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People Tell Their Stories: Healing/Illness/Caregiving Every Inch A Queen Marion Woodman  I chose my title from King Lear: "Every inch a queen." Lear was king of a kingdom, and through his own foolishness and arrogance, he lost his kingdom--gave it up. He lost his crown, his scepter; everything he had. Even his soul child was sent off to France. When he had gone through his descent, he came to the nadir, the very the depth of his brokenness, where he had to recognize that all his rationalizations, his illusions, his denials were gone. There he met his old friend Gloucester who had been blinded. He said, "How goes the world?" And Gloucester said, "I see you feeling me." Feeling me. He can no longer see with his eyes, but the two old men meet with love, a love that they never expressed in this way before. Lear in the heath, with the storm smashing at every part of him, appeared in rags. No scepter, no crown, nothing. But his suffering had brought him face to face with himself. What he found was his own soul. He stood up and said, "I am every inch a King." It was when all the pomp and circumstance, all the superficiality was taken away that he recognized himself and called himself a king. Later, Cordelia, his beloved soul child returned from France. When she met Lear, he could hardly believe that she had returned. He saw himself reflected in her, as she saw herself reflected in him. Of course, the two were bonded in love. He told her of all the sacrifices that he made. He said, "Upon these sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves pour incense." Many of us know what it is to feel the incense of the gods poured on our sacrifices. We have been through many lessons, and we have recognized our sacrifices. But we have also known the power of the love that is being poured upon us. Through the suffering, we have come to the recognition of our own soul. Those lines from Lear always resonate at a very deep level, because without the recognition of the incense, the suffering is meaningless and can be intolerable. The Descent of the Earth and our Bodies What I am suggesting, in referring to Lear and in the larger scheme of things, is that our earth itself is in descent. Descent deeper than the planet has ever gone through before. A dangerous decent at an extremely difficult time of transition. We all know that the patriarchy has been through its obsessive, compulsive materialism. It is bringing us to a terrible crisis. We know that patriarchy is crumbling. We are living in a toxic world. Air pollution, water pollution, over population, the breaking down of the ozone layer. We all know the symptoms and see the same ones in our bodies. Our immune systems are breaking down. The toxicity of what we are living in is impossible to live in. We live in harmony with our planet. Our matter is in harmony with the planet's matter. As we look at those signs of crumbling in the earth, we look at the crumbling in our own bodies--not only those of us who have cancer, but those of us who have AIDS, those of us with autoimmune diseases who have to recognize that our body is turning against us, a most rare thing. We have to look at that symbolically. Process Most of us also recognize that, in the healing process, we have to learn to honor the feminine principle. We have to break with cultural values. We have to break with efficiency, perfection, and going for the summit. All those values, which the patriarchy holds dear, will not work in the healing process. Many of us facing illness have had to give up our jobs and often make other sacrifices that are even more precious. Giving up the security of our bodies is also immense. I always thought I could depend on my body. No matter what happened, I knew it would hold. Now I do not know that it will hold. The crumbling stages of discovering that is terrifying. I remember one of my old friends in the Bay area saying that in the earthquake, she suddenly remembered what it was to have a body that you could not depend on. There is immense sacrifice. We are being called to recognize the feminine in ourselves. For example, process is a very important word in the feminine principle--process rather than product. One woman who was part of a team of breast cancer survivors that climbed Mt. Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, said that she had to stay with the process. She had to recognize that getting to the summit was not what was important. It was being present to the moment. Presence Present for her was recognizing three breaths to every step, then four breaths to every step, and finally recognizing that she would not be going to the summit with the rest of the group. I would ask you to look at your own process, look at the presence that is required. I think of my own process of healing. I had to learn to eat green and yellow vegetables--steamed, and that was about all there was to eat. I had to slow down and enjoy my green and yellow vegetables. I still have to slow down and eat the green and yellow vegetables, make sure to get the vitamin pills and to receive enough rest. In that process, for the first time in my life I experienced the relationship between eating food and getting energy from the food. You may think that is a wild statement, but I had never put those two together--that you could actually get energy immediately after eating. These are the tiny details that we have to learn when we are sick. Take an hours rest every noon if you expect to get through to the evening and to sleep that night. I personally have had to learn discipline of inverse order. I had a most undisciplined life. Now, I think of the word discipline as I think of the feminine divinity Sophia. I look into her eyes and see myself reflected. Through her love for me, and my love for her, I do what I need to do to obey nature's rhythms. I've had to learn nature's rhythms in my body and accept them, and be disciplined by them. I am finding the sacredness of matter, this incredible instrument that we are. We could go on and on about presence in relation to being with the people we love as well. We realize we may not be with them in a month, so we are present. Looking into someone's face and seeing the smile. Honor and reflecting the smile. To know that life does not stretch on endlessly is to bring the moment to life. That is all that matters. To live it right now. Paradox Another word that goes along with the feminine is the word paradox. The feminine can hold the paradox. It can say, "This is beautiful. This other, which is very different, is beautiful, too. This is an elephant; this is a gazelle. They are equally beautiful." Moreover, we say that we have to lose our life in order to find it. That is a paradox. Now what does that mean? We lose our life in order to find it? I am sure many of you know well enough what that is. You have lost your old life in order to find your new life. There are other paradoxes as well that happen when you have death on your shoulder. I can give you a couple of rather funny examples from my own experience. When the doctor told me I had two months to live, my husband and I went out to the graveyard to choose a grave. He found a place that he really liked in the middle of the row. I was not happy with that. I thought, You know, it's okay. There was a water tank right beside it, but I thought, "WellÖI don't want to be in the middle of a row. I don't sit in the middle of a theater row, and I am not going to sit in the middle of a row for all eternity." You see the paradox, part of me was living on earth, and part of me was already gone. I didn't quite know whether I was in temporal time or eternal time. I think you find that all the way along when you are trying to hold back that you are mortal, and you have to keep reminding yourself that you are mortal. My husband is very intuitive. During the time that I was in a wheelchair he would take me to the art museum. We both love art. I would go around in a wheel chair, and he would take me right up to the picture. He could see it fine, but I was looking only at the bottom of the picture. I discovered a whole new wall of art. I tell you there is a whole new world there, and someday you may see it. I discovered the world of children also--children being taken around in their buggies and looking at this strange big child in a different kind of buggy. I wasn't quite a child, but I was still going around in a buggy. There was a whole world of communication that took place with these little ones. There was a whole new life born out of going around in the wheel chair. Next Page http://maxpages.com/marionwoodman/woodman7 |
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