In the early mid-eighties I was living in a rented, totally 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 unusable areas around my lovely studio.
The first two years there I spent totally focussed 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 such an enormous sense of joy and accomplishment. I was captivated. Gradually, I continued rearranging more of the rocks and boulders. I formed rock gardens, low meandering rock walls, little terraces and then a magical 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 moonlight 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 utterly 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, the birds, 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, to the nursery to find flowers and bushes to experimentally plant in all these beds. The work was endless, intense, unremitting, strenuous, exhausting. At the same time it was exhilarating, exciting, magical and extraordinarily satisfying.
My friends shook their heads and joked about my days with the rocks. I was utterly 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 journey and for just how life actually unfolds.
It was a daily exercise in infinite patience. No expectations. No "goals." No hurry. No rushing. Just 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 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 irresistibly 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 begun 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 (Barbara) was making extraordinary 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 fascinating 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 caravaning 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. Beginning to explore collaboration-–a revolutionary concept in my solitary creative world. At the same time exploring this taking of my words and work out into the world and becoming accessible to numbers of people–a similarly revolutionary concept!
The coordinating of space, esthetics, personal styles and rhythms was brand new for the me I had become in solitude! Some of it moved incredibly easily and smoothly. Some of it involved a fair amount of focussed 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, an enormous 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 an idea that came through Barbara. 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 magical 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 as an ensemble. More deep processing in our collaboration. Lots and lots of intensive work finding, inviting and developing our collective. Press releases, flyers, coordinating intricate lines of communication with all our crafts women. And, not incidentally, 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 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 magnificent and extraordinary 48" in diameter ceremonial drum Barbara had built. The four five foot tall majestic and magical hand carved redwood goddess totems from which Oshu hung and an endless array of beaters for women to use when drumming on the big drum.
Over the year, more and more women came to these drummings–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, the food we all brought to share, the incredible 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 incredibly intense, unremitting, strenuous and sometimes exhausting, just as the rocks had been. It was also as exhilarating, exciting, 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 so exhilarating and exciting. All of it had been stretching and growing me into a person who, at long last, could "work and play well with other(s)." 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 incredibly intense, especially after we had had to deal with some serious intrusions. This responsibility, it seemed to me, was making it less and less possible for us to feel free and able to simultaneously "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. Endless, repetitive and exhausting cycles of packing and hauling and setting up and dismantling and cleaning and packing and hauling for us–while everyone else got to play with the toys!
As I shared my feelings about it all with Barbara, we could see that the thread of my disenchantment had begun weaving itself into our experience some time before that day when it 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 truly enlivening to me anymore was an incredibly difficult moment for us. There was a whole community of women who had come together around these drummings. 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 drummings then unfolded. Where was Spirit leading us now?
Our processing this shift in me involved Barbara 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 an extraordinary 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 incredible 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! And, 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, it was all 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, relationships and situations that I’m in that do involve me in expending enormous amounts of intense 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."
Over and over 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 seems to allow 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. see that others do indeed survive my honestly named and self-caring withdrawals, intact and without rancor.
Consider exploring the possibility of giving yourself 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 handcolored 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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