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Maps and mourning sites…..

I have been meaning to write about maps… for some time, but never got around to it; however, currently reading Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book brought it to the foreground again. So, in this brief post I will be making references to an intervention she has developed. She calls it Descansos. Descansos are to be found in various places like Mexico, on the edges of cliffs along scenic but dangerous roads in Italy, Greece and other Mediterranean countries and maybe other places, too. In Greece they are called Eικονοστάσια (icon + resting places). Some are elaborate and some are minimal, but they all mark a tragic loss. They are symbols that mark a death right on the spot where someone’s life journey was unexpectedly ended.

They may be simple crosses with people’s names inscribed on them by the roadway. She writes ‘in the rockiest passes, the cross is just painted onto a large rock at the roadside.’ In Greece they often resemble miniature churches made of various material on stilts. A religious icon, the person’s photograph and name, a message from loved ones, a plant or a vase with flowers are usually placed in these little containers. When loved ones live close by a small light is kept burning.

Dr Estes writes ‘women have died a thousand deaths before they are twenty years old. They’ve gone in this direction or that, and have been cut off. They have hopes and dreams that have been cut off also. Anyone who says otherwise is still asleep….. all that is grist for the mill of descansos.’ What has been lost, taken or abruptly ended needs to be acknowledged and mourned so that individuation and an awakening of sorts may take place. Making descansos as a healing practice involves taking a look at one’s life by making a time-line of a woman’s life on a big long sheet of white butcher paper, and marking with a cross where the small and big deaths have taken place and need to be articulated and mourned ….. ‘starting with her infancy all the way to the present where parts and pieces of herself and her life have died. We mark where there were roads not taken, paths that were cut off, ambushes, betrayals’ (C,P.Estes). I often think the crosses on these maps coincide with the instructions and road maps  handed to us on a certain developmental chair, a woman’s early wounding and conditioning to be a certain way, cultural, relational, educational and health related violations and experiences, all the way up to menopause, even later, depending on when the reckoning will finally take place.

The work involves discerning what has been mourned, what has not and what has been forgotten and not surfaced yet, as well as, what has been forgiven and released. As I understand, this work can become the basis for constructing a coherent life narrative within a larger and more dynamic background. According to Dr Estes, Descansos is a conscious practice that feels compassion for and honors the orphaned parts of our psyche, and the aspects of self that were on their way to somewhere, but never arrived. Descansos requires compassion and gentleness and fosters new meaning making. The process allows one to slowly put down the burdens and lay matters to rest. As with many interventions the presence of an informed and compassionate witness or guide facilitates the grieving process and the healing.

I have been meaning to write about maps… for some time, but never got around to it; however, currently reading Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book brought it to the foreground again. So, in this brief post I will be making references to an intervention she has developed. She calls it Descansos. Descansos are to be found in various places like Mexico, on the edges of cliffs along scenic but dangerous roads in Italy, Greece and other Mediterranean countries and maybe other places, too. In Greece they are called Eικονοστάσια (icon + resting places). Some are elaborate and some are minimal, but they all mark a tragic loss. They are symbols that mark a death right on the spot where someone’s life journey was unexpectedly ended.

They may be simple crosses with people’s names inscribed on them by the roadway. She writes ‘in the rockiest passes, the cross is just painted onto a large rock at the roadside.’ In Greece they often resemble miniature churches made of various material on stilts. A religious icon, the person’s photograph and name, a message from loved ones, a plant or a vase with flowers are usually placed in these little containers. When loved ones live close by a small light is kept burning.

Dr Estes writes ‘women have died a thousand deaths before they are twenty years old. They’ve gone in this direction or that, and have been cut off. They have hopes and dreams that have been cut off also. Anyone who says otherwise is still asleep….. all that is grist for the mill of descansos.’ What has been lost, taken or abruptly ended needs to be acknowledged and mourned so that individuation and an awakening of sorts may take place. Making descansos as a healing practice involves taking a look at one’s life by making a time-line of a woman’s life on a big long sheet of white butcher paper, and marking with a cross where the small and big deaths have taken place and need to be articulated and mourned ….. ‘starting with her infancy all the way to the present where parts and pieces of herself and her life have died. We mark where there were roads not taken, paths that were cut off, ambushes, betrayals’ (C,P.Estes). I often think the crosses on these maps coincide with the instructions and  road  maps handed to us on a certain developmental chair, a woman’s early wounding and conditioning to be a certain way, cultural, relational, educational and health related violations and experiences, all the way up to menopause, even later, depending on when the reckoning will finally take place.

The work involves discerning what has been mourned, what has not and what has been forgotten and not surfaced yet, as well as, what has been forgiven and released. As I understand, this work can become the basis for constructing a coherent life narrative within a larger and more dynamic background. According to Dr Estes, Descansos is a conscious practice that feels compassion for and honors the orphaned parts of our psyche, and the aspects of self that were on their way to somewhere, but never arrived. Descansos requires compassion and gentleness and fosters new meaning making. The process allows one to slowly put down the burdens and lay matters to rest. As with many interventions the presence of an informed and compassionate witness or guide facilitates the grieving process and the healing.

