The Way Through the Woods E-Book

Rebecca Beattie

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 376

Beschreibung

Discover your path through life's ups and downs with green witch Rebecca Beattie, a Wiccan priestess who has practised witchcraft for over twenty years and the author of The Wheel of the Year. 'Bring your troubles with an open mind and go away with the balm of nature and kindness.' Maggie Brookes, author of Acts of Love and War Where do we take our troubles when things get tough? In The Way Through the Woods, green witch Rebecca Beattie encourages us to reclaim times of great change in our lives – in relationships, work and family, and in our bodies and selves – as transformative, alchemical moments full of possibility. Drawing inspiration from the ebb and flow of the natural world, this is a must-have seasonal toolkit for optimising your spiritual, bodily and mental health. Whenever you need a helping hand, be it through grief or menopause, a new career or finding your flow, this enchanting book is filled with nurturing rituals and wild magic to guide you. The Way Through the Woods will help you to pause and reflect, to reconnect to nature and to yourself as you uncover a path towards joy and abundance. ___ 'The best book I have found yet on the magic of personal growth and personal healing. It is a perfect journey through the year and through nature to the self.' Ronald Hutton, author of The Witch 'Laden with compassion and care, it ripples with hope and is full of delicious magic and ritual.' Jini Reddy, author of Wanderland

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to those carers of this world – those who look out for the vulnerable, the broken and the traumatised. The work you do can sometimes feel thankless and undervalued, but I would like to assure you that you do make a difference, and change is entirely possible.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Life’s Challenges Sent to Test You

PART ONE: WINTER IN THE WOODS

ONE

The Journey Through Death and . . .

TWO

The Journey to the End of the Affair

PART TWO: SPRING IN THE WOODS

THREE

The Journey Through New Relationships

FOUR

The Journey Through Surviving and Thriving in Your Family

PART THREE: SUMMER IN THE WOODS

FIVE

The Journey Towards Finding Your Flow or Your Perfect Career

SIX

The Journey in Search of Home and Belonging

PART FOUR: AUTUMN IN THE WOODS

SEVEN

The Journey of Embracing Menopause

EIGHT

The Journey Towards Reaching Your Potential – Self-Actualisation

The Manifesto of the Perfectly Imperfect Life

Acknowledgements

Notes

INTRODUCTION: LIFE’S CHALLENGES SENT TO TEST YOU

There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees.

It is underneath the coppice and heath,

And the thin anemones. Only the keeper sees

That, where the ring-dove broods,

And the badgers roll at ease,

There was once a road through the woods . . .

Rudyard Kipling

Night is falling. You have stayed out much later than you intended, and everybody knows you should never walk through the woods in the dark, but you are partway through now and to go back wouldn’t make any sense. You wish your coat was a protection against more than just the cold and damp. Something is shuffling on the path ahead – is it a badger, making its way home to its sett? Or is it something more sinister? Concentrating on your breathing, you try to quicken your steps: in the dim light it would be easy to stumble and fall, and you must keep your footing. Thoughts are becoming muddled with anxiety, and it is hard to think logically about the direction you should go in. As your panic threatens to rise and engulf you, you will your body to cooperate. At this moment in time, you are in danger of completely losing sight not only of where the path is but of where you were going in the first place.

Folk tales are full of warnings about the dangers of the woods. Even the post-modern retellings of these stories echo the same advice: ‘Never stray from the path through the forest,’ writes Angela Carter in The Company of Wolves, and even in childhood the fairy tales talk of little else. Little Red Riding Hood warns us of wolves that run through the trees in the night, while Hansel and Gretel whisper of witches who dwell in the woods and eat little children. But what does the fairy tale have to do with real life?

When faced with the wonder of a woodland glade, is it any wonder that we feel inspired to wind our storytelling around the boles of the trees, draping them, moss-like, from the great limbs that rise above us? Of course, all these stories hint at the woodland as a metaphor for our inner landscape. Humans have always had one eye on the woodland as a place of wildness, representing something of our own psyches: our generation today is not the first to conclude that woodland spaces are magical and essential to our mental wellbeing. While woodland can be a place to walk, to sit and rest your back against a trunk, or to watch the signs of nature unfurling across the year, it can also be somewhere to take your troubles. When you are in the company of a being that has existed for centuries, it can sometimes help to put your own problems into perspective.

