[This essay is from the anthology entitled The Wisdom of Cerridwen: Transforming in Her Cosmic Brew, published by Girl God Books (2024).]
Cerridwen follow me
Cerridwen change with me
Til I dissolve in you
Cerridwen hunt for me
Cerridwen consume me
Til I be born through you
Cauldron
I went to the mountains to face my demons. The first time I’d gone there it had been summer and the days were beautiful. My little drum and I would go into the woods at sunrise to create sound. I’d unleash from within me the awe, gratitude, longing and some sadness too. Nights were passed serenely with stars and crickets.
In the peace of life in these woods, I entered cauldron space. Something was brewing slowly within me from the sublime concoction of ingredients the woods provided. I was able to encounter the muse, to feel the sacred creative impulse throb within me. There was no pavement between my feet and the soft, red earth. My voice, so often self-censored and stifled, got a little taste of freedom and bliss.
Anger
Between summer and winter, the trappings of modern life had taken hold of me and I went back with my partner to his cabin in the wooded mountains to cleanse from it all. I had been struggling with confusion over which path I should take. I was frustrated that I kept going in circles, making the same mistakes, with my addiction to coffee and sugar. I was exhaustion by swinging between confidence and insecurity. I expected the magic of the woods to smooth out the jaggedness of my angst and to provide easeful insight. I remembered how the muse had danced with my drum and me in the morning woods and I longed to meet her once more.
Of course, things did not go as planned.
I felt depressed, groggy and severely impatient with the hardships of a simple life. I tried to deal with my emotions. I kept up with my yoga practice, journaled, exercised. I sawed wood, drank tea and rested. These actions helped to take the edge off, temporarily, but the edge would quickly return like a thin layer of dust on a shelf. The moment I had completely wiped it away, new specks would start to accumulate, making it harder to breathe, harder to see what was beneath the dust.
The cold was ruthless. I didn’t drum. I didn’t sing. I didn’t talk about my brewing discontent. My voice felt even more constrained than it had back in the city.
One morning, after a particularly bad night’s sleep, I awoke cold and bitter. I attempted to light the fire, irritated that warmth wasn’t available at the press of a button. It would not light and I was getting frustrated. Anger at my own helplessness overcame me. I threw the matches against the wall, pulled on my boots and jacket, and ran out of the cabin towards the woods.
Below the surface frustration was a deeper rage that had been boiling in that cauldron. Rage at the theft of my sacred empowerment, stolen from me bit by bit by the Prince Charming narratives and Father God threats that created in me a belief in my inferiority, helplessness and desperate need to be saved.
Hare
It felt good to run, to move what my body was holding. The hut was still within my sightline when sharp pain in my heart stopped me in my tracks. I was still pulsating with fury that was about so much more than not lighting the fire.
I sat down on a rock and had a good cry. Or maybe it was a bad cry. I’d had a few of those over the past couple of days, the kind that go on too long so that rather than purge the toxic emotion, the cry just exacerbates it and gives one a splitting headache and swollen face. Whichever kind of cry it was, it stopped when I saw something move in the brush a short distance away. The something was gray and about the size of a large rabbit. My attention was immediately refocused on this living being near me, a mammal, with red blood coursing through its veins just like mine, a being I had never met and would probably never encounter again. I began to really look at what was around me. Snow had fallen during the night, coating the branches of the trees. The skinny, spindly ones and the thick and sturdy ones were enfolded in glittering white dust. The snow was sparkling in the bits of sun that were peaking through the clouds. This is amazing. Its absolutely beautiful and alive and every bit of it is conscious.
After days feeling foggy minded, frustrated and lethargic, I was suddenly pulsating with energy. The woods had breathed life into me and I was delighted by all there was to see and feel. I felt soothed by this circle of wood, earth and snow around and beneath me. The soft, muted sun above me felt like the whisper of a kiss. My focus shifted from my own misery and was redirected out to the living, breathing woods and what it was telling me. Stories I knew I’d never be able to relay, wisdom I couldn’t translate into words.
I looked back and saw the brown siding of the cabin peeking between the trees. A sisterhood of pine drew me further in, or maybe it was just one tree that caught my eye, or perhaps only a single branch, bent like a wise old woman’s finger, beckoning me nearer. The next time I looked back towards where I’d come from, I couldn’t see the hut anymore, nor could I pick out the brush where I’d seen the gray or white rabbit.
I set off in the direction I thought the cabin was hiding and looked for my footprints in the snow. That should be easy, just follow my footprints back the way I had come. When I tried to do this, the prints just led me in a circle back to the spot where I had discovered I was lost.
For a moment I thought I spotted the hut again, but I quickly saw that it was dead leaves peeking through trees. I realized what I had thought was the hut the last time I’d looked probably was not, and I was further away than I initially thought. I felt the panic that had been gathering around my edges suddenly go deep into my center, my head spinning violently, the sound of waves crashing in my ears. I’m lost!
Fish
It was as though the woods had swallowed me. My footprints had disappeared and I was drowning in the sea of snow. I had lost all sense of direction as though I were under water and not even sure which way was up.
I walked awhile and found myself in very unfamiliar terrain. Sitting down on a stump, the desire to just give up overtook me. I’d gone past the flesh and bone of hopelessness and I was into the marrow now, descending into the liquid core. I don’t know where I am. Who is going to help me? How will I ever get out?