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‘ Clearly creativity emanates from something that rises, rolls, surges, and spills into us rather than from something that just stands there hoping that we might, however circuitously, find our way to it. In that sense we can never “lose” our creativity. It is always there, filling us or else colliding with whatever obstacles are placed in its path. If it finds no inlet to us, it backs up, gathers energy, and rams forward again till it breaks through. The only ways we can avoid its insistent energy are to continuously mount barriers against it, or to allow it to be poisoned by destructive negativity and negligence. If we are gasping for creative energy; if we have trouble pulling down the fertile, the imaginative, the ideational; if we have difficulty focusing on our personal vision, acting on it, or following through with it, then something has gone wrong at the water spill juncture between the headwaters and the tributary. Perhaps one’s creative waters are flowing through a polluting environment wherein the life forms of imagination are killed off before they can grow to maturity. More often than not, when a woman is bereft of her creative life, all these circumstances are at the root of the issue……………

….. Sometimes it is not only the woman who is drying out. Sometimes, essential aspects of one’s micro-environment— the family or the workplace, for instance— or one’s larger culture are caking and cracking to dust also, and these affect and afflict her. In order for her to contribute to helping aright these conditions, a return to her own skin, her own instinctual common sense, and her own return to home are necessary. As we have seen, it is hard to recognize our condition until we become like seal woman in her distress: peeling, limping, losing juice, going blind. So it is a gift from the immense vitality of the psyche, then, that there is deep in the unconscious a caller……….. who rises to the surface of our consciousness and begins to incessantly call us back to our true natures…..’  Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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Gratitude and mud…….

Today’s post is about gratitude because it has been a salient experience over the last week. A family member fell off a motorcycle and got away with bruises and cuts only, which grounded me in a state of deep gratitude. I have also been using a gratitude exercise I recently picked up, which focuses on both present and future gratitude. Summarily, we first write five or six spontaneous statements of gratitude (e.g. I am grateful for the fresh, clean water available to me every day because so many people across the globe go without or I am grateful for waking up this morning…  I am grateful for this poem that moves my heart…… and so on) that refer to the present, and then statements of gratitude about the future using present tenses, as if the things we are grateful for have already happened. This seems to free desire and hope.

In his book Resilient Rick Hanson discusses how to turn experience into resilience. He suggests we focus on the experience that we want to develop in ourself, such as, gratitude, and then keep it going to increase its consolidation in our nervous system. This is the basic process of positive brain change because our brain is shaped by our experiences, which are shaped by what we put our attention on. So, when we rest our attention on an experience of psychological resource like gratitude, we hardwire it into our nervous system. We can experience gratitude and compassion and contentment while other less positive things are going on in our life or around us. Rick Hanson writes: ‘while you are having a beneficial experience, other things could be in awareness as well…. These other things do not cancel out the beneficial experience. Both are true: the negative and the positive, the bitter and the sweet’.

I am also often grateful for works of art that touch or inspire me. Ponge is a poet I discovered by chance in adolescence and I was amazed by the tenderness and deep insights he found in simple objects and ‘mundane’ things like mud… So, today, I am sharing Francis Ponge’s: Mud, the Unfinished Ode

‘Our soul resents it. Our feet and wheels trample it. “Mud” is how we address those we hate, paying little attention to the injustice done to the mud. Does it really deserve the constant humiliation, attacked with such an atrocious persistence? Mud, so despised, I love you. Mud is pleasant to the noble hearts because it is despised. In my essay, oh mud, fly in the face of your detractors! How beautiful you look after the rain has softened you — beautiful, you, carried on blue wings!

When not only the distant, but all that is close-by has turned dark and like in a dream with a funeral, the rain beats suddenly, bruising the earth. That is when the ground starts melting into mud. And those of pure gaze adore it. The azure kneels upon the slimy body broken by the hostile wheels; during long intervals from a deep teal to an opinionated passage, who knows where, liberty and devotion guide our steps. This is how a savage spot turns into a loveliest place giving off a powdered odour.

From there on, the earth’s finest flower, the bane of artist’s life, mud flies best, and defends itself best against the feet of its detractors. All by itself, it resists our direct approach, forcing long detours on stilts. And it’s not due to the lack of hospitality or a surplus of jealousy, since she immediately attaches herself to whoever is coming by —  that dog of mud keeps jumping on me, holding onto my foot; and she holds with tenacity, no matter her age — the older, the stronger the grip: When I trespass, when I enter her domain, she doesn’t let me go, but fastens onto my limbs, lassos them with elastic traps, grapples them like wrestlers lying on the ground.

What do you think about such lasting connection? You find it overbearing? Not me. An emotional tie I can readily forgive. I certainly prefer it to indifference: better to be caked in mud than making little progress. I adore it, although my pace is slackened; and I am grateful in spite of all the detours forced upon me.

Mud appeals to the valiant. You left your footprints on her face — she’s got your number and will pay back. Your destiny is sealed. She dies clenching her jaws. Mud perseveres, you have to wait for her to dry before she lets go. Its stick-to-it-ive-ness is that of ivy. You cannot brush her off. Try better scraping with a knife, scratching to dust, — that’s right, dust, which shares the destiny of all the carbohydrates, including ourselves.

Certain books, whose time has passed — they have done all the damage, as well as all the good  they could, had claimed mud as the origins of man. Man is an imposter and is not without his pretentious claims. Certainly, the claim was meant as derogatory, to keep us down, to strip us of all the pretensions. Actually it is derogatory for both mud and man. There are no obvious ties of close kinship between the two of us. Man’s flesh is too pink for that — we’ll talk about man in his turn. As for the mud’s pretensions, the most important of them is that there’s nothing we can do to it and that we cannot give it any structure.

It carries on the way snails and earthworms do when they pass through it, and reciprocally, the way mud passes through them – phlegmatically like slime passes through certain fish. If I were poetically inclined, I could continue the way I did earlier when talking about mud-wrestling, lassos and ivy; but myself, just like all the others who happen to be bogged down and should let mud dry, waiting on the side of the road, I need to let it dry now in this text. Although truth be told, I cling to that mud a lot more than the mud clings to my poem; so, it is really up to me to quit putting mud into words, especially since by definition, mud is hostile to form and is the bastion of resistance to all things artistic; in fact, I believe it entices me in order to frustrate. Therefore, the best I can do to its glory and my shame is diligently quit wrestling with this unfinished ode….’