But what about those bigger issues – the ones you didn’t ask for? We’ve all had them – the dramatic life changes that leave us sitting on our metaphorical backsides on the ground, wondering what hit us. It might be the sudden and unexpected end of a relationship, or the death of a loved one, or – even weirder as we expect it to be all plain sailing – the beginning of something positive in your life such as a new job, or a new relationship. These situations can all come with a sense of bewilderment, as you must gather in your wits and try to work out what just happened. You might also start to lose sight of yourself and forget who you were before.

That is what this book is about. How to navigate those sometimes-earth-shattering life changes that leave you feeling vulnerable, alone and afraid, those times when you think somehow that everyone except you knows what they are doing, that maybe you missed a turn on your way through the woods, or lost the map, and now you are stuck in an unfamiliar landscape, wondering how to get home. But before we get on to the business of those changes themselves, let’s think about some of the tools we might need on this journey; if I am going to be your guide, I probably need to tell you why I can help you navigate this stretch of the journey.

Before we start, I’m not going to tell you that I’m the world expert on everything. In fact, I might go so far as to say I am quite ordinary. I don’t believe in people setting themselves up as ‘special’, as it can lean into elitism. In fact, as I get older, I have come to realise we are all extraordinary beings. I am what is called a Gardnerian Wiccan. If that term is new to you (outside of Charmed or other fictional realms), for the purposes of this introduction, it’s useful to know that Wicca is a spiritual path which is matriarchal in nature and seeks a spiritual connection with the divine in nature. It holds the divine feminine, in the form of the triple goddess – a concept we’ll come back to later in the book – at its very heart. The only demons we battle are our own inner ones. For me nature is everything – a connection to the divine, a consoler when I am down, an inspiration when I need to create and sometimes just a comfort blanket to wrap myself in when the world feels a bit mean.

Wicca is a path that encourages study, and because I am naturally curious, over the years I’ve explored everything from psychology to neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis, to English literature and world religions. I’ve spent most of my adult life learning one subject after another – it’s become a life choice of sorts – so I do have several tools in my basket to help me navigate the stony path through the woods, not least those we use as modern-day witches. As well as a closeness to nature, these include an understanding of the value of ritual and time being set aside for spiritual practice; knowing there is still magic in the world; an ongoing cooperative relationship with the divine; and an ability to sense where the road ahead may be leading. In this book, I want to share some of those tools with you – crafting exercises to get you in touch with your sense of inner playfulness and creativity, and rituals to help you punctuate your life changes with a little celebration to acknowledge them and give yourself some closure.

If you have not encountered ideas around magic or used the tarot before, it might feel a little odd at first, so I will tell you what I often say to my students: it is healthy to give yourself permission to believe in magic. But what is magic? This is a tricky concept, as there are many different definitions out there. However, rather than see it as a dark art belonging to the occult, I think of it as something more akin to creativity. When I do magic, it’s a little like an active prayer – asking the universe to help me create a desired outcome under grace, as long as that does not involve harming others in the process. Just because you have asked for a change, however, that’s not to say you will always get it. Magic can only really work if the thing you are asking for is capable of becoming that thing – you can’t go against nature. For example, if I do a spell to turn someone into a donkey (think Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), it is unlikely to happen, but if I ask for help in completing a project I am working on – a new home, a new relationship – and I am already working towards that goal, it is more likely to happen. Meanwhile, as I will explain further later, in consulting tarot cards, I am not necessarily divining the future or consulting an external force, I am simply exploring my own unconscious. I am using the cards, rather like a storytelling device, to identify what is around me and within me, but which I may not be consciously aware of – yet. If you feel sceptical right now, don’t worry. I am one of the most cautious people I know, but over the years I have I have realised that life without enchantment would be a grey and colourless place. I prefer to live in a world where magic (creativity) and divination (storytelling) are a possibility rather than one of scientific certainty, where the goalposts often change as a new school of science disproves or opens up the theories of the one that came before.

