Wild Essence - Drinking from a Deeper Well

As I write the trees are alive with crows and song birds, darting about and twittering in a lively song. A cockerel is crowing somewhere down the fields.  A cold snap has passed and spring feels ever closer as mornings and evenings begin to stretch from the deep darkness. I’m glad that January is almost over, a funny month which is full of bright new intentions yet heavy with the cold and dark of winter. My work with women’s health, which began in response to my clients, meeting their needs for natural care during the perimenopause years, feels ever more relevant to myself as I approach my fiftieth year. And I begin to understand things from the inside out. The reckoning and realigning that takes place. The strangeness of age when I feel so young inside. Realising that I had all kinds of expectations of myself, many of which now feel irrelevant. And what I do want is to pay attention to my inner child, to drink from the deeper well, to experience peace in my mind.

I began working in healing because I was driven by a deep desire to understand myself and others more deeply. To understand illness, energy and dysfunction. To find meaning within the unpredictability and suffering of ordinary life. The more I learned the more I was hungry to learn. And that hasn’t changed as I’ve grown older. Sometimes I feel that the more I learn, the less I know. And I enjoy sharing my learning and my process of learning with others, on the same path, looking for answers to many of the same questions.

I find myself now on another turn of the wheel. The transformative journey that is perimenopause and into menopause. I don’t have it all figured out. And I doubt I ever will. What I do know is that a sort of uncovering takes place, that it can be naked, revealing and vulnerable. That I want more than ever to feel my feet on the ground, to be rooted and held, literally and figuratively. That I catch glimpses of my wild essence, awaiting my embodiment. I revisit the books I read in my twenties, that first opened me to new ways of thinking and being. And the words are just as true now, half a century later. But I understand them in new ways.

This is a tender rite of passage, there’s gratitude for all I have learned and gathered, grief for the seeds that didn’t grow, the people that have not made it this far.

If you are encountering these same things, I hear you, I see you.

If you are thirsty for the deeper well, let’s drink from it together. I have various opportunities and offerings over the coming months, see here, stay tuned.

I’ll leave you with this poem from David Whyte.

MAKE YOURSELF A DOOR

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,
how the discarded is woven into shelter,
learn the way things hidden and unspoken
slowly proclaim their voice in the world.
Find that far inward symmetry
to all outward appearances, apprentice
yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back
all you sent away, be a new annunciation,
make yourself a door through which
to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.

X x Siobhán

Excerpt from ‘Coleman’s Bed’ in ‘River Flow:
New and Selected Poems’
©David Whyte and Many Rivers Press