A visit from the sacred masculine...

I left that weekend with replaying thoughts of a budding seed that had taken root while there. I wasn't sure what it meant, or how I would come to know it, but I felt it land deep in my core. This is the way in which I come to learn that the voice of my truest self is trying to be known. Its the feeling that arises deep within me that something said, something is witnessed or something i've experienced has hit an unknown button that is in the very near future going to come to be known. My teacher had spoken about the divine feminine being within the land. In Celtic history, it was understood that the king that watched over the kingdom of a village was indeed chosen by the land and as such the king would remain her servant, listening for her voice and heeding her guidance when making decisions that concerned the community.

The archetypal motif beneath the currents of this materialization, is that the womb of dreaming in the medicine of the divine feminine holds and gestates the wisdom that the eternal masculine then alchemicalizes and puts into action. The masculine contained the energy of fire. She explained "most of the work we do here is healing the internal masculine within the women that come to the lineage, so that the two can come back into balance". I thought about the social issues I had studied in my social work career affecting women in the patriarchal dream and could recognize the imbalanced masculine that we advocated for in the feminist movements. Our conciousness stuck within the dream, imagining the power we tried so desperately to reclaim lay within the hands of the oppressive actors enacting their worldly drama. I thought about the vision of womens community I so carefully crafted from the threads of my healing journey and how it still held these components. Except this time the imbalanced masculine got to "work on" our inner selves. The warrior rising to meet the villain of our pain and go to a battle of fire and brimstone vigorously hacking out what didnt belong to us. And then I thought about the tenderness in the land that had called me to it. That I had moved onto only in the spring of this year. That her gentle whispers contained the message of beginning to gather the women whom my trials of fire had destined me to meet. I had nurtured the gentle nature of her womb on this land, harnessed her medicines of receptivity, but who was the masculine that would help support this womb and in participation of it's healing bring forth a balance by the time it manifested in the world? I thought about the Sundancer's arrival into my life and the medicines that he carried. While these questions and contemplations remained strong I would need to go and speak to him. Perhaps he and I were on our own archetypal journeys, coming together to reflect some of these very lessons. Like me, the Sundancer lived with a constant state of existential yearning. Although I had known many others that wrestled with the inner angst of existential impulses, I had never met someone with quite the same commitment to answering them. Additionally, although we had our own unique set of intepretations regarding the teachings of the old ones that we had each received in our own unfoldings, he was the first man I have come face to face with in a romantic way that reflected so much of what I beleived to be true, yet from a masculine angle. Studied in Indigenous thought and having worked and been initiated into many Aboriginal communities and rights of passage, he maintained a deep reverent relationship with his pipe and had taken a four year pledge to Sundance. Leaving the retreat I picked up Madison and drove directly to his apartment. Burlesquey had gone to Vegas for the weekend and he was on his own. As usual he opened up the door with glowing eyes and gentle joy in his smile. My heart lept. After putting Madison to bed in the loft, I made my way down the stairs to join him in the living room. When I entered the room, he stood up and walked over to where I was standing, his arms on my shoulders and staring joyfully into my eyes. "What do you want?" he whispered. "I'd like to honor you". My body stiffened, the awkward fidget that comes up when I feel vulnerable and confused began to twitch. Trying to look at the floor, and shuffling my feet in one place, the rest of my body started to stiffen. I had become speechless. He continued to stand in silence, embracing me in his arms. "Tell me what you need Erica" he whispered again. "Do you want a massage?... Do you want to be held? Let me know what you need and I will give it to you". My lips would still not part to utter a word of reply, my thoughts were racing, anxiously trying to track the discomfort I was experiencing in responding to his question. "Needs?" I thought to myself. "what are my needs? and why is it so foreign to say what they may be out loud? Why do I feel such terror ripple through me at the thought of having to admit what they might be?" I didn't have a problem negotiating my pragmatic needs in relationship, asserting myself when i needed to, setting boundaries and letting the other person know what i did and did not find acceptable. But it seemed, asking me to identify and speak to the most tender, vulnerable, intimate needs was a risky option loaded with a bucket of gunfire waiting to dig into each half healed wound within the tissues of my intimacies. "It's alright" he said reassuringly, "i'm patient. I'll just stand here and continue to hold you until you're ready to tell me". A tiny breathe seemed to break through the constricted spaces in my lung capacity and sighed a little sigh of relief that I had time, yet I still wasn't confident I'd have the answer soon. We may be standing there for awhile. Twenty minutes later, he broke the silence. "Alright.. can I give you a massage?" He asked. I nodded shyly and went about preparing to lay down to receive. My body still frozen in holding, as I maneuvered myself onto the ground. We spent that night wrapped in eachother's arms until almost 2 am, speaking gently to eachother about what my weekend had been like and exchanging perspectives on some of the things that were coming up for me as a result. "How can I represent the masculine on this land so that the sacred masculine both as an energy and in it's human form is paying it's reverance to the healing women will receive in this place?" I asked him. After several moments of silence and contemplation, he advised in building the landscaping structure of the cermonial space in the back field, that I build a sacred fire holding the energy of the masculine and that this energy can be balanced with the planting of a tree with the positioning of what might look like a yin and yang symbol if drawn out in outline. It would be a brilliant start. Yet if the fire was truly to represent the energies of the sacred masculine, it would also need to be built by the sacred masculine. Just like the energy of the firekeepers that tend and prepare the fire for the womb of the lodge at womens full moon lodges, this offering would hold that energy of the sacred masculine's holding and reverance for this land and the women that gathered here. I wanted to ask him, but posing the question made me feel extraordinarily vulnerable. I had watched him pull back from me in the month that he ran and re-negotiate his boundaries differently upon return. He was here alright, but he still hadn't arrived. My heart was too attached to him to feel like i had the capacity to house a rejection for even this simplest of tasks, loaded with a meaning so deep and so foriegn it was too hard to articulate. The question would need to wait, but i was on notice, something really beautiful was happening here and most days I could hardly beleive it had arrived.