I’m also a lifelong journal keeper. Feelings can be slippery things, like minnows, darting about and changing direction in the stream of life, and memory can fail us. In common with most people, I need time to process how I am feeling about something before I can articulate it to anyone else. Capturing the likeness of feelings on paper can be a helpful way of absorbing or analysing a particular situation, and acknowledging those emotions. Whatever you record, whether it’s a lot or a little, it can be useful when looking back and assessing how things are (or were) for you. How you record your journaling – on paper, on voice memo, on film or in interpretive dance – is entirely up to you.

The point of life for me is that we’re here, having a very physical experience. Wicca is an embodied religion, which means we’re not in the business of hankering after heaven. For us, where we are now is where it’s at – paradise is already on earth, and it’s generally found in nature. That doesn’t mean we don’t believe in an afterlife, but Wiccans try to live life to the full, and we acknowledge that life can be challenging. Although the two things may be unconnected, my life as a priestess has corresponded with life being a twisty-turny thing that surprises me at every junction. Just when I think I know what I’m doing, circumstance jumps out from behind a tree and yells, ‘Ha! Fooled you!’

In the twenty-five years or so since I began my path into paganism, I’ve experienced the end of several significant relationships (and therefore the beginning of others), the death of a very significant loved one, the realisation I was not going to have children, several career changes. I have also re-rooted my life from one geographical area to another (several times) and finally landed back where I began life – in rural Devon. And then there was the ending of my marriage (after a decade). In between then and now – and thank goodness – I spent a significantly sensible period in counselling, with a good therapist, who, for the sake of discretion, I will refer to as Shirley. That last one was a game changer. I would even go as far as to say that it saved my life. Now, whenever I am uncertain as to what to do, I think to myself, ‘What would Shirley say?’

It’s important that I give you a caveat at this point. As a witch, I’m used to doing magic to help me to feel empowered in any given situation (and I will tell you more about that later too). Magic, however, does not take away the need to act in the physical world, and it’s not a cure-all. If you are undergoing one of the dramatic life changes that we are going to visit in this book, there are no short cuts; if you are someone who would benefit from the help of a properly trained and qualified professional, then I would urge you to get support that way. Similarly, if you are battling with any life-changing illnesses or health conditions while going through these changes, it’s important you continue with your medical treatment. If you are neuro-divergent, and have found medication to be helpful, don’t stop taking it. This book is really an extra tool on top of the ones you already have – it’s not a substitute. But if, like me, you have a fiercely stubborn and independent streak, and you also want to take some real-life changes of your own, this book is here as a guide.

The Way Through the Woods echoes the theme of nature’s seasonal cycles. I have grouped the life changes we’ll be working with according to the season with which they chime. I have also made reference to the relevant magical foundations we will be working with during each of life’s ups and downs – the appropriate planetary body that rules these particular changes or times in life, as well as the element: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Similarly, I have given you the cardinal compass point you might be facing if you were in a witches’ circle at this time, and the tarot card that you may discover if you consult the cards, to help you identify what to look out for. All of these details are contextual, and you can simply plant them in the back of your mind while you concentrate on the work at hand – navigating the changes in your life. We’ll begin with winter, the hardest season of all. Winter is always a challenge – our death rates increase, along with our sickness rates, and our depression levels too. This means we will be looking at some of the ‘bad boy’ topics, including death and grieving – as well as endings in general – first. Yet out of these endings will come new beginnings, and from there we will move on to spring, to look at new relationships and family dynamics; summer will bring us to choosing to relocate and finding our flow. Finally, autumn will take us on a little tour around self-actualisation – reaching our fullest potential with the coming of age and the menopause.

Now, onto our first season, winter. Just as the pagan Wheel of the Year begins with midwinter in my model of the world, so winter is our starting place here too. It’s the time of year when you get to see the bare bones of the world that are usually hidden beneath layers of foliage. As I wrote in my nature diary several years ago:

Today the sun throws long shadows across the pathways that are paved with dead oak leaves and the grass still shows signs of heavy frost in spite of this late hour. Just standing to write this makes my toes feel the cold, but I am able to see pathways I haven’t seen before because the trees and the undergrowth are so bare.

So, let’s venture into the forest in winter as we begin our journey through the landscape of our lives and discover our way through the woods.

PART ONE

WINTER IN THE WOODS

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons . . .

