by Josephine Bloomfield
Listening to the stories of my Grandmother and Aunts weaving in and out of the past and present was always my favorite way to understand how to walk in the world. I remember reading their lined and wrinkled faces as they trailed off, feeling captivated by narratives of their rising and falling and ascension while they recalled memories from earlier chapters of their stories- lives lived by versions of women who do not exist anymore. It was during these moments I came to understand that I would learn more from these fleeting moments than I would anywhere else. I was of their lineage- their wounds might one day be my wounds. Even though I didn’t have the language to rationalize or articulate any of this, I understood deep down, that how they lived and how they reacted to life’s gifts, offerings sometimes wrapped in darkness, were patterns I carried in my bones… patterns patiently waiting for the right moment to bloom into my own version. How I would manifest my own story depended on remembering theirs.
I knew from an early age that I come from powerfully intuitive women who hold magic in their eyes – women who manifest storms and love and other adventures. Their passion for heeding an ancient call of passing on primordial wisdom to their descendants felt like seeds of hope planted in my heart, wishes that we would either follow their benevolent breadcrumbs or learn from their trauma and create a new way.
During a very reluctant initiation in 2012, at the age of 28 when Saturn made her glorious scorpionic return in my life, I came face-to-face with my darkest despair, a crashing of falsities never mine to hold so tightly. My confusion with adaptations never meant to feel so natural in my sensitive and tender heart broke me as these strategies didn’t prove my safety. I did not know myself. At the bottom of my well, the only place to sit was in grief. Life offered me no reprieve – my hair fell out, rashes formed on my face from too many tears, and I broke. It was an initiation my maternal line knew was coming, but did not know how to prepare me for.
Breaking without a witness is quiet and hollow. It’s a surrender into the dark, like an animal letting go in the forest, alone. It’s the loneliest exhale.
And how do we name the breaking? As beautiful as they are, words have a nasty habit of diminishing a deeper meaning when never meant to be spoken. Our western culture forces verbal proclamations and explanations onto magic, dulling the light and banning it into a tainted, colonized corner with no one to silently sit with it. No one to carefully place it in the world of feeling. What happened to the days when we could convey with a small glance, a tiny nod? A prayer said silently in the midst of a windy gust, carried on the wings of birds and moths and seeds.
For a whole year after my breaking, I wrestled with and shamed myself for all of the rage I felt. My hot, irritating rashes perfectly mirrored my inner landscape coming to the surface, an undoing of everything I tried to keep hidden and tidy. Over time, my anger changed into a different form, much like the anger a seed conjures to break open its shell to push out a root, or the roar a laboring mother summons during the last push before a precious head emerges from her root. The anger we feel when making way for a new form. We break and the soul takes a breath. Of relief.
Seeds crack open so they can grow.
It is why the seeds are sewn.
Acorns fall from the tallest oak,
It’s the journey down where they will grow.
Seeds survive cold storms and the belly of the beast.
Sometimes life will make you break,
Just to see what you will make.
My breaking was a recognition of co-dependency. Co-dependency is an interesting pattern, a gift, a curse, and a line blurred so easily when we refuse a moment for breath and quickly reject a chance to tend our own hearts. The ability to carefully and humbly tune into another (a human, a plant, an animal, a place) is a unique and precious gift passed onto each generation. Originally, this gift was the art of connection meant to help tend to those who do not have words for their inner worlds. However, in a moment of fear somewhere in our line, a curse formed when we lost touch with the heart of the gift – an inheritance never meant to make us safe, never a means for controlling the chaos. It was never meant to be manipulated for our own survival.
In 2015, I finally found my soul deep in the mountains of the Appalachians, amongst the rhododendrons and stinging nettle. One night alone in the woods, I heard a small trill, a song calming the night air. A screech owl sang her ghost-pony chorus and I fell asleep on the moss with a wool blanket. I was home.
How do the sensitive and quiet ones integrate both worlds? How do we find a sense of belonging in the times we live in and the times we inherit? Ten years after my breaking open, I teach my daughter the whispering of cedars and junipers and watch her as she can spot a blueberry bush in the deep wild, with no berries on it. I see her quietly wave to rabbits who stay to graze our grass as she passes, never questioning the magic. How there’s no wave of shock when crows surround us after gifting crow feathers to a Hawthorn tree. I teach her rituals as if they have always been, hoping her ability to tune into the otherworld finds its way back to its ancestral roots. My prayer is that she finds the original, beautifully rooted path of our line. May it be so. May it be so. May it be so.
