Full Buck Moon

There is a practice known as soul retrieval, based on the idea that in a response to bad experiences, one’s soul can fragment, and parts of it leave the person to seek out safer places, places in the “non-ordinary reality” where one can journey to find answers, meet guides etc. – a place that is simply a reality outside this reality. The person left behind here is then less than whole. A shaman, as a practice of healing for a person, can travel to these other places and look for bits of one’s soul and bring them back to the person, in order to make them whole again.

For what has seemed like a long time, I haven’t felt much inside. This full moon’s fire ceremony and journey time was the first time in a long time I have sat with a drum and experienced any journey at all. The first thing that came to me again was the feeling of being bigger than my own body, where the boundaries that separated my body from the environment around me melted away. It was comforting to find this place again.

A journey is an experience different than a day dream or one’s imagination. The experience of it is more crisp and real and the memory of it stays clearly in my mind and does not fade with time as do other memories. I can easily recall details of journeys from ten years ago, when I can usually not even remember what I did last week in my ordinary life.

The journey experience that followed was short but clear and emotionally intense. A lot of information was made clear to me in a short time. I saw myself, or I should say, a large part of myself, the part of me that was the total of the person I used to think I was, sitting with a collection of elders – wise spirits. I understood immediately that part of my soul that was who I used to be had passed, had left now, as one leaves a body when it dies. She-who-was-me passed over to the spirit world and was sitting with, in communion with, a collection of elders. As I saw her sitting there, she glowed with a gentle but bright light, brighter than the others - the light of a young fresh being, new to this place.

I immediately felt a great grief. She-who-was-me has passed on. As this heart still beats and this body still moves, no one but me actually understands she passed on, she is here no more. Thus there is no one but me to grieve for the loss of her. I thought that she deserved more than that. She deserved to have her absence recognized.

As I sat drumming, I almost started crying.

I looked more at this scene, of She-who-was-me sitting with these elders, covered in the soft bright light and I understood she was at peace. The struggles of this life, the constant confrontations of “you are not good enough,” the constant struggles against so many things, the failures and never finding a smooth path – all of this was done for her, and she was at peace. She looked happy. I could feel happy for her.

I immediately fully understood why I feel like nothing more than an empty shell, why I cannot feel hopes or dreams anymore. She-who-was-me that would have been the source of all that is gone. Whoever “I” am that is left here doesn’t have that part to draw on anymore.

I don’t know who or what I am now in the absence of her. What is a person anymore when the best of them has left? I know that when people look at me, they think they are looking at her. Only I know differently. I am blank and completely without a compass or a purpose or any clarity. I am the discarded pieces left behind, not really enough to make up a whole one. This question of who am I now is really too big for me to contemplate.

I looked at our candles in the fireplace, and wondered what request I was going to put into the fire. I thought of all the wishes and hopes and dreams I have put into the fire each full moon for the last decade – wishes of good things to come, wishes for healing and growing, for myself and for others. I looked at the direction I had hoped my life would have gone, and I look at the direction it actually took. While I wanted to grow strong and good and wise and prosper, instead I have grown smaller and lost so much of myself. The universe has had different plans for me, and I have been not able to influence any of it.

I placed my little paper into the flame of the candle and resigned myself to whatever new loses the universe has planned for me. I had no wishes tonight to put into the fire. All I could say was, “let’s just get on with it.”