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, ’tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

Emily Dickinson

THEMES: Changes that you haven’t asked for but have come regardless, the illusion of control being revealed as false, legacy, abandonment, endings

PLANET: Saturn

ELEMENT: Earth

DIRECTION: North

TIME OF DAY : Night

In woodland, life goes inwards in winter. It stays small and quiet, waiting for the spring to come again and release it from the tight grip of the frost. And yet, when life has caused me to question everything, to mourn afresh old wounds that should have healed by now, it is to the woods that I come and bring my sorrows. Deep in the heart of my local temperate rainforest, I visit a pool in the river when I need to wash away my sadness. It is particularly nurturing first thing in the morning, before the woods have fully thrown off night, or last thing in the evening, just at the gloaming, when everyone else has gone home. I call it Witches’ Spa – a twin waterfall carves a natural pool out of the bedrock, and a corresponding waterfall at the down-river end gives the impression of an infinity pool. After the rains, the water levels rise to their highest point and take on the hue of a cold Guinness, made peaty by the off-run of the moor. Leaves still circle and rise from the depths in the dead of winter, their brown shapes dancing and weaving in the fast current. When the river is in spate and I cannot make it all the way in, instead I hold on to an exposed curve of tree root to keep me steady.

When the sun shines on this pool, as it does only in the fading light of the afternoon, the water becomes crystal clear, lucid and turquoise in its intensity. Sitting a while on its banks, I can feel the limpid depths reflecting my mood, allowing clear sight and thoughts to flow like the water itself. If ever I need to get in touch with my own inner self and the wisdom locked away inside, I come here, notebook in hand. Here, at least, there is comfort and solace. Here there is a soothing gentleness to winter in the woods that can help us to navigate the hardest parts of human existence.

CHAPTER ONE

THE JOURNEY THROUGH DEATH AND . . .

You would know the secret of death.

But how shall you find it unless youseek it in the heart of life?

Kahlil Gibran

TAROT CARDS: Death and the Six of Swords

In 2005, I lost my mother to cancer. I was thirty; she was sixty-one. The illness crept up on us and took hold very quickly. The cancer was an aggressive kind. She started to feel unwell in November, then died on New Year’s Day.

Looking back on that time now, almost twenty years on, the experience can still land a punch straight to my gut that leaves me winded and gasping for breath. I remember fragments – the phone call when she told me she would be dying soon, which left me howling on the floor; the visits to the hospital in search of hopeless healing; the conversation my dad, my sister and I had on a walk to our favourite spot on the moors, when I said I wanted to be with her at her passing. I consider myself deeply privileged to have been with Mum at the moment of her dying, to have ‘midwifed’ that transition and to have come so close to death. It was a deeply transformative and spiritual experience.

There was a day in the hospital when I was alone with Mum. The elderly lady in the next bed was hidden behind a closed curtain. I was sitting on Mum’s bed and she and I were talking about faith and religion. At this point I was just starting to explore Wicca. Mum was telling me that she had experienced moments of prayer that left her feeling comforted, supported by an unseen presence, and I was agreeing with her. Just at that moment we realised something had happened in the neighbouring bed. The lady’s daughter let out a cry and, as she did, I closed my eyes and ‘felt’ the lady leaving. A feeling of her continued presence, accompanied by a warm and strong impression of her being all right now, washed over me.

Mum saw what was happening, and let me experience it for a few moments. Then she whispered to me, ‘Did you feel that?’ and I nodded. Somewhere in those moments, we both took comfort from the fact that I had felt the presence of the elderly lady after she had died. Of course, that is a matter of faith, and can never be proved, but it gave us a moment of hope in an otherwise hopeless situation.

Death is a difficult thing to write about, and even harder to talk about. Even now I am choosing my words incredibly carefully. We tend to talk in metaphors when death comes into the conversation – we talk about someone’s ‘passing’, their ‘transition’, and for those left behind we say, ‘I am so sorry for your loss’, as if they have mislaid a pair of gloves or their house keys. In fact, I would go one step further and say our society has done everything it can to divorce us from death – it becomes something that happens in private, behind closed doors, rarely spoken about openly. Even if you haven’t yet encountered the death of someone significant yet, death and grief are an inevitable part of life. You may find this chapter helpful to read so that you can better understand those around you who are in mourning, as it is a blessing to be able to respond to them with openness and kindness, rather than to shy away for fear of saying something inadvertently hurtful.

