that would serve to teach me later the lessons I required to continue walking my path as a medicine woman. We were to journey to Brigid requesting a healing prayer, poem or song...it was no surprise that what I was given was indeed a song. "On the shells of broken dreams, lies a secret way of being. Hold your light up to the sky, Oh my child don't let it die. Don't let it die, don't let it die, oh my child keep it alive. Don't let it die, don't let it die, oh my child keeps you alive. Keeps you alive, keeps you alive, oh my child don't let it die". We would gather at the river and amongst the drumming, create prayer boats to send along the river, offering our incantations allowed and in the silent witness of our sisters. That by doing so the healing was complete, the blocks, undone...as the river's medicine teaches us of the flow of life and spirit. If it was your time to speak you would feel it in your body and yell stop to halt the drumming. The silence that befell the admonitions of vulnerability of the deepest kind was deafening. I was attempting to listen to the subtelties of my body expected to alert me to my position in line, but at this point lay laden with ripples of intensifying fear. It was a terror that coursed through my para sympathetic nervous system, my body attempts to shake it out through knee knocking and quaking full body quivers. It seemed of the 24 women, we were down to two and I was one of them. Aftering spitting out the word stop in an act of surrender, i grimly and hastily made my way to the water. In ankle deep currents, i balled over and began to sob. Not quietly, or submissively, but in loud quakes of anguish. Like a tsunami of energy propelling itself from the very core of my being. And out of that quake, a fragile and small, soft, aching voice I could not muster the ability to settle from its quaking, creaked out of me. One ripping word after another, the blockages in the drainpipes had been faced down, the garbage deflected with the mighty currents of drain-o. Although my voice had only made its way out as a whisper, it had begun it's tough climb out. It had reminded me of life and the feeling one experiences when life pumps through one's veins. I felt the depth of release only a soulshaping orgasm is capable of manufacturing. My teacher would later say that her witness of this moment in my journey was a profound chord cutting, the shredding of this ballooned image that had been driving me, completely deflated and my own personal power returned to me. Sexuality had caused me to shut down my voice and bury my self expression, as such the shadows of the dark feminine ravenously devoured layers and layers of the dark sides that lay behind the primordial push of our animalistic drive toward mating. Yet as my sexuality was faced with an opportunity to heal, so too my performer appeared, reminding of the other peices of this complicated image. And as i re-claimed my performer, my sexuality in turn continued to transform, there became less desire for the expression of physical pentration and instead more of an art of seduction. A seduction that needn't actually be fulfilled, for in it's fulfillment it would successfully kill out it's reason for existence, which was the art and the expression of the deep crevices of eros.