Oneness and the Old Woman's Voice
Learning to speak an unborrowed language
Throughout my childhood, there was a quote from E.B. White taped to the closet door in my father’s office that read: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
This quotation seared itself into my memory and has initiated many conversations between my father and myself—initiated by me, I should say—because while it was clear that the quote spoke deeply to my dad, it felt like a riddle to me. I was, from a young age, preternaturally unable to enjoy the world. Only half of the quote made sense. I arose each day overwhelmed by the pain I perceived everywhere. I only wanted all the suffering to go away and felt constantly like that GIF of the man on the shoreline with a broom trying to sweep the ever-encroaching water back into the ocean. There were moments when I felt successful, but the waves kept coming.
I consider it a mark of healthy development that I came to learn how to enjoy the world. I had heard too many times that I was too serious and needed to “learn to relax.” Rather than continue to be offended, I finally took this to heart. I worked on experiencing frivolous pleasure like it was my job. I practiced indulgence, emphasized embodied sensations, and fell in love with so many things. I learned to enjoy life, trusting that I was not failing every insect, animal, and person who was suffering while I was laughing and delighting in something sweet.
But over these last many months, I’ve struggled desperately to feel buoyant. Maybe it’s some burnout from book promotion and a need to sort out what’s next. (I’ve been grateful to read several authors express their own experience with this particular exhaustion.) Maybe it’s also that there’s been so little sun for months on end and I just need to emerge from the gray winter. But, more than anything, of course, I know it’s the undeniable, persistent grief in the world. The multiple unnecessary and horrifying wars. The climate crisis. A fascist onslaught in my country and all over the globe. A war on women. Everything feels like a regression.
I feel like all the learning I did to “loosen up”—all the learning I have felt pride in over recent years—has dried up and disappeared. My own regression, I guess. I had someone advise me recently that I needed to “learn how to fall in love with the world again” and I almost burst into tears. I knew she was right.
I reached for a book I vaguely knew I needed to revisit. I sat in bed and opened the shiny black covers, trusting the object itself to tell me where to read.
What do I need to hear? I asked.
Bibliomancy. This instinct to divine information from the pages of a book earned its own name. I open the book feeling anxious in my chest. I feel weary. I find myself begging for clarity or a bit of insight.
The pages fall to a paragraph that I realize I have quoted before but am grateful to see again now.
“I cannot get away or separate myself from my alien culture, as I am part of it: born of warlike people in a waring age and, like them, divided and contentious.”
I feel mirrored immediately, and calmer.
I was called back to this particular book after a dream about my maternal grandmother. She needed surgery and I was to be her surgeon. Long deceased, it seems that I needed to bring back to life and heal her. It is this deep aspect of myself that has required attention, I guess: The Grandmother, the Great Mother, the Old Woman.
This book on my lap is The Old Woman’s Daughter by Claire Douglas, an author who might as well be the patron saint of my bookshelf.
The pages continue.
“I am drawn to others who stand a bit apart from what we have made of this world, and they to me. …As we find our voices and enter deeper into the world, what we, the formerly dispossessed, share and may be able to teach, contains the Old Woman’s knowledge of interconnectedness and the flow that links everything in this universe. This voice needs to become louder in its cherishing of this planet and all that is within it.”
As I know my grandmother, I know this Old Woman from many dreams, and the Black Madonna, perhaps one and the same. Through them and this writer, I am reminded of another way of being quite different from how we are living that has, for millennia, been steadily mocked and eradicated and disappeared from view.
“We need to find ways to say, and stand up for, what we know. We need to learn to speak an unborrowed language that flows toward peace, compassion, conscious harmony, wisdom, personal responsibility, and the joyful contemplation and action that can help heal both our internal and our external worlds.”
The hatred and violence in which we are steeped every day is unnatural. This is not how we were meant to live, nor how we can sustainably survive. In politics, in our government, on social media, in the news, on the streets, the vitriol is performative and sick, an indication of unwellness, not strength. The more we normalize it and perpetuate it for coming generations, the more likely we are to forget that this is not how we are meant to live.
This is not life, it is illness.
“Patrifocal culture splits connection into opposites rather than creating a sense of oneness: me and you, for instance; or male and female; them and us. And it further splinters the world soul into infinite other oppositions such as human and nature (or humans and the divine), good and evil, heaven and hell, war and peace. …[It] all comes down to the breaking of connection: the basic, erroneous division into me and not me.”
We need to unlearn this division that we have imbibed as fact when it is fiction, an invention from a few of us that has made all of us drunk. Poisoned. Perpetually unwell.
I’m doing my best to do the necessary cutting and stitching now, the healing and mending of myself that needs to be done. I want to viscerally remember life as interconnected so I can stop feeling the hopelessness. I’m praying to my grandmothers. I’m praying to the Old Woman. May she light the path to show us a different way forward.
Coming up:
Starting this Saturday, March 16th at 9:30am PDT, my six-week seminar on Carl Jung’s book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Sunday, March 24th at 10am PDT, our next Self & Society gathering for paid subscribers. (Registration link is in the automatic response after upgrade or in the email footer for paid subscribers.)
Fridays in May & June, online Community Dreamwork with me at The Salome Institute.
June: two in-person retreats on the truly stunning San Juan Island. One for Quarterlifers only, and one for all adults to explore the wisdom of The I Ching.
Beautiful, and so necessary to hear the old woman’s voice after marinating with incomprehension at Senator Katie Britt’s baby voiced response to the President’s SOTU. Imagining that she was selected, scripted and staged to appeal and advertise a political perspective fills me with rage. Perhaps she and her handlers could use a copy of Claire Douglas. Thank you for the antidote.
Beautiful, Satya. This: " vitriol is performative and sick, an indication of unwellness, not strength".... I have been thinking and feeling so much about the cancerous nature of divisiveness, and you articulated it in a way I needed to hear. And more importantly you offer an antidote.