If, like me, you spend time in nature, you will have seen the traces – the feathers left behind on the woodland path after a nighttime’s hunting, the bones of a once-pony on the moor, or strands of wool left attached to the heather. As a child I even took home the skull of a sheep – its chalk-white, hard lines revealing the scaffolding that lay beneath the face, yet somehow not attached to the concept of the living being that once wore that face.

The truth is, modern paganism, like its ancient predecessors, wasn’t all that helpful in providing me with a manual for grief when I lost my mother. To our ancestors, death was all around; it was not the source of any mystery beyond what happens to our souls once we transition out of the physical existence. While Christianity is built with the death of someone significant at its core, the ancient pagan faiths focused all their efforts on trying to imagine what the afterlife would be like for the deceased person. For example, the Egyptian Book of the Dead contains detailed spells and rituals to prevent the dead person from being consumed by crocodiles, or to stop their head falling off (yes, really), but there is nothing there to help with grief – in fact one of the spells is to prevent the deceased person from being replaced in life, as if they ever could be. Similarly, the handbooks we have all come to rely on in the West – for example, the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who I will talk more about later – were originally written for the person who was grappling with a terminal diagnosis, and not their loved ones left behind. Kübler-Ross, later in her life, worked with the ‘grieving expert’ David Kessler, and adapted the stages of grief to fit many other situations. Yet the truth is, like the pairing in tarot of the Death card and the Six of Swords (a journey across water), the deceased loved one is not the only person going on a voyage here. When you lose a loved one, your whole life changes too.

After my mum died, I felt I needed to know how other people had encountered death and how their lives were changed as a result. I came to learn there is a strange beauty in it, how we shall all face our own death one day, as well as the death of everyone we have ever known and loved, and more besides. In this chapter, I will share some of the small beauties I discovered, as well as some of the terrors. It comes with one caveat, however. In the same way that moving through grief will never be a linear process, every person’s experience of death is unique to them. What you discover will make your journey through this sometimes alien landscape your own. I offer these thoughts, then, to give you a sense of my own pathway through this dark time, which I hope will help illuminate your own.

PREPARATION FOR THE JOURNEY: BEFORE DEATH

If truth be told, nothing can really prepare you for death. A sudden death can leave people reeling – with unfinished business, words of love unspoken, arguments unresolved. If you are given warning of the event, you may enter a stage called ‘anticipated grief ’. In my case, I lay awake each night thinking of my mother and what was likely to happen in the coming weeks, shaking at the thought of what we would face. My limbs would feel cold and my teeth would chatter. I almost became accustomed to the intense heavy weight in my chest, to the way my breath would catch in my throat and my heart would stop momentarily each day. In my own naive way, I held on to my one mantra, ‘Please let her go quickly and not suffer for too long.’

Yet I was lucky in that I had several people who had been through this process ahead of me and were able to share their experiences. This meant I was able to be there for my mum, to be part of the tag-team with the rest of the family, each in turn cooking, cleaning, going with her to appointments. Whatever else was going on, she had us with her, as the rest of life was put on hold, and yet, for the person dying, this process can be a profoundly isolating experience. People can sometimes talk about the person as if they are not there any more, as if their opinion doesn’t matter. If you are present with someone in the end stages of life, it is important you don’t do this. Just ask them what they need, what they want and do your best to fulfil their requests. You might be called on to advocate on their behalf. Don’t worry that you might make mistakes and get things wrong – the important thing is that you are present.

TRY THIS: A WOODLAND SENSORY WALK

Time in nature can offer us valuable moments of solace and solitude when the busyness of death takes over, and I would encourage you to take advantage of what is on offer near you. It might be a garden, a park or a woodland path. Walking through the woods in winter is a full sensory experience. Because the trees are stripped back to their cold branches, without the softening of the green covering of leaves, a wood can seem bare, harsh and very cold. But if you wrap up against the inclement wind, or the unexpected showers of rain or snow, you can start to discover a world that you never knew existed when the woods were haloed in green.

