In the early mid-eighties I was living in a rented, magical, beautifully converted two-car garage on a very sweet piece of property. The area around my little cottage, though, was kind of a mess. Excavated boulders, rocks and an unbelievable quantity of assorted construction debris had littered the, till then, untended and unusable areas around my lovely studio.
The first two years there I spent totally focused on healing from the devastatingly difficult end of a very troubled and troubling relationship. Most of my time was devoted to tending the wounded Little One inside of me. When not working my two days a week or wandering in the mountains and canyons of Ojai, I was also slowly transforming the studio into a home for the self I was then becoming.
Each bit that I did filled me with an enormous sense of joy and accomplishment. I was hooked. Gradually, I continued rearranging more of the rocks and boulders. I formed rock gardens, low meandering rock walls, little terraces and then a sacred space of concentric circles with a central fire pit.
For almost two years, I worked long hours at the rock piles, often well into the darkness of star- or moon-lit nights. I dug and levered and pried up huge boulders, often sitting down in the dirt with my back against a huge rock, digging in my heels and using my back to push it where I wanted it to go. In my struggles to free the really deeply embedded ones, I'd use a six-foot long, thick and pointed stake that I'd raise and drop repeatedly to loosen the earth around them. Then I'd use the flat end of the stake to lever the boulders out of the loosened earth. Often it felt as though the Grandmothers or the spirits of the space were helping me, pushing the boulders up from underneath.
Some weeks I worked at the rocks from early morning till well after dark day after day. Often food seemed irrelevant. Water to replenish what I'd sweat away was all I needed or wanted. I often delighted in hurling and flinging small and midsize rocks over the hill into the wild chaparral. Cursing or breathing fiercely as I hurled made it an unbeatable way of releasing the anger, frustration and rage that sometimes rose up in me those days.
When I'd run out of steam, I'd take several days off and go back up to the mountains and canyons and streams of Ojai's back country. There I'd lie naked on rocks in the water watching the clouds, the water, the leaves and the birds, while mindlessly drifting and dreaming.
Then I'd come back to the rock pile or to digging fertilizer and soil amendments into newly created flowerbeds. Or, I head to the nursery to find flowers and bushes to experimentally plant in all these beds. The work was intense, unremitting, strenuous, exhausting. At the same time it was exhilarating, magical and completely satisfying.
My friends shook their heads and joked about my days with the rocks. I was fascinated by the enormous pull the rocks exerted on my being. And by the way that, rock by rock, boulder by boulder I was transforming what looked like mess and debris into what became beauty and wonder. Just by rearranging what lay around me. It was an exquisite metaphor for that season of my healing process and for how life actually unfolds.
It was a daily exercise in infinite patience. No expectations. No goals. No hurry. No rushing. Just moving one rock at a time. Never thinking about how long it would take or where it was going or how much there was to do. Just moving one rock at a time, in timelessness.
Several years later, in the early nineties I was drawn in and captivated by something quite other than rocks. After almost six years of relative inwardness and deep healing, Spirit had begun nudging me back out into the world, into interaction with people. had begun pushing me into starting to share more widely the fruits of this long, rich time of healing in which I'd been immersed.
The Rememberings and Celebrations cards had started emerging. At first a few at a time and then, quite remarkably, a whole deck of 64. A catalog started taking form. New versions of all the cards and amulet-gifts I'd created over the past many years for friends and clients were printed and assembled. I started being invited to speak at Women's Councils (on aging, on power, on the Sacred Feminine). Each time, I'd bring along a few catalogs and a small stash of my slowly growing collection of treasures to offer for sale.
A woman I was just getting to know in those days was making sacred drums and rattles for women's ceremonial use. Spirit had been nudging her into traveling to sell her treasures at various women's gatherings in California and New Mexico. She'd started taking along the overruns of my Rememberings and Celebrations cards to give away to women who stopped at her booth. And, she sometimes took along some of the emerging line of T-shirts with my words and images on them. The tales she brought back about the excitement women had about my words/work at first were merely intriguing information.
Then, before long, I'd been gently seduced into toting my goodies off to many of the same gatherings. There were Women's Music and Comedy Festivals, Goddess Festivals, Women's Spirituality Festivals, Art Festivals and Gay Pride Festivals. Sometimes I even found myself moved to do small workshops at these events.
We started caravanning to the events, renting adjacent booths, hanging out together between customers. As we got to know each other better, we moved on to exploring sharing a single booth and together creating Sacred Feminine space into which women could come to explore our wares.
It was an exciting (and sometimes quite challenging) time for me. This beginning to explore collaboration was a revolutionary concept in my solitary creative world. Experimenting at the same time with taking my words and work out into the world and becoming accessible to numbers of people was a similarly revolutionary concept.
The coordinating of space, esthetics, personal styles and rhythms was brand new for the me I had become in my solitude. Some of it moved surprisingly easily and smoothly. Some of it involved a fair amount of focused processing, sensitive articulation of needs and feelings. And, just as with the rock moving, there seemed always something more emerging to do. This time, though, it was in collaboration rather than in solitude.
Being in collaboration meant adjusting to having next steps sometimes come through someone else rather than to me directly from Spirit. This involved a good bit of internal rearranging and processing, a significant increase in radical trust and, sometimes, a good bit of processing together (See The Sacred Feminine, for more about this.)
In the earliest days I'd been hauling around a few boxes of inventory, a couple of tables, some portable folding display panels I'd designed and built with copies of all my cards and hand-lettered signs laminated onto display boards that could be hung on those panels. There were always fresh flowers, velour tablecloths, objects for an altar and a shade tent along as well.
