The Images that Haunt Our Souls

Fetching Ourselves Home through What We Love

The word "haunt" originates from Middle English "haunten," borrowed from Old French "hanter," which likely has Germanic roots, possibly related to Old Norse "heimta" meaning "to bring home" or "to fetch.”

A Spell of Light and Shadow

When I was a child my mother made us take naps on summer afternoons. She was just trying to get a break for herself, but on sunny days when all I wanted to do was run on the grass and look for four-leaf clovers, being forced to lie on a bed and be quiet felt like being locked in a jail cell.

Blinds cast barred shadows on my bedroom wall. I watched them flicker, counting down the minutes until I could run free again in the dandelions, lay my head on the ground and listen for a herd of white horses galloping toward me from the future.

Once I grew up, I forgot about those afternoons, and those horses, until the future finally arrived and pulled me down, rising up through black water like a shark without mercy or malice.

I had heard the stories, knew I shouldn’t eat the fruit he offered, but when my lover slipped the sweet fruit from his tongue to mine, I didn’t see how his teeth gleamed when I swallowed. He imprisoned me behind walls of flowers and waterfalls.

Somehow the darkness didn’t consume me as I watched him scrape cocaine off the floor, and even though desire chained me to him,

my innocence stayed close, guiding me in daylight through towering ferns to the clearing where a wild mare had just given birth.

On her side, from the blood-slick ferns she watched me. I saw the fear in her eyes—this is what it meant to be a human.

Her foal rose and fell back onto the ferns. I wanted to come close, stroke the mare’s brown haunches, rest my head on her neck and cry until someone came to save me, but I backed away. I did what the mare wanted.

Maybe that is why I survived the knife at my throat.

I was a girl in love with words, caught between light and shadow,

willing to be both.

And if willingness is an enchantment, let me say I don’t regret

I fell under its spell.

And if today my words have reached you like a drink of cool water

at a time of genuine thirst, it was all worth it. There are scars on my thighs from the shark’s jaws, jagged tattoos.

They tell the story I first heard on those summer afternoons as a child trying to stay awake so I’d remember what they were whispering on the edge of my dream as the wind moved the blinds, and the light and dark shifted on the wall.

Survival, my adornment,

I wear you on my skin with grace,

a prayer moved by underground water.

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Musing on my Muses

I just listened to a great interview

Martin Shaw

, of the House of Beasts and Vines and many life-changing books, did with one of my favorite living writers, Jay Griffiths, on his podcast, Smokehole. He was commenting that Jay seemed to be a writer who was curious and wrote about everything, while he seemed to be a writer who focused, in this life, on only a few topics.

You could say this is an approach that favors depth over distance. Jay by the way, does both. If you haven’t read her yet, please do. She is one of the most important writers of our time, and like Martin, inspires me to commit as deeply as I can to listening for the stories, human and beyond, in order to contribute my piece to the revitalization of culture that is necessary now if the human experiment is to result in the transfer of love into the next universe that will be born, even if we are unsuccessful.

If you’ve been reading my work for the past three years on The Corpus Callosum Chronicles, you’ll know that I’m one of those writers who returns again and again to the same images. Butterflies in milkweed, the interplay of light and shadow on a wall, whirlpools, breaking waves, a mare giving birth in ferns, a girl on the edge of a clearing, deer at the edge of a meadow, heart-shaped tracks leading over dunes to the shore. Shores—always shores. I am an edge-dweller, living and writing about the in-between spaces of many dimensions. I try to go as deep as I can with the images that want to inhabit me, that have claimed me, in order to honor them as living beings, and to create beauty through them that hopefully moves through you. I don’t worry any more about being repetitive. If someone is tired about reading about the girl on the edge of the clearing, or the newborn foal (nobody has said they are, fyi), they have the privilege to move on.

Most of us, including me in the childhood nap I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, are not in jail cells. We owe it to those who have lost, or are losing their right to move freely through the world, to recognize our privilege and to listen for how we can use that privilege to serve life. This will look different for everyone. It’s something only you can know for yourself, and it’s not for anyone else to judge. Your contribution, the one you know in your soul is what you can offer, is enough.

Most of us may not be in jail cells, but all of us, including those who are imprisoned, are in cells. Those cells form colonies and hives. Though the gold walls may be invisible, they exist. We are all connected. Just on the other side of a thin layer of beeswax, is another buzzing soul.

So many of us in our solitary cells are waiting for someone to bring us the nectar to make honey. We can’t wait anymore. All of us need to get out there and find the nectar ourselves, and we have to bring it back to the hive. Create beauty as food for each other.

When I say beautiful, I don’t mean aesthetically pleasing in any traditionally received sense, at least not according to western culture which promotes a narrow, and increasingly artificial standard.

For me, beauty is in the particular. It is your image, the one, or maybe a few, that haunt you until you’re compelled to create as an act of praise that transmutes all the horror and pain of this world into an offering that feeds both sides of the veil, the human and the spirit world.

How are you called to create beauty that serves the holy with the images and encounters this astonishing world has given you?

Get out there and gather some nectar. Some parts of our world are most certainly falling apart, but inside the gold cells are waiting to be filled with dripping honey.

Listen to Jay and Martin here:

Links to a few of Jay’s brilliant books:

Tristimania: A Journal of Manic Depression

Savage Grace: A Journey in Wildness

A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World

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News

For those wanting to explore their soul’s images and learn how to compost and transmute the challenges life has offered them, I hold space as a mentor in a unique rites of passage journey called The Coracle. Please go to my website if you’re interested. You can book a discover call with me from there. I’d love to hear from you.

I will be a guest presenter in The Hala, an upcoming workshop on the properties of light with Ke’oni Hanalei of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals. We begin in April. Registration is close to capacity. Don’t wait if you’re feeling the call.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light