In my local wood, the first thing that comes alive is my sense of smell. The loamy scent of the earth becomes pungent; each footfall releases wafts of it. It smells like the taste of root vegetables – of beetroot and potato with the soil barely dusted free. It smells like vetivert and violet leaf – green, brown and heavy with a musk of its own.

The second sense to come alive is my hearing. In winter, the birds are subdued and still, with only the most resolute of souls singing in the depths between the trees. The occasional trill of a blackbird’s voice, clear as glass. The throaty cawing of crows, indignant that I have disturbed their peace with my clumsy trampling of bare twigs and broken leaves, dry, brittle and tense. The third sense is sight – what wonders we can discover among the abandoned trees of deepest winter, when only the bare bones of the forest are visible, and only the most determined of walkers make their way here.

I would love it if you could take yourself to your nearest woodland in winter and start to use your five senses in noticing what is around you. If you are a city dweller, and finding a woodland is impossible, then you can visit a city park instead and gain just as much insight as they are usually filled with trees. Perhaps find a tree that particularly appeals to you. What can you see, hear, smell, taste and feel? Using your senses in nature in this way not only helps to familiarise you with the world around you, but this ‘mindful’ approach to observing it can help to bring you out of grief, anticipated or otherwise, and gently lead you back into the now. When the future seems bleak, and the past is full of hurt, sometimes the now is the most nurturing place to be.

EMBARKING ON THE SHADES OF THE DEAD, OR THE MOMENT OF DEATH ITSELF

For my mother, the moment of death was peaceful. Obviously, this is not always the case. Each person’s experience is different and, again, you must be guided by the person themselves, as well as your own beliefs.

Your loved one might go through several different states of consciousness in the process of dying. My mum had entered a state of altered consciousness in the last few days. As the end drew closer, she spent less time awake and present. As I wrote in my grief journal at the time:

Mum sleeps on, her breathing peaceful at last, her face clear of the pain and distress she felt when she was awake and still with us. I stroke her hair while Dad dozes in the chair on the other side of the bed.

Outside the day breaks on a cold January morning in Devon. The trees are bare, and a cold wind blows off the high moors and into this wide valley. The window is open just a crack because she always wants to have just a little bit of fresh air. The heavy net curtain blows in the current. Somewhere a tractor starts up and I hear voices hushed in the corridor outside. Mum stirs:

‘It is so peaceful here,’ she whispers, almost under her breath, and then drifts away again.

I lay my head on her pillow, place my mouth next to her ear and start to speak gently to her.

I am not sure I could tell you exactly what I said to my mum. I remember words of reassurance, words of love. I do recall assuring her that it was OK to leave us, that we were releasing her. My feeling at the time was that her experience was so difficult, I did not want her worrying about us, though somehow she always knew it would come to this.

‘I will never make old bones,’ she would say to me with a wry smile. But that was when her death was some vague and far-off future event. When it came to it, she knew long before the doctors the path she’d be taking, though she shielded us from it. Always so quick to protect everyone else, the last person she would look after was herself.

In time, her hospital room became a cocoon for us, away from the rest of the world, where we were encased in a shell that at any moment might crack and send us all sprawling. If you are walking this path with a loved one, it is important for you to be able to sequester yourself away with them and just focus on what they need, even if you are only able to do this one moment at a time in between the rest of life’s demands. Later, this will be an important landmark as you navigate the rest of the woods, knowing that you took those moments and cherished them while you could.

The actual moment of Mum’s death was one of the most profoundly spiritual experiences I have had in this lifetime. I felt her passing, just as I had felt the lady in the hospital depart previously. Ever since then, I have been sure I can sense the departed person at funerals. Is it their soul that comes back to visit? I always like to think we get to see our own funeral and who has turned up. It might be delusional, it might be weird, but it gives me immense comfort to feel that the person I am mourning is there and present.

TRY THIS: CREATING YOUR OWN GRIEF ARCHETYPES

You will find throughout this chapter that I talk about death as if it is a real person. Facing moments of devastation head on, writers the world over have been employing this technique for centuries. With figures such as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and Death in Terry Pratchett’s Mort, it becomes a way of removing the fear of death, while at the same time humanising it. Humans throughout history have created archetypes – figures who enable us to explain the unexplainable and make it more palatable.

