Wails, songs for grief
sunday Charles and his daughter Tilell came for an errand in bham and spent the night here. charles was anxious to share our anticipation and callings towards this YLSI. i found myself as i so often do talking, wandering around in circles looking for someplace to land in my telling that would feel genuine to me and articulate to charles. i spoke of my mom’s death, the beginning of a painting, of my hope to become more porous and able to connect more easily with the wildness of the world around me….i spoke of my recent dreams. he then shared his big dream of whale song and the mother orca, the two calves and the bony whale king, a threatening bull whale who spoke to him as he found himself in the belly of the female whale. the mother orca gifting him a tooth from the right side of her mouth. this dream in the spring was proceeded by an lived experience with a whale some 15 years ago. he went on to describe active imagination with the bull whale which led to purchasing a bronze casting of a whale tooth, a visit to a maritime museum 3 hours north of him and finding the place in the skeleton of a giant bull whale, the same placement of the tooth gifted to him in the dream. numinous, synchronistic, mysterious. i found myself feeling like an imposter…a. recognizable inner protector and subpersonality. going to bed that night i dreamt of myself attempting to help others who were struggling and sinking in black quick sand, only limbs and heads poking through as they struggled with their animal like bodies. in my attempt to help i also became stuck in the dense, black sand and struggled to remain above the surface. what an image to begin this journey…..i spoke with becky about my time with charles and she reminded me of the animus and the father who i witness charles to be to his daughters, and the longing i experience for not only the father that i both did and didn’t have as well as the father that my children do not have. there is a lot of sadness in this longing, a kind of grief. both grief and acceptance. I share this with charles in an email and in that reflection …
….Then extrapolating from this place I realize I have been working with this healing of the masculine and the feminine so much of my life. And then there is the tooth. In my re-membering, it was a tooth taken from the right side of the whales mouth. The right side often thought of as the terrain of the feminine, and the feminine as she appears to be in her current wounded ailing earthen body seeking healing and balance in this world, the oceanic emotional brewing of all that is …..and then Palika sent this lovely message this morning and the music below which is sprinkled with whale song………………………………..
Dear Ones Near and Far
You who love prayer song and singing together as humans deeply listening and loving - this is Ahlay Blakely. She has offered this heart tendering community grief ceremony for the world in such times as we live, dream and are dreamed. I have been letting myself be swathed in the abyss of this honeyed ocean of heartbreak that meets me in my longing, love and participating with the miraculous cosmos where our ocean planet spins. I imagine singing these prayers with you sometime and offering our tears to the holy ocean for the visions we carry of what is possible and of what we love and care about and tend.
and now in this writing i see the many interconnections. charles writes back that he sees in Blakely’s illustration for Wails, a woman in a fetal position in the belly of the whale ~ as he found himself in his dream, he then went on to remind me of my painting that i shared at our first residential, of a girl/woman in a fetal position in a watery world of her own birth, death and rebirth ~
i remember writing a poem i called flight and sharing that with my new cohort the first residential. i can't find the poem but i remember my experience....may 29th, 2017, olivia skye attempted to take her life....when we were being transported to seattle childrens hospital in a medivac helicopter after dusk, i was sitting in the passanger seat next to the pilot with my eyes closed, praying that olivia would not die. i could hear the nurses in back, the concern in their voices as they were with olivia on a life support machine. as we flew south over the ocean, the islands bodies below, i remembered the painting i had been working on now throughout the spring. i opened my eyes and looked below as we were flying below cloud cover and i could see in the diminishing light the tributaries and rivers flowing into the oceans surrounding the islands and shorelines....i knew then that she would not die. this painting was a premonition of a transformation, a birth, death, rebirth cycle, a painting of life and not of death. and she did not die.
my work has always been my window into the liminal, into the mystery of other worlds beyond logic and what is known. and now i thinking about how just one year later after this life changing event, i entered pacifica, a new journey of the soul, ultimately exploring island bodies of another sort, those i had once viewed from above, isolated but deeply interconnected to one another.
immram (a wonder voyage, a sea journey to another world), 30"x40", charcoal and graphite on paper, 2020