I’ve Seen The Matriarchy, And It Is Good
Healing in the woods at Spirit Weavers
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In the days leading up to June 13th, my scheduled departure from Los Angeles to Medford, OR, I was kind of an anxious wreck. I laid in bed the night before paralyzed with pre-Summer Camp jitters but on 100 because not only was I not an emotionally flexible 11-year-old anymore, but because I didn’t know if I had it in me to either make a slew of new friends or worse, relive the high school trauma of getting socially overstimulated and eating lunch in a bathroom stall.
The self that signed me up for Spirit Weavers back in January when they opened registration was a very different person. A person that read the following description on the website and, rather than being terrified, thought, ‘hey that sounds nice.’
Spirit Weavers is a place in the forest for women to gather and share story and skills while being in service to the divine feminine, honoring and celebrating the female experience. We attune with Mother Earth, and remember our connection to her, as we open our hearts to being in relation to all things around us, human and beyond.
To be fair, when I booked my ticket back in January, I had expected to be six months pregnant by June. I was expecting to be as Woman as I’d ever been and ready to commiserate about the journey towards being a ‘mama’ with other people on the same path. Instead, I was arriving to a community of women and those who identified as such (and also some non-binary folks, as it turned out) in a moment of my life when, put frankly, my relationship to my own body was fractured and filled with trauma, not to mention my tenuous and confused relationship to whatever being a ‘woman’ meant to me. Despite months of trying to hold space for the spectrum of emotions brought on by my miscarriage and the surgery to remove the embryo, my ability to process it on my own could only go so far. In fact, I was barely off the starting blocks.
So when I pictured “the gathering” on “the land” and its website that was the length of a book with advisories and FAQs and packing lists, I shrank. I pictured myself among scores of integrated, calm, cis-straight-white Earth Mamas with uncomplicated relationships to their femininity, breastfeeding under the sun and dancing to New Age folk music with Farmer’s Market twirls. And putting all that into writing, I now wonder what’s so wrong with that, but at the time I couldn’t picture myself surviving more than a few hours because of how much I’d been through.
On the schedule for the weekend, among offerings like ‘Intuitive Leather Pouch Making,’ ‘Honoring The Deer Mother,’ and ‘Squirrel To Soup,’ I saw a workshop called ‘Honoring Our Unborn Children: Healing After Abortion, Miscarriage, and Still Birth’ led by Natasha Pachalove, and felt a twist of panic knowing both that I resisted the word ‘child’ being anywhere near my experience, and that this was something I should probably push myself to do. This was a recurring theme when I tried to talk about what had happened — I felt it was important to say that the embryo had been a cluster of cells and not a child. I felt set apart from birthing people who were able to name their lost embryos as such. As I saw it, it scientifically never had the chance to become a full person (thank you to Like A Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy by Angela Garbes for teaching me this for the very first time), so I really had no business engaging with it that way. Little did I know, this outlook locked me firmly in my head. But as I was to learn over the course of the weekend, healing comes from the heart.
After a couple of cosmic coincidences I couldn’t ignore, the first morning of the retreat I found myself in a workshop called ‘Ancestral Dreaming,’ taught by Grandmother Sarah, a woman in her mid-seventies from the U.K. who had been trained in the Lakota tradition of shamanism and healing for decades. It felt ironic to stumble into this workshop all about dreaming when my sleep had been dramatically thrown off since my surgery. It was a regular occurrence for me to lie in bed from midnight to two or three a.m. just waiting for sleep to come, then sleep until 11am, rueing that I’d missed half the day. The night before had been no difference — I’d lain awake in my tent until one o’clock, clutching the spot in my lower belly that had cramped at night for months. In my head I knew it was just my contracting uterus returning to where it had been before. In my heart I felt it was the locus of the grief I didn’t know how to work through. Put simply, I was kind of a wreck. I was in no shape to sit my feeble pelvic floor on the hard ground and envy others’ relationships to dreaming and sleep, but there I was anyway.
Grandmother Sarah’s outlook on dreaming is centered on the truth that the technology of the human body has remained unchanged for 200,000 years. As such, generations of our ancestors survived so that we could live. The dream time is a place where they can contact us, and we can commune with them. As she puts it, you have a dreaming ancestor who is connected to you across time, and they deserve to be thought of and welcomed as you drift off to sleep. She covered the basics of an ancestor altar, explaining it didn’t have to be complex: “My ancestors are Scottish! What do they like? Whisky!”
But what impacted me more than the content of the workshop itself was seeing a woman claim her space as an elder, someone with wisdom to share with the younger generations. After days of reflection I realized that this was something I’d hardly ever seen before, especially not in my own family. My mother, aunt, and paternal grandmother are all doomed to be forever obsessed with youth, trapped in an orthorexic cycle of making themselves literally and emotionally smaller. It was suddenly put into stark relief that these women were treading water as aging children. In their minds, there was nowhere to go but backwards to a place they’d never go again. As a result, there’s nowhere good to age to, nothing to aspire to. Only more of the same, and the feeling that the more control you apply to your own body, the less it will respond. It’s fucking dark!!
Grandmother Sarah finished her talk and opened the floor to questions. One woman asked about nightmares and was given a general but heartfelt answer about instructive nightmares versus fear-driven ones. Another woman asked a question about cultural appropriation and Grandmother Sarah shared her view that cultural appropriation in the context of teaching hinged on two things: first, not understanding the lineages of the work you were doing and turning around the minute you hear of them to make a quick buck, and second, situating yourself as an expert and doing the work without mentorship or acknowledgment of that mentorship or origin. Towards the end of the Q&A section, something pushed me to raise my hand:
“Do you have any general advice for people with insomnia?”
She swiveled in her chair and fixed me with a penetrating gaze. Thus far, nobody else had gotten this look.
“When you experience insomnia, what are you feeling?”
My throat grew tight. I wasn’t ready for this.
“Um — maybe fear of losing control?”
She closed her eyes and her head dropped to her chest. She winced a little. Then she raised her hands and placed them across her lower belly.
“There’s a tightness here,” she said, eyes still closed.
Instantly feeling the grief-laced cramping that had dominated my nights for months, a choking sob fell out of my mouth. Tears streaming down my face, I nodded in front of the thirty-five women who watched quietly as my heart broke open. It bears mentioning here that as emotional a person as I am, I can count the amount of times I’ve cried in front of anyone except my husband and my therapist on one hand, and that includes moments in childhood when I needed comforting from my mother. I stand on my own. I intellectualize. I compress.