Water under the tree

Synchronicities happening all over the place!! And amazing meditations, on the train to work of all times (I guess that's one good thing about my bike being out of commission for so long...)

With this thing with G and everything, feelings keep welling up; feelings of sadness and loss, longing. So I've been turning all of my feelings into seeds and planting them. Since yesterday, whenever any feeling for G or related to my longing for love comes up, I mentally take my hands and bring them together around the the part of my body the energy is gathering (sometimes it's in my belly or my sex, sometimes in my heart or my head). Like a potter bringing a ball of clay together, or a figure skater drawing her arms in to bring the energy in towards the center, I would bring all the energy together and concentrate it into one, charged, spinning ball. This would transform into a seed or a pearl or something. Then I'd dig a hole in the ground until I saw the groundwater and place the seed in the hole and cover it up. I've been doing this since last night.

This morning on the train I figured out that I was planting trees, and the trees were in a large circle, a henge. In the center was my sacred place. At one point I closed my eyes and walked over goddess knows what (at one point it was broken glass) but, as in my dream, I trusted Her and the glass was also changed into the forest floor.

The amazing thing that happened was with the music. At first, I was listening to This Mortal Coil's album It'll End in Tears when "Song to the Siren" came on; this is the song that I've been obsessively listening to lately, because of my longing for love (and for my animus) and I knew I had to take all of those feelings and plant them, too. I also felt that it was time to move to another album so I put on Florence + the Machine's Lungs. And what was the first song to come on? "Blinding," the song that I was obsessing over when I was longing for G, and when all those feelings came up I took them, too, but this time it was a huge hurricane and I was in the center of it. I pulled everything into the center of my heart, and my heart became a giant pearl. Then, the next song was "Hurricane Drunk"!!! Which made me laugh out loud, and as it played I cut open my heart, walked to the center of the henge with my open would leaking blood onto the ground, then buried the still blood covered pearl at the center. In the center instead of just ground water was a spring - the spring which will come out of the roots of the tree, which will be watered by the spring and nourshed by the blood from my heart. And I realized what my sacrifice was, and my offering, and felt even more that I would sacrifice anything - my relationship with G, or any chance of a relationship I had, my job, my home, my life, anything - to find my Center, my Self. The feeling is still small but it's growing in me.

The final song that came on after that, just as I was walking towards the handless Monster Tentacle Mother (who now has hands!) was "You've Got the Love," and I felt Her love for me and had to laugh out loud again.

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air

I know I can count on you

Sometimes I feel like saying "Lord I just don't care"

But you've got the love I need To see me through

Sometimes it seems that the going is just too rough

And things go wrong no matter what I do

Now and then it seems that life is just too much

But you've got the love I need to see me through

When food is gone you are my daily need

When friends are gone I know my savior's love is real

You know it's real

Time after time I think "Oh Lord what's the use?"

Time after time I think it's just no good

Sooner or later in life, the things you love you lose

But you've got the love I need to see me through

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air

I know I can count on you

Sometimes I feel like saying "Lord I just don't care"

But you've got the love I need to see me through

Where once before I did "magic" in a wrong way today I feel like my visualization was healing and right. I wasn't running away from something - I was running to something.

And it's starting to become clear what my I-ching reading had to do with my need for love: The love and longing I feel? The longing for someone to love me and be there for me? What I'm really longing for is God/dess. She's the one who will be there for me, wipe the tear from my eye, support and nourish me. What I've been looking for for so long in love relationship with men is because my mother complex is so empty and messed up; just like I look for Her in the sweetness of food, I've been looking for Her in the sweetness of love. And now, She really is approaching Her temple, the secret henge of trees in the wood, with it's tree nourshed by my own blood and the Water of Life springing up from it's roots.

Edit: The devouring mother

Re-reading my post about Twilight made me think of something I heard while re-listening to Marie-Louise von Franz's The Way of the Dream:

The unconscious itself can devour the human being. That is why the dream has not been attended to. We are now discovering that the dream world is the most beneficent thing on earth, and that attending to one's dreams is the healthiest thing one can do. But the dream world can also devour a person by way of daydreaming, spinning neurotic fantasies, or chasing unrealistic ideas...

The dream world is beneficent and healing only if we have a dialogue with it but at the same time remain in actual life. We must not forget living. The duties of real living must not be neglected. As soon as one begins to ignore outer life - one's own body, eating, doing one's ordinary job - then the dream world becomes dangerous. We call that dangerous aspect of the dream world the devouring unconscious, or the devouring mother. It can suck us away from reality and spin us into a neurotic or even psychotic unreality. The dream world is only positive if it is in a living, balanced dialogue with a lived, actually lived, life.

I've been doing a lot of work with the animus, especially as I relate to it as a Persephone and an introverted intuitive type. What this all boils down to is that I constantly have to combat a tendency to get lost in the Otherworld. I spent most of my life mainly in a relationship with the unearthly Iseult (or, in my case, The Vampire Lover); I poured all of my love and all of my passion into the dream world. And, even though I managed to meet the basic necessities of life, and to even have some friendships, most of my libido went to this Otherworld.

It's good to have a relationship with the unearthly Iseult, but when that relationship interferes with one's relationships on earth, and one's duties to our lived lives, that relationship becomes pathological. In just the same way that cutting ourselves off from the Otherworld is death, so is cutting ourselves off from this world. We need both. Puers and puellas have the one problem, other types have the other. Both are bad. Just as we need two legs to walk, we need to live and thrive in both worlds, in both sides of our human beings.

... Something else occurred to me: what if the monster tentacle mother is the "devouring mother" von Franz refers to above? She has no hands so she can't act, no feet so she can't move. I never lived with my mother - I felt abandoned. There's always been a huge emptiness inside me that I never even knew about, but that would come out in my desperate search for someone I could depend on and my desperate desire to eat. This mother in me had been mutilated, turned into a monster. She could only touch others with the monstrous part of her.

This is what it means to have a "negative mother complex" - the mother is mutilated, turned into something monstrous, which can't touch or act or connect with others, can't speak or see or take in nourishment. It can only devour, and it destroys where it seeks connection and nourishment. With an inner Mother like this, is it surprising that her son, the animus, is so dangerous? He's only trying to get for the mother what she needs. This is why the two are so closely connected: romantic love and the inner mother. We somehow instinctively know the two are connected. To heal them is a task fraught with danger! But is there anything more worth the risk?