An unexpected visitor...

I found a poly community online. Eagerly posting my excitement at finding this innovative community in the world, I acknowledged my virginhood in the practice. Later that day, i found a message in my inbox from a member of the community, if i had questions about the lifestyle he was pleased to share his experiences. His name for me would come to be the sundancer. The photo on his profile was of an older man, older then one i might take interest with. He had a female partner of whom he lived with, he had dated a bit, she was busy with a spiritual transformation that directed her attention inward. Our days began and ended with endless communications over text, about who we were, how we lived and the places and insights that brought us to this moment in the enternity of the universe. We agreed we would have coffee one day. My mom was visiting from Ontario. We devised a plan to go into the city for a day, to show her the unique acceptance of individuality that is commercial drive. Mom and maddy and I wandered up and down the street and in and out of a variety of eclectic shops looking for new housewares to lay claim to the new home i had just birthed into the world. Although the sundancer and I weren't due to meet for coffee for a couple of more hours, from the corner of my eye I caught and older man with longish darl hair, a black and red Aboriginal rain jacket, glancing down at his cell phone as he meandered up the drive on the other side of the street. Although I couldnt see his face, i suspected it was him, racing unsuspectingly up the other side of the street and dodging strangers along the way, determined to get a grasp of his face and validate the credibility of my claim. Within seconds, he also glaced up looked directly in my eyes from across the street and we were met with a mutual recognition. Are you you? our quizzical faces playfully pointed at eachother. There was something magical about meeting in that way, although he would probably consider it just another coincidental happening. This moment would be the beginning of our journey together, however short it would be in the world of clocked time, it would create ripples within me that would impact every layer of my existence. The sundancer was unlike no other man i had known before. As we continued to blend our work days with intermittent but all consuming conversation about spirituality, healing, our histories, our present, our philosphies on life and untold opinions on sexuality, we had begun to find ourselves in a tailspin of a consuming fire of passion. I was surprisingly perplexed on his ideas of sexuality. He viewed sex as a deep spiritual merging, in which two people consented to share "all of their information" with eachother, not to be entered into lightly. What did he mean share all of their information? I asked him. " Well" he said while taking a deep contemplative breath, "it's as if in that merging of energy, all of who and what you are is shared with another person". He went on to explain the other reasons he was hesitant. He and his partner shared a deep energetic bond he would go on to explain, that would register deeply and profoundly everytime they shared this union with another. As it would affect three people rather then just two, decisions had to be made more carefully. Then of course there was also the notion of boundaries which he explained he had learned along his own sexual journey as hard to define after sex, and so it was never as casual as one would be led to beleive. It of course was the curiosity and questioning of my own sexual explorations that had brought me to this place, so poly sexuality and poly relating were regular discussions in which i questioned with complex curiosity on a constant basis. It had been eight months since i had gotten laid, i was horny and ravenous and the object of my desire was conservative in his engagements. He wanted to honor me he said. I had no idea what to do with that. The sundancer would come to represent in entirety everything i beleived to be true about the world. He was the manifestation of all that i had yearned for in a partner for six long years. Of course there were things i would need to barter with myself in order to stay engaged, that he was twenty years older then me and didnt want anymore children. But the admiration that burned inside of me, coupled by the