It could be argued that we have distanced ourselves from these archetypes over time, just as we have divorced ourselves from the process of death and dying, and it can be beneficial to think about how you might meet and greet your own death archetypes. Writing your own story or creating a narrative in response to your own experiences is a deeply empowering and nourishing way to approach the process of change. It can help you to sift through events, make sense of your experiences and acknowledge your emotional responses to them, which are so important. Later, sharing these can be healing for other people also.

Perhaps like the ancient Greeks you might imagine being carried, Six of Swords-like, in a boat over the river Styx to the realm of the dead, after paying a coin to Charon the ferryman to cover the fare. How would you feel during the crossing? Or perhaps you might encounter an ageless figure like the goddess Hecate at the crossroads in the woods, as she holds aloft a lantern to illuminate the way, throwing light into the shadows between the trees.

You might find it healing at this point to consider what your own archetype would look like. How would it appear to you, and in what setting? How would it usher you in? As an example, I have created my own example of a death archetype.

Once upon a time, in a land not so very far away, they lived an imperfect goddess called Elizabeth. She was a gentle soul, who liked to fill her days with books and nature and dreaming. One day, when the last of the leaves had finally fallen from the trees in the winter gales, and the trees swayed in the cold north wind, Elizabeth decided to set out on a quest – to go in search of her lost mother and discover the mysteries of life and death. She packed a bag of food for her and her little dog, she placed her favourite necklace around her neck, and her bracelets on her wrists. Closing the door behind her, she set one foot on the path. As she walked, the wind brought whispers of snow and ice, but Elizabeth was undeterred. She was resolute: she must learn what she could in the woods.

Along the trail, the imperfect goddess reached a tunnel carved into the hillside. She peered inside. She could see a faint glow of green light at the other end, so she pressed on.

As Elizabeth emerged from the tunnel, she knew that she was now in a different part of the woods – much further in than the distance she’d walked. She noticed the quiet descending around her. She had often heard her mother say that this was the realm where the crone lived, her black cloak sheltering her head, her pack of dogs around her, with the lantern she held aloft to light the way. The imperfect goddess knew she must seek out the crone if she was to learn the secret of death.

It was then that she noticed a side gate leading into the deepest part of the woods. The path underfoot was covered over in dead leaves and fallen twigs. Each step she took was accompanied by the sounds of crackling and rustling. Coming around the next bend in the path, she saw the crone up ahead, and her little dog ran towards her. The crone was entranced by the little dog and the way it wrapped itself around her ankles in joy. If this was how the little dog responded, thought Elizabeth, then the crone could not possibly be someone to fear.

Our ability to tell stories can illuminate our path through these winter woods of grief following the death of a loved one, and lay a trail for those around us who are also taking this journey. I would encourage you to keep your notebook handy, and trace your own story as you go. You can follow the story of Elizabeth as we continue across this chapter and beyond through the different phases of grief and loss and into each new season.

NAVIGATION: GRIEF AND GRIEVING

‘Good day to you, ma’am,’ began Elizabeth, her voice sounding shriller than she intended.

‘I am not the Queen,’ replied the crone. ‘You may call me Margaret.’

‘Margaret,’ stammered Elizabeth. ‘I wonder if you might help me. I come here in search of the secrets of death,’ she said. ‘I want to find the place where death lives.’

Margaret nodded and looked thoughtful.

‘Are you sure you are ready to learn such mysteries while you are still so young?’

The imperfect goddess thought for a moment but, remembering her mother’s warm embrace, she nodded.

People talk about grief as if it is a vast dark forest to push through, but I would like to propose a different model. It’s not a place you go, but a companion who meets you in the woods and stays with you on your onward journey. It is important to find ways, such as in the previous exercise, to enable us to befriend grief, so that we do not try to resist it. To refuse this process would be to push the feelings down and not process them properly: this later can lead to illness, both physical and mental. It is important to acknowledge your thoughts and fears as they arise, and to remember that while you are vulnerable right now, you won’t always be so. For some people, grief is an unpredictable creature, as my close friend and fellow priestess Alatarial shared with me: ‘Grief is a wild beast,’ she said. ‘It raises its head in ways we never thought of – impacting on all aspects of our life.’ Grief can sometimes sneak up on you and pull your pigtails, but it can also give you a hard smack round the chops that leaves your face stinging and your tears flowing. Sometimes, you are left breathless and wondering if you will survive it. But in time you get used to its presence in your life; while grief doesn’t ever go away, you can learn to live with it in companionable silence. Make a place for grief at your table and share a meal together, or write grief a letter telling him or her how they have made you feel, and also how they have helped you in this journey.

