My favorite candle sits on my dining room table. It’s inside opaque black glass and sits on its own wooden cover like a little pedestal. I refer to this candle on this table as “The Family Hearth,” and try to help my family recognize its archetypal place in the pantheon1 of my womanhood. The table lies near an edge of our downstairs on a darkly cut up wooden floor, abutting a kitchen, and just above the sunken living room where saxophones and ukuleles play on a good night.
The candle says: “may the bridges I’ve burned light my way” and smells fabulous. Every time I light this candle, I cackle in delight.
you had me on burning2
My family eats dinner together at this table, folds laundry on it, and makes stuff on it too. Sometimes I use my fingernails to scrape the Sculpy clay residue up, or smear off the sticky edge before my upper belly winds up with a stain across it like a dirty wound. I fancy myself like some kind of Hera/Hestia hybrid, perfecting a home, tending a central fire. And even though I mutter like a pissy housewife with Tourettes, I enjoy scooching my kids’ computers, backpacks, sweatshirts, and miscellaneous leavings off the table. Just like I enjoy the make-believe that I have the qualities of a goddess I likely least resemble.
“Ah!” I want all to declare, “what a lovely hearth you have made!”
Brandishing & Burning | the Shadowlands
Burning bridges is my shadow’s secret desire: to roll out from a under-appreciated project or relationship with a dozen arms wielding furious fires, flashing eyes of lightning, with my legs comporting across a roiling path of red and black coals…never ever to return. My college boyfriend got this treatment. When I found out he had cheated, I went kick-ass crazy and tore every single piece of art I had made for him off the walls screeching with fury “when I’m gone, I’m gone. You will have nothing left of me!” I can’t tell you how great that felt, and because it was the early 1990s and no digital breadcrumbs remained in devices like phones and social media.
And… now I’m an adult, and it’s the digital age. And maybe I’ve mellowed? Nah, I think I just figured out where to burn the fire. So now when it’s time to go, I look at the people from whom I need to separate, usually realize I like them and that I don’t wish them any ill will, and take my hurting/burning status inside myself. I light the candle, survey the bridge between me and them, and move on with the red hot glow of fury and my own raging shame. Some people lick their wounds like an animal in a protected grove, I cauterize mine with a sword, then limp on wounded.
There’s just so much left to do.
Grandmother Freedom | Love in the Time of Duality
Last week, I received an energy clearing from a 12th generation Mayan-line indigenous healer. I didn’t know what to expect, and I figured like most spiritual unseen things, the experience would subtly creep up on me — that I’d need to search for the results. What I got instead was a head-bobbing, snot-crying, blind-eyed trance of some kind, complete with my body falling all over the place, and sobbing releases of tears and noises with a head full of wet rosemary water.
And what made the floodgates open was a very clear message: “you don’t have to be a bridge any more.”
What a huge relief. I didn’t even know this, until I was free of it.
In metaphors and in life, bridges are symbols of connection between different places, different sovereigns, different ideals. Blasting bridges has always been an effective strategy in war, and building bridges an clear call for unity. What I hadn’t realized until that moment was how much women are often expected to serve as bridges themselves, stretched thin between two aspects of themselves, between others, a safe place over troubled water. In my case I was stretched thin between who I wished I was, and my real self — a cackling bridge burner.
Bridges were hugely tied to my freedom while growing up on a little island, and survival after being nearly stranded on another. But how could a person actually embody such a thing? Embody a bridge? My answer in retrospect: not well.
I don’t suspect this story will mean that much to everyone who reads it, but some of you will completely understand. My takeaway is that the thing I always thought was best ( Peace & Connection ), and it’s shadow form ( Breaking & Burning Apart ) are two sides of the same thing. Also, I learned that our soul talks to us in ways that make sense to us, deeply and profoundly, and that healers walk among us.
- I cannot say enough good things about Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Seminal book Goddesses in Every Woman. ↩︎
- Silly Pop Culture Reference. ↩︎