Page 166 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

I dream that CS Lewis of A Grief Remembered has given me his room.

I dream of my dead returning to me.

I dream of grief bowls made of earth, sold in the village marketplace where we pay our
debts to creation. In the carrying of them, peace is created between neighbors.

I dream of collecting death teachings with a dying woman.

I dream of carrying a human skull, memento mori, remember death.

I dream of crossing the bridge of tears, her daughter and I guiding my friend to the other
side.

I dream I am dancing, swaying with a dead man in my arms. A Pieta.

I dream of probiotics for the dead.

I dream I tell someone there are old ways to touch the dead.

I dream of an otherworldly café, I am lost, I am afraid, I’ve made a mistake, I want to go

back. The GPS fails. The roads are icy and I skid. I ask a woman for help, she tells me
she cannot help me go south. I am traveling North.

I dream. I dream. I dream.

Following the instructions of a teacher, I look for my dead, their tracings, in the old ways
of my people. I study Scots Gaelic in which I learn that my ancestors did not say my

land, my house, my family, my. Other than for relatives and the body they did not
express possession in that way. They literally expressed connection by saying someone

or thing is on me, with me, at me. An echo of all my relations. The dead are at me.

They surely are.

I try my hand at the drop spindle, the most ancient form of spinning. I hook the roving to
the spindle, draw out the fibers and spin the spindle sunwise. I imagine spinning the

thread of creation; as the spiral of energy travels up the wool I pray to renew the world

and make holy the daily life. I spin, I pray, all to weave myself back to them. I write. I
sing. I call to my dead in their language, I introduce myself and the dog who is with me.

I am trying to carry my dead. And, I don’t know how.

Some would say I am obsessed, and they would be right. Some would say it is a
distraction. Perhaps. But this is what I know. It is the story that has conjured me my

whole life, that has tried to plant itself in the stubborn soil of my heart. A heart harrowed
by grief – both the proper grief that calls to those gone from my sight, and the sorrowful

wreckage that I inevitably caused when running from that grief.

I surrendered to my grief many years ago, I had no choice, on my knees in the garden

unable to move for the pain, and in doing so tried to heal it. In Western ways, that means
I put myself to the task of disappearing it, killing it with kindness, drowning it in tears,