While no one can predict how you will feel, there are some useful ‘roadmaps’ you can consult for the journey you are on, to help you identify those cleverly concealed grief pangs. At this point I am going to reintroduce you to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss psychologist who spent most of her early working life with patients who were terminally ill. She observed that people would go through five identifiable stages when they were coming to terms with their own death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, but these just as easily apply to the bereaved also.

Kübler-Ross’s theory has been debunked or discredited in some quarters, but this is usually because people misunderstand how the five stages of grief work. The word ‘stages’ suggests something that will run consecutively, but Kübler-Ross herself stated quite clearly that the stages are not linear – not everyone will experience all five of them, and you may find you loop back round and experience some of them more than once. Do remember – the map is not the territory. A model is there as a guideline, but life can look and feel very different from the landscape that is drawn on paper.

So, let’s see what these stages look like in real life.

DENIAL

Our grief companion begins by bringing us denial. This does not necessarily mean that you deny that the loss has happened – you might feel disbelief when you are still in a state of shock. If what you have experienced is a death, or the ending of a significant relationship, this is the part where you might wake up each morning and, for the first few seconds of conscious awareness, wonder if it was all a bad dream and if your loved one will emerge, Bobby Ewing-style, from the shower. At this point you might be clinging to what Kübler-Ross and Kessler refer to as the ‘safe world’ – the old reality that has now passed, as opposed to the new one you have not yet got your head around. Go gently on yourself. The sense of denial will dissipate, but you need to give yourself time.

ANGER

Anger often happens when the full extent of the loss you have experienced starts to sink in: you may feel angry at the rest of the world for not being fully aware of what has just happened, or at the lost loved one for going, or with yourself for something you did or didn’t do. The thing to bear in mind here is that your emotions are not logical, linear things that always have a root cause. You might feel angry for no good reason at all. You can see this in my own grief diaries, true to Kübler-Ross’s model:

17 January 2005

I am back home and due to start my first day back at work. I feel scratchy, tempestuous, Little Miss Firecracker, almost willing people to say something clumsy and ill-timed so that I can unleash it a little and whip them sharply around the face with my words. Of course, that would be unfair, so I will it to nestle down inside my belly, coiling around on itself, hissing its forked tongue as it dozes in a light sleep, with one eye open.

Many years on, I am learning how poor we are (collectively) at managing anger as an emotion – both our own and other people’s. You could say that women in Western society are trained not to ‘do’ anger, as it tends to make people uncomfortable, but this affects men as well. Men are taught to channel it (and other difficult emotions) through ‘manly pursuits’ such as sports or competitive activities that are designed to vent their inner warrior, while women seethe silently into whatever they are doing to distract themselves. When we don’t know what to do with a particular emotional response, we often go into avoidance – side-stepping the emotion, or evading the angry person, and hoping it will go away.

I would invite you, if you are feeling that hot, writhing anger, to seek ways of expressing it or expelling the energy it creates. Journal it, sing it, paint it or express it through whatever physical activity you favour – walking, swimming, running – or scream it into a pillow, shout it to the hills. Think about what works best for you. If you don’t, it will turn in on you, and you can damage your health (both physical and mental) if you don’t vent that pressure cooker. And it’s not just your health that suffers, it’s the unfortunate person who asks the wrong question at the wrong time and gets hit in the chest with both barrels.

BARGAINING

The third stage the grief companion brings, according to Kübler-Ross and Kessler, is bargaining. This doesn’t mean you are off to the market to haggle; it means you start ‘should-ing’. My best friend Lizzie always says to me, ‘Stop should-ing all over yourself – it’s a dirty habit’, and this is what we mean by bargaining. We start to think about what we should have done better – what we got wrong, what we didn’t think of until it was too late – and then we start bargaining with the universe: ‘I should have told Mum I loved her more’; ‘I should have gone home more quickly when I got the call’; ‘If only I could take her place – my life for her own.’

DEPRESSION