beauty i continuously saw blaze in him made all of those negotiations fairly easy to rectify. It would seem i had finally met my match. A few weeks into our intensely developing kinship, Madison developed an abscess tooth that would require removal with anesthetics, we would need to go into the city to have the procedure done. I asked the sundancer if he would go with me. As they had just finished putting her to sleep, i was overwhelmed by the metaphoric images that accompanied her lifeless body. I went wandering down the hallway with tears seeping from hy heart. The elevator doors opened and he made his way toward me, a gentle but overwhelming happiness in his grin a gentleness in his being. "i'll be okay in a few minutes, i promise" i muttered embarrssed. "Be however you need to be" he said with a big grin, grabbing my hand into his. We wandered over to the bank machine, exchanging sloppy kisses in between. We were enamoured with an intense passion that both of us felt enveloped by. As he grazed the side of my chin, kissing my lips and bringing my legs close into him, he whispered "you know i'm kinda glad you dont live in the city". "Why" i chuckled. "Because i think this could very quickly become all consuming and it wouldnt be good for either of us". We both laughed.

I was happier in relating to someone than i had been in a very long time. A re-membered sense of excitement that accompanies the magic of falling in love had begun to fill up my heart and overflow into every other aspect of my existence. I had no doubt that this moment in time was born of the starfish medicine that had dropped into my medicine journey and the work i had done to start healing my heart and learning to beleive in love again. Just as I did the universe brought me exactly what i needed, the reflections of all that i beleived and wanted in the world, the missing powders to the elixir of my continued healing and the shadows of the peices of me that were still waiting for birth. I was happy.

It took me two years to fully leave Ontario behind. With all my stuff arriving right prior to the beginning of my Hearthkeeper year in apprenticeship, the parts of me strewn across the country were quietly collected and laid deeply into the BC earth. I have finally arrived. And no surprise that i have done so in the year of learning to attend to the hearth. Life is still a rollercoaster ride, full of surprises both ecstaticly enticing and the ones that hit hard, leaving you to wander aimlessly down an unlit road. But i can breathe here and hear myself. I can set the pace, make different decisions and carefully select my choices, which seem to really be a predominant theme of my life here. I am lonely and craving the deep connection of another, a like minded kindred whose face might be recognizeable as belonging to my kind. Some days i am tired of sleepign alone while others i wonder how i will manage to fit them into my life having be single for what seems like forever. Yet i remain relentless about the quality of connection and relationship that will exist in my life. A long journey of pot holes to pavign my way to solid ground. Although some days i remain trapped within a never ending battle with myself, about all the things screaming to be fixed, other days i am profoundly blown away by all the progress i have made, the long trips i have taken to the tunnels within myself and still come back more alive then when i started. I have this amazingly brilliant kid, whose tender and colorful personality and never-ending compassion, i feel blessed by everyday. She truly has taught me more than she will ever know. We live here in the mountainous and luciously green forested lands, close the the freshness of the ocean, nurtured by the raindrops and glittering in the sunlight. Our temperment has helped me experience more rainbows in a year than i have been priveleged to view in a lifetime. Community is forming, eclectic and diverse, colorful and creative. I went from building a marriage, to building a career to finally building a life. And it amazes me that all the obstacles i placed inf ront of myself were obliterated unther the magnitude of the call of my soul, my heart and in doing so quieted all the objections in my mind. Whenever i stop to truly think about it, the only thing i could possibly surmise is that truly and most authentically i am incredibly blessed.

