Creating The Webbd Wheel: Reclamation
Reclamation is the process of claiming something back. It’s a welcome process in the case of reclaiming something we lost and want back. However, deliberately setting out to find the pieces of ourselves we have attempted to discard or amputate is a different proposition.
In post #57 of The Hanged Man, Eurydice, Radulf, and Maria all understand they must retrace their steps in search of parts of themselves and their history they have left behind. I’ve heard this kind of work referred to as soul retrieval.
The work of soul retrieval is archetypal; a common thread running through all of humanity. Many indigenous cultures practice rituals of solitary time in the wilderness, discovering one’s totem animal, proving one’s ability to survive, or in search of signs, portents, and understanding of their place in the world. Numerous stories and tales speak to this old archetype. The hero’s journey is based upon it, as are coming-of-age stories. Less common are examples of middle-aged or older people who realize, at some point along their path, they must go back in order to continue going forward.
Thomas Wolfe wrote a book titled You Can’t Go Home Again.
But sometimes you have to.
More than ever before in my lifetime, the current culture encourages us to create a pseudo self and imprison ourselves within it, to change our physicality, to numb and distract and escape our day-to-day lives and challenges. Eurydice reflects this in her attempts to escape her family of olive trees and the physical characteristics indicating her heritage. Maria reflects it in trying to come to terms with her choice to destroy her children and herself. Radulf understands he must return to his parents, his young wife, and the memory of the little mermaid who loved him and whose love he was unable to return.
When we practice reclamation, we set out to acknowledge, find, and reintegrate the parts of ourselves and our history that terrify us, the parts we hate, and annihilating guilt, shame, and trauma we feel we can’t endure. This is the work of Nephthys, the old archetype of Bone Woman, who sifts sands in a desert between the worlds, patiently collecting bones for the purpose of regeneration and transformation.
It's perhaps the most difficult work we can do; a quest which brings us face-to-face with the worst in ourselves and our history.
Weaving Webs
I’m currently living this kind of reclamation. I recently went back “home,” to the place I came from before my life in Maine. I did not leave that place because I was happy; rather I fled, tore myself out of the fabric of both family and community almost exactly eight years ago. At the time, it felt like a life-and-death decision, and I don’t say that as an exaggeration. I chose life, and I’ve achieved a beautiful life, rich in connection, creativity, self-love, and contribution. It cost me dearly in pain, guilt, and shame. I left a lot of unfinished business in my desperation to get away, and I left pieces of myself, pieces I never wanted to see or feel again or acknowledge as having anything to do with me.
I always feared having to go back. Then came a series of events and a series of choices and I knew, however afraid I was, I must go back. And that’s what I did.
I reclaimed old ties, old friendships, a community which has grown and changed in my absence, but still feels like home. I reclaimed my connection to my own mother and my connection to myself as Mother. It was desperately difficult, painful work, but I was sustained by Radulf, Maria, Eurydice, and many of my other characters who will also circle back in order to go forward in chapters yet unwritten. I was sustained, also, by the deep, clear voice of intuition that said, “Yes. This is the path. This is the right way. This is what your story requires.”
I believe many of us who write do so as a means of finding out what we think, what we need, what we have loved, and how infected our wounds are. Many of us navigate hard times by holding onto the frayed lifeline of words on the page. Whatever our situation, whatever our anguish and terror, we write our way through, and out. Shortly after I left everything I knew behind, I started my blog, Harvesting Stones, and through the years, week after week, I have made visible the painful steps of recovering, reclaiming, and discovering myself. In the process I’ve made connections; I realize I am not alone and others realize they are not alone in their experience.
Two Substackers I follow are examples of this.
of My Sweet Dumb Brain is a young widow whose life was shattered when her husband died suddenly. That event changed everything for her and gave the world a sensitive, thoughtful, honest writer who frankly shares her loss and struggles and her gradual blossoming into a new kind of life while honoring and remembering what came before. Her courage inspires me, and what she’s learned about grief upholds me.Another writer I follow is
, who writes the Kureishi Chronicles from his hospital bed. A year ago he had a catastrophic accident and lost the use of his hands, as well as his other limbs.He’s a writer and he lost the use of his hands.
He currently writes through the hands of friends and family, coming to terms with what has happened to him. He’s funny. He’s real. He’s vulnerable. He’s curious and smart. He’s indomitable, not because he cheerfully brushes aside what’s happened to him, but because he deliberately explores what’s happened to him. Yet he has not let go of the rest of his life and interests. He is still whole in himself. He is a writer, hands or no hands, who continues to write and give himself to the world, and what a contribution he makes! He humbles me.
Turning Over Stones
Questions:
What parts of yourself have you tried to leave behind? Do they haunt you?
Can you imagine, one day, setting out on a quest to collect and reclaim some of your parts? Which ones?
Do you suspect a time will come when you will need some of the pieces you’ve tried to leave behind? Which ones?
How do you process and find your way through the hard times in your life?
Name a writer who inspires you, and tell us why.
Leave a comment below!