The idea of our adding an adjacent sacred-play tent at many of the venues was one that came through my colleague. It meant additional boxes of art materials, face paints, goddess coloring books, portfolios of my own and other women's writings, and a goodly collection of my large fiber masks, the Spirit Mother Totems. Considerably more hauling, but for what was a very transforming and exciting addition to our traveling show.
From the mix of both our happy and our challenging experiences at shows run by others, and from a couple of shows we'd done just for the two of us, we progressed to experimenting with creating a series of three local Women's Fine Craft shows in Ojai. These we were committed to developing as collectively designed Sacred Feminine spaces where all the crafts women worked together as an ensemble. This involved more processing in our collaboration as well as lots of intensive work finding, inviting and developing our collective. Then there were press releases, flyers, and coordinating intricate lines of communication with all our crafts women. All this involved, not incidentally, me becoming much more visible and accessible in my own small hometown.
From the energy, excitement, joy and exhilaration generated by our local efforts grew the vision of creating local sacred space for women's drumming events. More challenges in our evolving collaboration, more weaving together of the separate, sometimes similar, sometimes very different threads of our visions for the space and design of these special events.
Together we envisioned what became a series of women's drumming events at the solstices, equinoxes and a couple of the cross quarters in 1994 and into1995. For each event we hauled all we'd been hauling for the other shows along with a vast collection of miscellaneous percussion instruments I had gathered in my studio.
Each month we came together for composing the images and intentions on the invitations, getting them and the flyers printed, getting out our mailing and press releases, posting our flyers. The day of the drumming event always involved the elaborate setting up of either the indoor or outdoor space we'd rented. Masks, art materials, wares for sale, a huge and magnificent communal altar, a threshold altar at which the entering women would receive a water blessing as they moved into sacred space and time, a communal food table, Oshu-the awesome 48” in diameter ceremonial drum my friend and colleague had built, four five foot tall majestic hand carved redwood goddess totems from which Oshu hung and a vast collection of beaters for women to use when drumming on the big drum.
Over the year, more and more women came to these drumming events-with or without their own drums or instruments. Many were local but increasingly, as word spread, women drove from considerable distances to join us. The spontaneous joyful noise we raised together, the chanting, the dancing and the food we all brought to share, the weaving together of Sacred Feminine Community-it was all a dwelling with Great Mystery.
As with the solitary rockwork, there was in all of this collaborative process an organic progression: one step unfolding into the next, no where to get or to go, a timelessness, a sense of being in just the right place at just the right moment. It was all intense, unremitting, strenuous and sometimes exhausting, just as the rocks had been. It was also as exhilarating, magical and as extraordinarily exciting as the rockwork had been. Until, one day it wasn't.
Suddenly and clearly for me, at least, it seemed that it all became too much work. The evolution of our collaboration and the spaces we had been creating out of that collaboration had been enlivening. All of it had been stretching and growing me into a person who, at long last, could work-and-play-well-with-other(s). It was something I had never before been able to do with much grace or skillfulness.
And then, in a moment, it felt as though we were just repeatedly doing an awful lot of working so that a lot of other women could get to play with each other. Holding a safe container for the increasingly larger number of women who showed up was a huge stretch, especially after we had had to deal with some serious intrusions. This degree of responsibility felt like it was making it much less possible for the two of us to feel free to simply be in the container that we were creating/holding.
It wasn't exhilarating, exciting or magical for me anymore. It all now felt like being the Mommy for everyone else. Interminable repetitive and exhausting cycles of packing and hauling and setting up and dismantling and cleaning and packing up and hauling for us-while everyone else got to just play with the toys.
As I shared my feelings about it all with my friend and collaborator, we could see that the thread of my disenchantment had begun weaving itself into our experience some time before that day when it finally all became too much work for me. It had in fact earlier on led us to ask some of our local and dedicated regulars to help us with the setting up and blessing and dismantling and cleaning up.
This moment when none of it felt enlivening for me was a very challenging moment for us. There was a whole community of women who had come together around these drumming events. It had always seemed that Spirit/the Grandmothers had been leading us through the long, stepwise process toward our shared creation of the Sacred Feminine space in which the drumming event then unfolded. Where was Spirit leading us now?
Our processing this shift in me involved my friend/collaborator in discovering that it had also become more responsibility than she felt comfortable holding. Finding our way to letting go of it all with caring and skill and grace was another huge stretch for us. Agreeing to the how and when of announcing the end of our tenure was perhaps the greatest challenge yet in our collaboration. Here, our different styles and needs were the most discrepant.
The work of reaching consensus without violating what each of us needed to have happen in the closing ceremony took us through much anguish, pain and tears. We stayed committed to the belief that, if we could only tolerate sitting in the middle of that pain without pushing, a resolution would emerge that would give each of us 100% of the essence of what we truly needed. We did, and it did. We were able to do the closure with grace and truth and blessings for us all. We passed the torch on to the women who were committed to having the drumming events continue. And, all of it was all right in the ending.
I've learned that it isn't okay for me anymore to do things or to be in relationships or situations that feel like too much work. There are still many things that I do, many relationships and situations that I'm in that do involve me in expending considerable amounts of concentrated work and energy. When that to which I'm devoting so much intensity, energy and commitment is truly enlivening and deeply right for me, it doesn't ever feel like too much work.
Again and again, when how it feels to me changes into, or when how it feels to me at the start is the too much work feeling, I practice giving myself permission to stop or to decline from participating. My unconditional permission for myself allows me to find my way out of whatever it is honestly, and with gentleness and grace.
Amazingly enough I repeatedly, and with less and less surprise each time, see that others do indeed survive my honestly named and self-caring withdrawals. They survive intact and without rancor.
Consider exploring the possibility of giving your self permission to stop (or not to start) doing things that feel like too much work.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
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