My tangible, physical situation had become an extension of feelings I’d been swimming through for months. I’d felt trapped in my mental patterns and acceptable addictions. I’d felt lost for awhile now and I’d been avoiding dealing with it. I was terrified to confront the massive uncertainty surrounding where my life was going, how I’d get there, if I’d be all right. Before I knew it, I’d forgotten my power to choose a path to walk. This emotional turmoil needed to find a much larger form or else I’d keep swimming around in the same small circles, decaying, rotting, forgetting. Losing my way forced me to look at how I was already drowning.
Bird
In addition to looming questions about career and higher education, things were not all fairytale roses and songbirds between my partner and me. I’d been feeling powerless in my life and this contributed to the persistent, irrational desire to have him take care of things for me. To take care of me. I felt like I needed him to make me to speak when I couldn‘t (which, of course, he never would), to teach me everything I didn’t know (which, of course, he never could) and, when it was too hard for me to learn things, to do them for me. This fantasy of knight in shining armor or prince with the castle in clouds takes on many forms. It is also God in Heaven with his soaring white angels and his mighty judgment, deciding who will and will not be saved.
Sitting on the stump, there was a crow that flew back and forth over my head. I saw it but wasn’t ready to listen to it. I wasn’t ready to remember that I knew how to break the cage my psyche had manifested into physical reality and sprout my own wings.
Cold nibbled at my fingertips and toes so I began to walk. After about an hour and a half of wandering through the woods, I found a dirt road, covered in snow. I followed it down a steep incline and then stopped because I worried that I was getting further away from where the hut was. I turned around and went up the road instead.
When I got to the top of the road there was a fence and beyond that were railroad tracks. Technically, I was out of the woods, but I still had no idea where I was. I remembered that the railroad tracks by the fence were a frequent walk-to point from the cabin. I decided to walk along the fence and call out for my partner again, thinking that if he was still near home, and not off someplace else looking for me, then he would be able to hear me and come find me. I would periodically walk a short distance into the woods, keeping the fence in sight, to call out. I climbed a tree, trying to spot the hut from way up high but it was all branches, snow and dead leaves.
The shimmering black crow seemed to be following me this whole time, periodically cawing loudly, letting loose the frustration it must have felt in the face of my stubbornness. Then it was gone and I felt more alone than ever.
Grain
I walked along the fence for awhile and then came to a point where it turned, and then kept going and going and going. I walked back to the road again, down a little ways, a little further than before, and then back up again, back to the fence, walking, calling, hoping I’d be found, fearing I would not. I’d decided against trying to get on the main road because the reality of backwoods men in pickup trucks was far more terrifying that whatever Mother Earth had hidden in her womb.
My voice started to loosen in the woods near that fence. Crying out again and again for a man to save me and hearing my voice echo that back revealed the bleeding wound of self mistrust. The only way to begin to heal such a wound is to be thrown into a situation where you have to trust yourself in order to survive. To be completely swallowed by a reality bigger than the one you have created.
In a moment between bouts of franticness, determination and hopelessness, I felt myself crouching down to get close to the earth. So small in her vastness, I prayed to Her, to the Mother. I’d only begun praying to Her in recent years. The muscle was new, shaky. The prayer I repeated began, “Our Mother, who lives within us.”
Incubation
Since childhood, whenever I was scared I asked God to save me, even after I stopped believing in him. A reflex born of learned helplessness. This time it was not the Father Above but the Mother Within, whose presence I conjured. No Divine Force From Beyond, no God or prince or partner or even Goddess was going to rescue me. Even though I felt like I was entreating a loving, compassionate Mother Goddess far beyond me, what I actually did was call upon my own power, the power of the creative feminine within me, She Who Knows the Way.
Then I just screamed. Loudly. I screamed not to be found or even to be heard, but to let loose the anger, the childish frustration and remorse, to purge the deep, dark fear about my own survival. Such fear. It was human emotion unfiltered by reason or shame. Such pure emotion has enormous transformative power. Life let loose when I screamed and in that moment I was free.
My mind settled and opened. I remembered hearing about a dirt road leading to the neighbor’s property and I tried to recall whether that road started at the fence. Suddenly, it seemed ridiculous not to at least try to take that road down as far as it would go and, if it led me nowhere, I could always come back to the fence. I had seen the neighbor’s property the other day and noted the duo of trailers parked opposite a bright orange fireplace.
I began walking back down that snow covered road, retracing steps I’d taken dozens of times already this morning. This time I went past the point I’d gone before, went down down down the hill and started to see different trees, different piles of snow and sticks, a different angle of the sky above. I kept walking and I started feeling a tingle of hopefulness. The little voice inside me warned to brace myself for disappointment and a long, steep climb back up to the fence. The big voice inside me said, Screw the little voice, we’re going the right way, you‘re going to get home.
Rebirth
After a bit, I came upon an enormous water tank and I knew I was on somebody’s property now, but I didn’t know whose. I kept walking and then I saw some trailers. Are these the ones? Probably not, but could they be? I kept walking. Then a beam of light hit my eye, blinding me for a fraction of a moment as a streak of sun emerged from behind a thick wall of clouds and landed right on that bright orange fireplace. That was when I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I wasn’t lost anymore.
During my three and a half hours in the woods, Cerridwen followed me. She hunted me down as I ran in circles from myself until I crumbled to the ground, and became that tiny grain for Her to consume. She birthed me into Her Wisdom and that is how I knew I could find my way. From that day forward, I would sing her praises. And I knew the next time I was lost, I would meet Her again.