The Bejewelled Tabernacle

Curse and the quest of remembrance

“What is ailing?” he asked.

The question came toward me and I experienced it with some degree of shock and also as a blessed relief.

What was there for me in that moment in response was something about survival vs aliveness, something about the risk-averse, death-phobic world that holds us away from aliveness, relatedness, from our own agency, from our wild responsiveness to the beauty and pain that is life. Something about the half life, the ghost dream, our survival bound to a system that is inhumane, that wants us slave, automaton, our time consumed by a soul-eating imperative, so that the impulse for nourishment, the longing for presence, the hunger for still and deep listening, the hankering for connectedness, to self , to other, to community, to world, to nature, to spirit and an ensouled life, is always held at arms length. So that although I am always full, yet I am starving, though a feast is set before me, yet I am malnourished, never satiated, and so on and on we race, seeking relief, seeking an end, a respite at the completion of a diabolically driven to-do list that never ceases, is precisely inculcated to never end. In the meantime I am left with the life that has no room in it for me, the living that holds no space for the true self.

And there it is in the story, in so many of the stories, this quest to wake up from the trance, to be rescued from the enchantment, to be diverted from the poisonous apple, to have it artfully dislodged from the throat. I feel that as human I am born both. I am the one who is in the grips of a magical sleep, entranced, cursed to inhabit an unfamiliar shape, an untrue form, ensorcelled in another’s intention for my life and I am also the unswerving, unwavering, steadfast third daughter, who enters the forest, enters into inhabitance with, side by side, sometimes in the dark, the monstrously entranced. She is the one who then goes deeper into the woods, and then deeper still, the one who will traverse the earth a thousand times, for seven years and then another seven and then another, beseeching the scent of something deeper, truer. She who is thwarted and tricked and deterred again and again and yet still she seeks, still she quests, aided mysteriously by unseen forces, by mythic sources, by elemental manifestations, by reeds and birds and old women in mountainous caves. She continues questing, searching, seeking for the ways, the means, the remedy , the pattern, the moment to reverse the spell, break the enchantment, unbind the ensorcellment, to restore and return to the true form, to remember the birthright of the soul, of the beloved, the unique wild calling of the deeper self.

Sometimes the world grooms us to lead lesser lives, be diluted expressions of ourselves in service to an inheritance of epigenetic contortion, a beleaguered clinging to a safer life for our lineage, that might otherwise be dangerous and disruptive to the over culture. Sometimes we are just born with exquisitely thin skin, or skin that has become so abrasively worn down by the world , it can seem at times to almost not be there at all, so that to stand in the world is to stand in a fire that sears and smarts, where others are untouched. So that we must learn anew, to grow feathers and fur, to ensoul our receptive flesh again with garments of rhythm and praise, story and verse, pulse and song, grief and recollection, become again artist, shaman, remembering ancient birthrights that protect us from the dangers of a too safe life. These are the curses we must endeavour to reverse. Rather than wait, passively as we have been taught, entrained victims of a romantic proclivity, awaiting rescue from some gallant knight, or noble prince. No, we must come to know that all of it is me. I am the curse itself. I am the accursed. I am She who finds the way to slip through the cracks of enchantment to break the spell and return the shape of the world to its rightful pattern.

Who is driving my life? Why is my own soul not firmly in the driver’s seat of my existence? What parts of me are entranced by a story of something other than my deepest desire? How do I continue to invite myself in? Can I remember the same hidden quest, the higher calling, to orient my attention to the fifth direction, to apply an unquestioning love and devotion to what is not yet known, with steadfast loyalty to truth, to embark upon the endless path, to break the curse, to unmask the ancient soul, to enthrone the true self, to enflesh the primordial imperative for aliveness. Can I become intimately attuned, exquisitely attentive to the small voice within, the subtle emergences, the almost imperceptible nudgings of soul speak, that slowly, incrementally, tirelessly move me towards, rather than away from, my deeper potentiality? May I remember that what I am seeking is also seeking me, that when I reach, I am also being reached for.

I summon her tenacity now, this queen in the making, I invoke her unwavering purpose, because in truth, although so often I feel swallowed by the necessities of existing within the overarching system, I also always have choice. A moment to moment choice to stay entranced or to enter the wild, unknowable terrain of my own sacred becoming. To stay sleeping, bewitched by the flickering lights or to bring forth with courage and fortitude, a truer expression, a deeper inhabitation of my own mercurial medicine, my own multifaceted remedy from the bejewelled tabernacle of wound. And so while I shake my fist and rage at a tyrannical world, I must also see that the curse is my very own inheritance, a precise device of my inner making. It is, in fact, an invitation to holy becoming. That to be born human is to be born cursed, shackled, enslaved to all that has come before, but also, blessedly, to inherit that redemptive impulse, that untiring devotional pull, to remember ourselves as something entirely unique and exquisitely responsive to the deep currents and ancient tributaries of a wild and emergent now.