Return to the Dark Forest

My hands were still as the handless maiden's. Chopped from my soul, my words remained unwritten, my paintbrushes dry, my creative urge lying dormant like the cold, hidden roots during winter.

To have sacrificed this part of myself for as long as I did left me feeling unmoored. The ache throbbing in the emptiness it left in its absence. My art, my writing, my poetry is my way of understanding the world, of reaching into the unseen spaces and weaving them into something tangible. It is how I connect—to nature, to memory, to the flickering, numinous spirit of things.

Creativity, like nature, moves in rhythms. There are times of abundance and times of stillness, and neither is a punishment—they are simply part of the way of things. But I had been punishing myself for so long. Allowing guilt at not achieving, not doing, to eat away at me. How could I allow myself this space, this time to be, to live, to create, when there are so many other things to do. I buried myself, my desires, my passions in the constant need to do, do, do. Because time is running out. Life is hard. I need to to survive. I need to get somewhere. Now. Now. Now. Do. Do do!

And then something shifted. Not a small thing. A dip in my health. A very real glimpse at my own mortality and frailty, darting in the fog beyond.

Life is hard. It is brutal. It is a tale as old as time - Hare and Fox, the shadow and the light, the hunter and the hunted, life and death. It is confronting to see yourself slipping backward, into the dark, into illness, when for a while, things have been tame. There is nothing like a flare, a worsening of condition, to wake you up from your slumber, and realise that you may have been wasting some of your time spent on the wrong things, and losing time for the things that make you happy.

Coming back to yourself is hard too. You begin to see how the world's expectations of you don't fit, how you have been carving away into the deep softness of your flesh, leaving scars and scabs just to continue on in a soulless world.

The disguise wears off and soon you are seen in all of your raw and wild heart, red and pulsing with a sense of the other. There is no where left to go but the deep, dark forest.

It is defiant to be an artist, to be a witch, to live a life of ones own. To make ones own choices about how and where we spend our time- writing, reading, painting, worshiping in the dirt, in the mud, in the muck, bringing it to the surface in all of its glory.

So slowly I have been crafting new hands for myself. Perhaps of silver and linden, and nettle and flesh. New hands and new eyes, to touch and see what truly matters in my life. 

Photo by Anastasiia Chaikovska