Note to the reader:
At this stage of my life in early 2024 (at 81 years old), I’m in a period of deep reflection. Deep reflection comes naturally to me. And I am (mostly) making sense of my “Creeksong” immersion experience in the Australian bush in my 50th year.
It was a classic midlife experience. A journey of initiation, to be sure. And it began with a sacred wound: being abruptly rejected by a lover I knew well and trusted. He formed a relationship with me and then told me he’d just decided (at 38) that he wanted children. At 48, having had a hysterectomy years before, I could not help him.
He quickly left me and found a fertile woman, and she immediately became pregnant with his daughter.
And I was left wondering what to make of it—this Sacred Wound.
Later, I read in works by Jean Houston that the Sacred Wound reframes life’s cruelties and betrayals. I learned from this experience to see them as gateways to deeper understanding, vulnerability, and empathy. This wounding led me to enter into a Mythic Journey and Transformation. I experienced the story of the soul’s journey: we embark again and again with ever-deepening consciousness and high purpose. I was to engage in the Discovery of the Larger Story as I became willing to see my individual life as part of a Great Life. Everyone and everything I met upon the way were essential participants in the unfolding myth of life on Earth.
Not surprisingly (and right on cue), I was led into Initiations into My Own Depths. There, I discovered that initiations come in many forms and ways. Later, I was to engage in Partnership with Spiritual Allies and actively pursued my relationships with archetypes. Finally, as Fate would have it, I experienced Union with the Beloved of the Soul: my archetypal representative of God, of All Being.
(This material comes from Jean Houston, The Hero and the Goddess: The “Odyssey” as Mystery and Initiation, 199, p. 23).
So here I am–facing “initiation in 1990. I’m a wreck. And I’m trying so hard to understand what’s happening. The upshot of this email is that I spent a year in the tropical bush in a place called “Humpty Doo” near Darwin.
Being “initiated.
A little over a year after I wrote this email, I’m building a house at Humpty Doo and preparing to live there for a year. When Hermes, the trickster messenger, gets to work in my life, he doesn’t waste time!
***
September 1990, St. Kilda, Melbourne, Victoria
Dear Mica:
G’day, hello, and hi. How are you? I am ready again—ready to get back into proper communication after so long.
Are you ready to do it, too?
Since we last spoke, I have been everywhere—journeying—not exactly geographically but in the terrain of the heart. Despite your contrary views, I have not partnered again. In fact, I have been “alone”, though with lovers on and off, for the past 3 1/2 years. I am very active in the heart’s journey in the personal, spiritual, human-loving realm and my work. Now, I am ready to talk.
The issue is anger against men. I think I have finally cleared it away. It’s been incredibly painful and astonishingly joyous.
So now I want to write to say that I am sad that I hurt you three-plus years ago when I withdrew my invitation for you to travel to Sydney to visit me. I tried my best not to hurt you — but I suspect that our interlocking patterns ended up with hurting and inflicting hurt being the result. I really am sad that that occurred. Over the years, my friendship with you has been sturdy. And I value it greatly.
I have had a heart-opening experience, and the impact has been astonishingly strong. I am learning a lot about transitions and transformations. This is the work of the present and the future.
I am eager to talk to you again about the future, too—about what it holds and what skills we will need for the next stage. I am conscious that you and I are about halfway through our lives, more or less. How should we spend the rest? How should we spend a life?
Are you ready to discuss these issues with me? Are you ready to have an intimate exchange about what is really important?
I am ready. I am open and excited by the prospect that this letter will be received with openness and love.
So, please write to me and tell me your story. And I will tell as much of mine as I can articulate. Some of this will have to be done “in the flesh”, I expect.
I hope that this is enough to start communication again. I am a little winded by all that has been going on in my heart of late, but I am well and open. I am ready now.
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