The Artist Without a Brush

In early September I began having re-occuring dreams of pregnancy. I had a consistent feeling of being full, filled with so much wisdom and valuable teachings that i have had the blessing to acquire over the years from so many teachers, life experiences and an unwavering commitment to personal growth and spiritual development, yet the bridge to share these with the world could not be located. After a shadowed and forlorn journal entry of this agonizing deprivation, I made an appointment with my shamanic teacher and in trying to relay what was going on with me, the only words i could say was .."I feel like an artist without a brush".

It is now mid-Novemeber. I have returned to part-time work, finished my first year of my shamanic apprenticeship and have been initiated as a MoonCarrier given the moon rites that accompany this responsibility.

In early fall, the abscesses familiar to my diagnosed condition of Hidradenitis Supprativa were in full force, rapidly spreading and causing discomfort in almost all of my extremeties. My body had been calling out for me for a very long time..our relationship is still quite tenuous but we are definately working on coming together and falling in love after a long life of physical self-punishment, characteristic of those who were taught at a young age that their body had no value. For me this came through the childhood trauamas of sexual abuse, overshadowed by the guilt of overt religious indoctrination. I am only coming to realize now, that long after the abuser had gone, i took over his role and each time someone hurt me, or i perceived criticism, i violently punished my body temple, unconciously of course, but none the less made every effort to shut it down. With no answers to the manifested condition of this from western medicine, i began seeing a Chinese medicine doctor which would mean a complete lifestyle overhaul, weekly accupuncture, a pure diet, desceration of my vices (which i havent yet acheived), a stronger awareness of this relationship i maintained with my body and the daily administration of chinese herbs. This journey continues..

In early November I attended my last class of year one of the Celtic Shaman Woman Apprenticeship. Our teacher explained that medicines could be thought of as a balance or equilibrium that is unique to each one of us. That although every individual comes from the same oneness, we each have our own unique medicine born of the unique and individual path we are to walk in this world. A primal or original medicine is our unique essence that we come into this world with, yet as we continue walking through the journey of our life we also weave in skills, knowledge, and learned gifts born of our relationships, our communication with our ancestors in addition to acquiring some of our strongest medicines from our initiations or challenges that we meet along path or through dedication and powerful initiatory rites, such as our vision quests, naming ceremonies, rites of passage or initiations such as the Moon Carrier. She went on to explain that a very important part of understanding our medicine is to understand that the medicine we carry to the world is extremly unique and stressed the need for it to be in the world, no matter how humble we judge it to be. Not dissimilar to my teachings from the Annishnabe on personal gifts being the belonging of the community and expressed through the individual.

Complimentary to the idea of medicine, is the essence of power which she defines as the means we use to direct our medicine in the world, involving the ability to take action derived from experience, skill and knowledge. In recent days i have discovered that it is here where some of my blocks occur, the feeling of fullness being the recognition of the ripeness of these burgeoning medicines i feel within me that comprise my own individual art in the world, yet the brush representing to power of action for some reason undetectable.

