Memoir
I feel like I am falling apart in deep loneliness, but there’s always the circle to save me. It’s the Summer Solstice, and I’m holding the South-West, an odd combination of down-into-the-darkness married with the height of the year, so that I feel mixed tides of strength and release, hope and despair. It’s the midst of our holiday season—Summer Solstice is followed a few days later by Christmas, then New Year and my son Damon’s birthday—so there is a swirl of social and ritual activity I am committed to. And I have reinjured my ankle, triggered an old weakness; I have it strapped but am hobbling; it’s swollen and sore. Altogether I am struggling, hardly knowing how to be with myself or where to turn. It’s also the last quarter of the waning moon, and I feel a determination to turn with it, to go down into the night and release and let go and rise again somewhere different.
I want to clear myself of the old, sweep clean all those past relationships, and make space for something real. I know what I want but feel overwhelmed, unsure of how I would get from this part of my life to a time of meeting joy and love again. On December 23 I take a hold of myself and drive to the labyrinth, the center of our Circle of Eight. The weather is hot, too hot, but the labyrinth is shaded by trees and there’s some breeze. I stand at the entrance and don’t know if I can do it. I’m planning to visit my eight directions over the next eight days, and at this point it seems an absurd plan: to fit all that in among these celebrations and holidays with my ankle how it is; standing here I don’t even know if I’ll be able to walk the labyrinth.
I decide to take it step by step. I got here—that’s the first step—now I’m going to step onto the path. The narrow path, the one that twists and turns so measuredly, that flirts with itself, passing and turning and doubling back, that unwinds, dancing, eventually into the center, only arriving after the center itself has been forgotten in the movements of the dance. I still feel the tides of the solstice, and in the freedom of the labyrinth I clothe myself in its energy. I walk forward as the Summer Queen and imagine walking forward into the embrace of my beloved. I feel energy dancing, an invisible cloak that flares and wraps around me and lends me lightness, conviction through uncertainty. I walk slowly but supported by what awaits me in the center; I feel threads of it already.
Time blurs for me, and even though I am walking slowly I arrive at the center smoothly, as if the complications in my life did not exist. As if I were meant to be here. It’s like a secret is being passed to me, so secret I don’t know what it is yet; if it’s knowledge or love, the new year or the deep healing and stripping away of the past I associate with my direction of the South-West. But I feel something definite inside me when I reach the center: resolution and trust and the call of the unknown. I walk out of the labyrinth to a small chant that seems to be breathing its way out of me; my ankle is still bearing my weight, and I bring that hope and trust out with me for the next day.
It’s Christmas Eve, and I drive with Damon, who is thirteen, to the South-East, even as the year and the moon are nearing the close of their cycles. Everything is going down, but we journey to the place of beginnings. And we discover a low tide, so the cave can be entered; I crawl in, right to the narrow back of it where there’s a bed of smooth stones, and lie down on them, salted wet rock walls above me and to each side. It’s cramped and humid, but I close my eyes and begin to breathe deeply. Perhaps if I can sink deeply enough into myself in this place, I can emerge into a different piece of my life.
When I rise to come out of the cave, I begin singing; I am singing my offering to the circle, to the beach, and at the entrance to the cave I am almost assaulted with sudden light and air, the hugeness of this small beach compared to the rocky, moist closeness of the cave, and I call forth my emergence, my offerings, my desires towards life and love and joy, and I walk into the waves. I haven’t been aware of other people, at all, through this ritual; I left Damon back at the other end of the beach, but as we go to leave, begin climbing up the rocky steps to the road, I look back and see a naked man walking into the sea. It seems promising, as if the direction itself is promising something.
On Christmas Day we drive, Damon and his father and I, to the East, the cape, and it’s a lovely day to be doing it. All the people we see are having picnics and parties. My ankle is improving. I can walk to the cliff edge, where we gaze downwards into a dolphin festival of waves and their sleek, surfing bodies daring the strong surges of water near the base of the cliffs. I almost imagine myself into their presence, down there in the water diving and rolling, twisting free of the force of the wave and then giving myself to it again, surrounded by other tumbling, smooth shapes. The East has me in its grip, and I feel both vulnerable and powerful; given over to the ritual three days now and gathering strength, and the waves meet inside me as if all the directions arrived here, headed to this point and converged suddenly and dramatically. I turn to them one by one, thanking them, acknowledging them, but they are singing inside me, alive and magnificent; I am trembling with the power of them.
