“I want you to think about the places that have supported you”, I ask. 9 faces stare back at me. “Not human places, but wild ones”. The eyes of the women look up to me. Anticipatory stillness. Disbelief. The request is a loaded one. The request cuts through old & forgotten histories, it snags on the sinews of separation. Ripples through the palimpsest; settled sediments of violence now disturbed. The perfume of violence enters the room, mingles with the bergamot & jasmine, an acrid note amongst the sweetness.
Beneath the stillness wrath begins to stir, she curses & spits, bubbles up between the brittle threads of trust. Snap. One woman stands abruptly. She walks over to the far corner of the room. More fox than woman. Eyes white hot. Face a picture of contortion & suspicion. Tightly bunched arms defend her centre; fleshy bars protecting her heart. She tells me she wants to leave. She doesn’t belong here, she doesn’t belong anywhere. She continues to stare out of the window, out toward the moor, out toward the green tops of dancing trees. Being a human is too painful, she says. Another woman sits silently and cries, crystal rivers baptizing cheeks. Another sits with her eyes closed, focussed on centring herself, becoming an anchor against a great tide, belly rising with the inhale, feet placed firmly on the ground.
I scan the room for texture. Jangly. Metallic. Coarse. It is pregnant with the qualities of preliminary rupture. The rupturing of a relationship. A relationship where all is well, as long as you remain passive, as long as you don’t probe too deeply or listen too intently to the still small voice that whispers of your longing. Such relationships are hard to leave & harder to look at with honesty. Such relationships are often steeped in terror. Fear blinding our capacity to access clarity, to access truth. It takes courage to look at a relationship of this nature, more courage to see our part in it.
In his book, ‘Psychology of the Unconscious’ Jung says that:
“This kind of for-getfulness was called repression, and is the normal mechanism by which nature protects the individual from such painful feelings as are caused by unpleasant and unacceptable experiences and thoughts”.
Displacing oneself emotionally from land isn’t a conscious choice. Severing oneself from the very source of your existence, I believe, isn't something innate within the human psyche. I believe it’s something which is learnt. It’s a mechanism which, as Jung acknowledges, protects the individual. A mechanism which has a payoff. To sever is to remove oneself not just from land, but from a system that has robbed the collective of meaningful intimacy with place. The physiological impacts of this mechanism are insidious. Look to displaced indigenous communities, look to communities where mining has proliferated, what you will find there are repeated patterns. Soaring rates of addiction, suicide, poor nutrition, suffocating poverty. People who are both spiritually & emotionally sick. The mechanism to ‘forget’ is a mechanism to help cope with the unacceptable. Numbing oneself to such unacceptable conditions is not a matter of choice, it’s a matter of survival; of surviving conditions that can’t be physically escaped. Inviting a question that gently pulls at the threads of such complexities, doesn’t come without wrath. It doesn’t come without grief. It doesn’t come without a helios hot fury toward the disturber, toward the woman who dares pour medicine into such a festered wound.
I sit uncomfortably as the rupture unravels itself, layer after fuchsia layer laid like pomegranate jewels on the navy carpet of this white walled room. Body’s writhe. Faces scowl. Tears Fall. The silence is fibrous. Frayed threads of conflicting energies jostle against one another.
The women gather themselves into a circle. The group sit on the plastic black chairs in a manner that reminds me of school children. They are quietly proud. Embarrassed by their engagement in such an activity. Humiliated to have such engagement witnessed. The women appear naked. Emotionally naked. They’ve abandoned their cultural scripts, for all but a few hours. They sit straight backed, with eyes cowering from eye contact. Shifty hands fidget, nails are bitten. Each of them sit with their drawings. Cerulean, magenta & cadmium beam out from A4 sheets. You’re invited to share your experience, I say. My voice tumbling around the circle, licking at the ankles of the 9 women sat before me, gently reminding them they are not alone.
One woman clears her throat. Hands shaking. Tears making themselves known before words do. Her voice is charged with passion & gentleness. “I was never allowed to share this type of thing”, she says. “Never allowed to express this”. She signals toward the beautiful, pastel colourings, toward the pages of pictures honouring the places & the plants that have held her. “If I shared how I feel about this”, she said, pointing toward the umber trunk of an oak, “I’d be locked up. People would think I was mad”. The tears gush now. Ancient rivers roared from the source. The group sits & listens. The group looks on, our eyes pooling with the same waters from that life giving spring. She tells us the story of her drawings, the names of each of the places we see. She describes in such detail the contours of the rocks, the waterfall that washed her clean, the gully that held her in the early days of her recovery. The words pour out of her & into the room, into us. Let us witness this. I say.
Like a fern, the women unfurl themselves, they unshackle themselves slowly from the burdens of their capture. They crack open their chests & sing, not in words, but in feeling, a beacon of hope & defiance.