When the Foundation Cracks, We Return to Our Roots.

I gave my granddaughter this stone, and a few days later found it cracked. It is the perfect metaphor for our lives right now.

We, as humans, get so caught up in what we are building, what we have built, and what we deem is a necessary construction or construct. We are addicted (a bit) to the idea of “solidity”. Though they have stood for possibly hundreds of thousands of years (according to some) even the great monoliths that our long-ago ancestors built will eventually crumble and turn to dust. There is no, building, no “foundation” that is indestructible, no matter how solidly it is constructed. 

We, and our world around us, are far less solid than we think. We are fluid, dynamic, and always in some kind of “state” of change.

Up until about a week ago, I was feeling pretty “solid”. I had a routine that I have been building for some time, and over the holidays I had put in some serious time with my writing practice, and bringing my book into the physical realm. I can “feel” it, conceptually. I have been able to for years. I can “feel” several books, various concepts that drift around in my psychosphere and take form in blips and essays, FaceBook posts, and meandering conversations. They’re “there” (gestures vaguely around my head), they’re just not “here” yet (gestures at belly, at keyboard, points out into the vast world all around—the material one, not just psychosphere). It is not yet solid.

I tend to feel “cracks” in the psychosphere before they appear in my world. I know “inside” when a structure is going to break on the “outside”.

A few years ago when I was “dating” someone I care for very much, we had a serious happening move through our relationship; neither of us were prepared for it, and neither of us handled it well. I felt the “crack” weeks before we had the conversation. I awoke from a dream as if struck, and I “knew”, even if I was not willing or able to own what was happening yet. As it turns out, he is still in my world, and what cracked was our then “container”. It wasn’t sustainable for either of us, and yet we cannot seem to say away from each other. The roots of what we created, what we are, and what is yet to come, are still reaching for each other and I cannot, nor do I have any desire to “cut” them off—to “cut” him off. 

It’s curious how relationships live in the Underworld as well as the one above. 

Relationship roots in the immaterial are often invisible and further reaching than we might guess. Roots may live longer than any man made structure, and they, too, may be absorbed back into the soil from which they sprang. 

If anything is truly eternal, perhaps it is soil. 

And so, instead of trying to rebuild a structure that is  clearly “cracking”, not the relationship that I mentioned above, but some very old family “structures” that need to crumble, I find myself investing my energy into the roots. I sink my consciousness into loamy soil, and notice the lack of nutrients there. I slip through the dry sand, and water those tender growths, reaching into the darkness with my tears. I watch the shoots struggling to make their way through the fecund dark, striving towards sunlight. 

It’s called a “family tree” not a family “house” for a reason. We relate more deeply to growing things than we do constructed ones.

The roots of which I speak are my granddaughters. The soil is our foundation. It is both compost that I have created for us over the years of deepening into my own center, and the center of creation. It is my womb, which long ago housed the potentials of each of them, before they were even realized in their own mother’s body. 

It is The Womb, not just mine, that is our foundation. 

We love to seek balance, but balance is not stagnant—it is dynamic—and the oak that cracks in the strong winds is survived by the willow that bends. 

I am bending in ways I did not think I was capable. I feel the storm rage around me—and I am the eye. I feel the storm rage within me—and I am the lighting. I am precise in what I strike as I am encompassing in what I hold. That is the power of the Mother and I am claiming it. 

I do not have time for weeping witch “wounds”; it is time to stop lamenting the loss, and become the power. People need me. Small innocent people. People whose bodies have been through enough. And though my body still vibrates with the wounds of abandonment, rejection, fear, and volatility, this is not my story—it is theirs. And I will give it a new narrator and the chance to have a different ending. 

I change diapers that are, without a doubt, where the swamp monster exact his revenge. I scoop little bites of food into the mouth of a hungry chick, catching the baby food sputum on her chin before it can even dribble onto the bib. 

I wrap my body around young shudders and long-internalized terrors. I watch flesh release trauma in a way that not many can see. I absorb the lighting and return it to the earth from whence it sprang. 

I sip wine in the tub while a 4-year-old looks on, and I hold a boundary, a clear request: “Please don’t touch me, at least for a bit”. And when I get out we make cookies, and drink milk; I hate milk. I never keep it in my fridge, but there is a jug of it there now. 

This is my new balance. It is dynamic and difficult and sweet—and there is no fucking foundation. We are suspended in time and space by a web which I am weaving. 

And I write… little dribbles here and there because I will not have my own soul go untended in the process of tending theirs and their bodies. I will not have them witness me withering in that way. My roots need tending, too. So—by-fucking-gawd—I will write at least a bloody bit here and there. I don’t know how to “weave” when I am not writing. Words and relationships are life and breath to me, and these little glowing letters dripping from my fingers in the pre-dawn light are how I build bridges and bridges, and knots and loops in the new configurations that we are in need of now. 

She slips from bed now, the 4-year-old. She sits quietly with me in the dark as I finish typing at 5 am. I tell her: “Thank you for being so patient. This is important to me.” She replies, “You're so welcome”. 

I hope there is something for you here. I hope my ramblings may touch your heart, or pluck a string in your soul in some familiar or ancient way. Our stories matter, and this mine right now, so thank you for listening.

And to my paid subscribers, I appreciate your patience. A ritual on Ancestral Weaving is brewing, and will be ready to be preformed soon.

Lotsa love,

Justice