Hi Jennifer Rose, it's good to read your newsletter again--I am encouraged by the hard work of the soul you are doing and have done--and your return to your family and your past. I started writing a comment to your last post--but then got derailed and didn't finish. Thanks for what you have written about the gift and challenge of the experience of return and reclamation. I've been considering some of these things, too. (Pluto is starting to oppose my 29 degree Cancer Sun.) Time is not linear, but cyclic and qualitative. The parts of my being I tried to leave behind were the strange, awkward, fearful, helpless and disassembled and dispossessed child I was. And most of all, my fear that I was strange and crazy, which is still a fear I have.
Now the life I've built as an adult is slipping away and returning me to a feeling of my partly forgotten childhood--a time of loss and disconnection, though there was also beauty and joy. I say partly forgotten, because what was forgotten was the visceral feel of powerlessness, aloneness, and fear under the bandages that covered over this wound in a tissue of dreaming and not really being present that's held me together to this day. But the word "reclamation" encourages me to stay with my sense of regaining something lost, something I don't want to remember altogether, but it also holds the power of my vivid feelings, sensations, and imagination--and my voice, my need for expression. I begin to have a greater inkling (interesting word) of where this is going, some of it is remembering and feeling the power of reconnecting to the earth, the gifts of amazing imagination and dreaming that filled me. I am not sure how I process hard times, perhaps it is that I lived in a sort of a dream world, an evasion, but one that enabled me to survive. I feel that Pluto in Capricorn is such a visceral call into the world of hard reality that I will know more of this before long.
And yes, as far as a writer that inspires me--and there are legions, including you, but curiously what popped into my head was a novel, Marilyn Robinson's Housekeeping, which I read decades ago and is probably still my favorite novel. It's called Housekeeping, but it's really about the haunting challenge of keeping house on this earth, the complicated way we set out on a path where things remain certain, permanent, and ordered, and find the impossibility that anything can stay that way. It is a most haunting story--and maybe it's time to read it again. Robinson is a very wonderful storyteller, though oddly I've never read--or rather never finished--any of her other novels. Lucille, the narrator of this novel reminds me of myself. If you don't know it and wish to see what the book is like, the Amazon excerpt will show some of how marvelously and beautifully told the story is. It recalls to me that it is the power of dreaming that perhaps I need to reclaim most, the magic of the dream, the power to trust in this and let it carry me where I need to go.
Thanks for your intriguing questions and where they led.
Our paths sound similar. Reclamation has been on my mind for some years now. I first wrote about in my blog; the essay is titled 'Reclamation.' But even before that I think I was in process, much as you describe, though I wasn't very clear and didn't have good language for what I was doing. However, I've always loved the idea of Bone Woman. Clarissa Pinkola Estes introduced me to her through Women Who Run With the Wolves. That book was a turning point for me. It cleared and defined my focus. I began to see how much I had abandoned myself. I began to spend time with Bone Woman, wondering if I would recognize the parts I abandoned, if they would come when I called them, if they would speak to me from beneath the sands of the desert between the worlds.
Writing guided me. We reunited, old parts of myself and the incomplete woman I patched together in order to survive. In my blog I wrote a post called 'The Doll.' In my 40s, I bought myself a rag doll, one that looked like me. Working with that doll is enormously healing. Somehow, I was able to love the doll in ways I couldn't love myself. Gradually, I've learned to extend toward myself the tenderness, nurture, and acceptance I gave to my children and to others, but that I never received as a child and thus never learned to give to myself.
Then I came across Pete Walker's work on CPTSD and began to actively reparent myself. He describes a couple of techniques that continue to help me enormously.
All this is to say it really is a journey. It's taken years -- decades -- for me to reclaim, to heal, to learn how to care for me, to pay attention to my own needs, to prioritize my own life. It's hard to unlearn our early conditioning, and I'm not sure we can ever root it out entirely. My default under stress and pressure is always to abandon myself. But my doll, which sits next to my bed, reminds me. My journaling reminds me. My writing reminds me. If it's too heavy for me, I try to remember I can choose to put it down. If it's not mine, I try to repair boundaries. I also ask myself, many times a day, if something troubling or distressing me, some fear, some old memory, some narrative I've made up in my head about how things will go, is worth my peace of mind. Because I realize more every day most things are not worth my peace of mind.
For years I've worked on reclaiming the sensitive, empathic, parentified, terrified, neglected and abused child I was. Now I feel her with me all the time, and she adds play, a new box of crayons, dance, silly music, and picture books to my life. I've realized these last weeks that now I must set out and find my mother aspect, which means it's necessary to take on my history with my own mother as well as a very painful history of myself as mother. I don't want to do it, but I choose to. I know I must if I am to continue to heal. I cast the mother part of me away out of shame, grief, anger. I banished her because she hurt too much. But now I need to set out and find her. We need one another.
What I have discovered is the trust I need is trust in myself. The love and acceptance I crave is love and acceptance of myself. I have much of what I need already. I've spent all my life and much of my love caring for others; now I'm learning to care for myself first, to move out of the shadow side of the archetype of caregiving, which is refusing to self-care.
The book you reference is familiar to me. It's not in my library, but I've seen it somewhere! I may even have read it. I'll keep an eye out for it. Thanks for the recommendation.
Thanks for the conversation. Good questions are, to me, irresistible. We can learn so much from one another and give so much to one another when we're willing to ponder questions like these.