The next day I am pleased I don’t have to drive too far. I don’t know how I will get through the rest of the circle; all the far-flung places are yet to come, and I hesitate in doubt before deciding not to think about that but just to focus on the North-East. Of all directions, this one most symbolizes what I am calling in: love and sensuality. I go there on my own. There’s no one there: no fishers, no surfers. I take all my clothes off in the hot sun of the beach and walk into the cool waves. I feel impelled. Each place has been intensifying; alive; waiting, almost, to join into my circling nine-part ritual.
The waves play with me, coming in to lift my feet off the sand, setting me down; incoming, they caress my breasts again and again until I am laughing with it; lighter among the froth and crests and swells and then a wave comes for me and I am just the wrong height for it, I have to grab my breath and dive under or be crashed by it, and so I do, feeling its power sweep me and then push me beachwards. I am more cautious afterwards, more wary, but I still feel I belong here, as if the ocean is doing the ritual with me. It’s just that there’s a warning or two, a few difficult places with the waves as well as lovers; I have to stay alert and can’t lose myself entirely to the timelessness and buoyancy. But I’m immersed in the ritual.
On day five I go to the lookout. The North is the direction I sat in when we began the Circle of Eight, and for me it is both the beginning and the height. I contain it, and from me it flows forth. I look down to that beach where I swam yesterday, over to that mountain I’m telling myself I’ll get to tomorrow, across west and south to all the hidden places I can’t see but know are there and then to those sea places of a few days ago, the cape that I can see clearly and the blur beyond it that I know holds the small beach with the cave. Here at the pinnacle I hold the threads of those places and feel them humming; all the lines of power flow through me as I sing to them. It feels high and free and also simple to be part of this turning wheel of days, this spinning circle of places and magic.
It’s a long drive out to the mountain on the sixth day. I take it slowly, driving myself towards the peace of forest, of my temple. This is the place of genesis for this land, and I feel its vibrancy through the hot air, its potency in the rich soil. The circle is bringing me back to life as I traipse, place by place and day by day, out to these directions. I drive through the shadow of the black cockatoos, hearing their screeches resounding as if through the temple, feeling their shadows imprint onto me the knowledge of endings and beginnings. Once on the slope of the mountain, I am quiet; I feel almost asleep in the depth of it, but eventually my song comes to me, the song I have been singing in increments since the labyrinth, and it winds out of me, casting in whispers into the forest and the land, weaving my threads in here as well.
The next day is the West; the beauty of lake and bird and deep water. It doesn’t matter about the driving anymore; my ankle is coping, my mind is on hold. I am caught into the strength of the ritual, and things arrange themselves around me; I can no longer imagine not completing it. At the lake I meet again its serenity, vastness. The endless grace of water, of sky. I feel soothed, stilled by it; offered ease and assistance. There’s quiet here, patience and depth that doesn’t change; the West holds itself and offers that to anyone who comes here. My song is simple, clear, almost silent in the bigness of the place.
Day eight, the second-last day of the year and the second-last place: the bora ring. I go early, and it’s hot. That smell of dry earth; the Australian summer. Being at this place feels essential, stripped back, no glamour in the wavering gum trees, the faded cemetery, the busy ants. There are magpies and kookaburras, and life seems brief between the cemetery and the ancient lineage of the bora ring, but the now is with me, and I do not feel less by all this timelessness. I feel the fullness of myself, of body, flesh, bones; watching the process of life out of death and back again, that endless spiral. There’s nothing here, and it’s all here; if I spend a moment or an hour or a day, it will all be the same to this place.
On the final day, December 31, I go to the waterfall. South. It’s the eve of Damon’s birthday; fourteen years ago I was in labor. My ankle is tricky on that descending dirt path, on the sharp rocks leading up to the pool. There’s no one there when I arrive; other people are caught up in preparations for New Year’s Eve and not thinking of bush walks and water holes, so I go in naked. I remember suddenly, in the water, that I am the Summer Solstice Goddess, that at the labyrinth I invoked that, and in the round, lapping pool I feel the satisfying weight of that. I have not had a lover for a year, over a year; no one has kissed me or touched my skin, but here I feel alive again, almost excited with the fullness that’s coming to me, birthed from me, met in this completion of the circle, of the eight directions. I sing in the water and feel filled with joy.