Angela explained to us, that although we come into the world with this original/primal medicine is not uncommon to lose our way in the world and find ourself charting away from our original path. The medicine names we were given in the summer post-vision quest served as a map to show us where we fell away and provide direction about how to come back. My medicine name is StarFish, representing the union of the energies of the sky and the sea and telling a tale of severance between my heart and mind, that until i could find a way to unite these two and have them walk together, blocks continued to accessing this power. Her suspicion was that this severance occured when i was married to Ken, that in falling into a marriage of deciet and abuse my mind began to distrust my heart and in doing so looked down at it as a victim, the weak part of myself that could not be trusted. My suspicion today however, is that sever started long before i arrived in this experience and perhaps at that time was finally successful in breaking apart completely.

My mom has shown me in several ways and at several different junctures over the last several months that the spiritual or healing gifts of mine are repetetively kept underwraps. This was not something i was able to see before. More recently in conversations with some of my very good friends i have also witnessed that not only am i quick to devalue these personal essences in the world and instead hide behind grand spiritual philosophies derived by "worthy and credible beings" in the world, i also say very little of this colorful and talented history i have within the performing arts.

For as long as i remember i was rasied around music. My dad was a past choir director and whether he was cooking, shopping, cleaning or otherwise he was always singing. Naturally, i always sang with him and to him, although he regularly pointed out that i was incapable of harnessing the energy from within my diaphragm and instead sang from the fron of my mouth, something that obviously would need to be corrected. I remember dancing with him around the kitchen, standing on his feet as he directed the steps. I went on to become a ballet dancer, where for seven years, i was passionate about the stage and actually quit because there was too much practice and too little stage time. I sang solos at all our family events, performed solos in school competitions, was in 3 school choirs, was student choir director in 8th grade in addtion to being part of a professional children's choir, difficult to get accepted into and travelling with them on performance tours. In my youth i had strong musical peer groups with whom we made music together almost everytime we gathered, i was in musicals and drama and somehow when i got on that stage and opened my mouth, my reality slipped away, i went deep into myself and popped out again at the end of the song realizing that yes, i was in fact on earth and i was in fact in front of people. I sang the duet at my 8th grade graduation and all my endeavours in music supported all of those years in which i was being sexually abused. At the age of 12, i remember looking down at my swollen pregnant belly, that noone knew about in the middle of choir practice and belting out the rythyms that somehow continued to keep me healed. I continued to sing for about a year after the abuse ended, the abortion complete and somewhere for some reason, i developed a severe anxeity disorder and my performing stopped. My love of music was replaced by a burying, drugs, premiscuous sex, survival. My musical friend groups slowly dissappeared and the closest i got to it was my singing in the house, ferociously in the car, never to perform publically again.

For years on this spiritual journey, knowing full well that the path of the spirit belongs to the artist, that the creative spaces within us are the same spaces from which we feel and unite with the Goddess, our ancestries and the great song of creation, i have searched tirelessly for my medium, coming up time and time again feeling empty. I felt the artist within deeply, longfully and mournfully, but somehow her brush had gone missing. In it's abscence this strong therapist that has been born of the time of my traumas until this part of my life continues to rip me apart and look for the cause of my malady, correct the dysnfunction and take away the numbness that repetetively visits.

Following the last class, I asked a friend from our group to conduct a journey on what exactly was happening with the dis-ease withim my body. She came back with a valuable vault of knowledge about the detoxification, purging and cleansing my physical body was going through and also shedding light on one significant peice of information from the haling grandmother "she hasn't yet put her feet down". It sounded strangely familiar to my previous teacher, ThunderBear's observation and curiosity about why i "don't just jump off the cliff". And also to the request to do hands on healing for 3 members of the community at the request of one who i gave a short "underground" treatment to, which i quickly subverted letting him know that part of me is not public and also to the request of the local social work faculty for me to come and talk about the Indigenous worldview and my work within it, which i also shut down, once i realized my casual conversation had erupted in an invitation that bring too much exposure. This friend of mine said.."is it possible that you have performance anxiety?"

