The call of the Eastern Whipbird.
Last week I travelled to the land of the wallaby, eastern whipbird, powerful owl, monarch butterfly and the yellow-tailed black cockatoo (amongst other teachers).
I went expecting.
I was full and ripe and stretched with a feeling that I was to take a solo trek around a mountain.
After a long and quiet drive, I parked my car near the base of that mountain in a field carpeted with pine cones and longing. Each night I slept with the doors and windows of my car open, ushering in the whispers from the belly of the mountain. After exhaling gratitude to the stars and God, I fell willingly into each dream-time. Fear dissipated slowly and I felt an old thread on the breeze, so I started pulling on it. I asked the dream-maker to visit me and I was gifted with dreams of a laughing fox, a destructive bear, a bursting dam, a vision of me saving a drowning tree and
then
a scene of my daughter writing her own story.
I rose each morning to a bird-song wedged deep in my chest; the same song I have known since I was a little girl. It was a dirge accompanying each of the childhood memories my body has long-remembered, yet my brain has fought hard to retrieve. I have spent my adult life unsuccessful in this brave endeavour. However - I must confess - I did not actually trek around the mountain near my car, after all. The journey is rarely what you think you signed up for. Instead, I pushed my fearful and naked body through rivers I have longed to trust. I scaled paths paved by nature on the steep ridges dotted with boulders and ancient pine trees whose trunks were the canvas that held the map. My map. The wind had carved pictures of whale eyes and watchful midwives of the old tradition into the bark of the trunks, into the DNA of each tree’s heartwood. These midwives sung a song of waiting while I stood bare-chested, devastatingly alone, birthing a new story of freedom. I walked gently through slippery embankments covered in mycelium and the faint idea that I would
- eventually - reach the centre of my wounds.
In the weeks leading up to this trek, people asked me what it was that I was preparing for and truth be told I didn’t know how to say “I am going into the wild to listen and to heal an old story.” I also had not done any research on the trip or on the two guides from Colorado who facilitate these soul quests. By the end of the first night, I realised that what I had signed up for was indeed a nature-based practice that was steeped in a kind of somatic psychology. It was a “choose your own adventure” type of psychotherapy that lead me - literally and symbolically - to an open field staring directly at the three year old inside of me. Although that wasn’t specifically what the trek was about, I realised that this is what my trek was going to look like. The truth is, I had reached a point in my life where I couldn’t go any further until I healed the deepest wounds inside of me. This feeling of stagnation has affected my writing, my direction, my mothering and my ability to surrender to the deepest love around me. I arrived with the need to write the last chapter of my childhood and close the book. So I made the choice to go all in. I bravely accepted a call from the wild - particularly from the other side of the river - a place I have never been able to swim to - and I began my descent across the landscape (within and beyond). With my journal, a whistle and a head-torch in my backpack, the words of Wendell Berry, Theodore Roethke, Mary Oliver, Clarissa Pinkola Estes and John O’Donohue thrumming in the back of my throat; I trekked to places I would usually avoid. The melancholy sound of the yellow-tailed black cockatoo became beloved company in the woods as it soared overhead.
She peered down at me occasionally,
chatting with me occasionally.
At some point, perhaps it was in-between the walking and the diving, the climbing and the falling, I was catapulted into an old remembrance. I found answers - at last. I felt myself come home - at last. With an ease I have only ever dreamt of, I retrieved the memories I have spent ten years in therapy trying to retrieve. I realised that I had been my own gardener all along, and that the years of therapy had been leading me to this week of favour in the wild. I had been actively tending the soil for the pinnacle moment I had just as the sun was setting, the rain was falling and my heart was freeing on the side of a hill that was home to the forest. I have bravely tended this soil that was once overtly nutrient-depleted so that I could meet myself at the end of this long hike to freedom. For ten years, I have been nourishing this soil earnestly trying to find closure from the things in my childhood that have chased me relentlessly. This haunting has forced me to make immature decisions for my children with the hopes that they not be harmed. This haunting has been an incorrect map with incorrect directions leading me to incorrect places. This haunting has held me prisoner for thirty-three years. So with pine needles stuck to the back of my legs, the bird-song crescendoing overhead, my hands on my knees as my lungs drew in clean air; I heard the sound of a new story beginning. A free story. This is something I have been looking for my whole life, but especially since I left a coffin’d suburbia two years ago.
Later that week, upon returning home to my lover and children, I fell into their arms and tried to explain what I saw,
what I felt,
what I healed.
Yet how could I possibly explain the tales of a woman who had shed her clothes, crossed the river and abseiled naked to the terrifying forest? How could I explain the conversation I had with the bear who tried to steal my childhood from me? How could I explain the baptism I’d experienced in those rivers I have been desperate to cross? The weight of what I had seen as a little girl lifted from my shoulders when I asked the bear to leave my life for good. The words were not adequate for the enormity of the experience I’d had in the wild. So when my middle child - the animal revering one who has an innate understanding of metaphor, just like I did at his age - asked me what I had experienced, I told him this:
“The Eastern whipbird’s song is a call and response.
She sits on her branch and calls out to the trees far away from her.
She waits to hear a response,
to enter into a duet
and - almost always - another whipbird sings a tune in reply.
However, sometimes she calls out across the canopy of trees and waits
and waits
and waits.
Sometimes there is no response.
That’s when She sings again.
She answers her own call.”
My son curled himself up onto my lap and we sat on the mat listening to the final notes of dawn approach. “I love the Eastern whipbird, mum”, he said. “Me too, baby”, I replied.
It turns out, there was a mountain after all. I walked around and around myself spiralling into lost memories and new dreams. New possibilities of beginning new stories. While literally walking alone across a wild parcel of land complete with actual hard-to-reach forests and real freezing cold rivers, I let my mind, dream-life and subconscious come to the foreground of my deepest knowing. Alone in the woods with not a snotty nose to wipe, nor lunch to make, nor child’s need to fulfil (other than the child within me), I let the silence around me bring me closer to God and nature. I played out the deepest parts of me and in doing so, I discovered a peace that has been chasing me for most of my life.
And
- yes -
the wound from long ago was excavated, inspected and released into the river.
I suspect I will have to share my marriage to my husband with the wilderness now. She has all of me now. This experience in Creation has changed me in ways I still cannot describe and perhaps I never will.
If you are given the chance to go into the wild alone,
don’t walk there.
Run towards Her.
Ask Her what you need to do to cultivate your own wholeness and She will whisper the directions into your heart. In the beginning, I was whole. Every grain of sand, every drop of river, every rough of stone, every feather of bird has been created to remind me of that -
every moment
of every day.