Immediately i was faced with a series of flashes of different moments in my life, the womens group i spent a year creating and designing and when just at the time for registration i shut it down. The private practice i set up, working through all the the agaonizing legalities, paperwork, buisness advertisements and fees and just as i received my first two clients, escaped it and moved out of province. The recognition of all of these trainings and teachings i have acquired that upon completion and filled with an overbearing state of unpreparedness search for the next teacher to inform my quiet learnings, the only time feeling confident to come forward through the use of academic writings and analysis of these concepts i hold dear, because they can be written in secrecy and process and by the time they make it out to the world, a faceless person resides beind the penmanship.

I told these stories to my friend who journeyed, she recognized our similarities and called me a long lost little sister. She explained that our teacher helped her lessen this anxiety by reframing her shamanic work as the work of an artist, which brought comfort to her as a musician and vocalist in the world. That's when i told her, my performance history and the lightbulb went off in my head. Performance Anxiety. Not only had this controlled my work in the world, it also spoke of my long lost history...i had stopped performing because of my social anxiety...all of this was wrapped into one large block. It was no wonder the artist had lost her brush.

Two days later I had a dream about a very dear friend in my history i met as an adult that i still struggle with the abondonment of. The most significant part of our connection was our dear love for music. In the dream he had come to visit and as he went off to visit with Madison, I went outside to bask in the sunlight and enjoy the serenity of this point in time in the world when a stern old woman approached me and placed a withdrawn and subdued baby swaddled in white knits into my arms. Hesitantly, confused and scared, as she began to walk away i asked her who this baby was and why she was leaving it with me. She abruptly walked back looked sternly in my eyes in a powerful way that left me speechless and shaken "this is my grandchild, his parents can not raise him, he is your responsibility to raise". With that she walked off poignantly and confidently. I looked down at this strangely withdrawn child, in his carefully put together white knits and searched my surroundings anxiously. I didn't want this child, where would i put him, had people seen this?, would i be accused of stealing this child? was this legal? I frantically went back into the house and asked my friend to call the police, apparently they were closed, i went into the very back room, took madisons doll out of it's basinette, layed the child within it and tucked it away in the back of the room and left back outside trying to find a direction of what to do. A group of cheerful and laidback youth in a cafe next to my house had seen what happened, she knew this woman of the village and the parents of this child, they joyously and freely told me that if i decided to return this child or made any attempt to call authorities or childrens aid or locate the parents, this old womans wrath would fall upon me. I was anxious and unsettled the bind had grown even more unsettling, i went back into the house and into the back room and found the child had rolled out of the basinette and landed face down on the floor. It did make a sound or a movement in its subduement, but i was horrified that i had put it there and left it without any such care or regard. I picked it up again and awoke.

As i was recording this dream, the symbolic significance began to speak to me. Was this old woman a representative of Calleaich, the baba yaga, stern and sharp returning this new part of me that was also indeed connected to the old? Did this baby that was subdued and withdrawn represent these performing artistic capacities that i had "shoved into the back room" and remained afraid of "people becoming suspicious" and did it connect with my body whom i am unravelling this great disdain and uncare for? Specifically, the hiding of this baby in the backroom reminded me of the journey i had conducted last class centered on medicine gathering, which when i had gotten to music, the helping spirits showed me that it was shut down at 16 and they showed these gifts being placed within a box and buried deep within my unconcious body.

Further, how did these recognitions relate to my medicine name of Starfish? When i realized these things I do not talk about despite my outgoing and openly expressive adult self my mom and I had a conversation about what happened in the early years of counseling post my sexual abuse. She said the counselor i had was moving on and was talking about a referral to one of her colleagues. They decided this was not a good move, with the counselor having cited that i talked endlessly about life at school and issues at home, but refused to say anything at all about my sexual abuse. The counselor said to my mom that perhaps i had shut that down and buried it if only to survive and that pushing me into talking about it would be dangerous, instead she best leave it until a natural opening happened when this information came to pass. I think i was well into very late adolescence before i even began to acknowledge or talk about how these experiences impacted my life. If my singing and performing which came from my heart was what nurtured my survival through this time, is it possible that when i decided to shut down the reality of the trauama and how they affected me, is it then also possible that i shut down my heart too pained to feel and being so connected to my music, shut that down too?