Bill Plotkin in his beautiful book "SOULCRAFT" talks about the need for every human to go through its 2nd cocoon.
We go through the first one when we become adults. When the ego is born. When we get to know who we are in this world as a first step.
Then we have to go through a 2nd metamorphosis. A 2nd cocoon. A rite of passage. Native and ancient traditions had organized and mandatory rites of passage for young men and women. Allowing them to discover their soul.
But to do this, and survive going through it, we need first to build a strong ego. A strong core. A strong container. That can hold the deepest and sometimes daunting revelations that will be shown during the rite of passage.
Often those rites of passage were through being sent alone in nature. Through vision quest. As in that space only can we meet ourselves and our demons.
We lost this in our "modern" world. So we need to recreate those rites of passages. And finally remember what God is asking of us, which can be very different from the life we have and what we think we need to do.
In the past 4 months, since my vision quest, I have been dropping in the depth of my 2nd cocoon. A tremendous amount of grief, losses, and heartbreak have come to my shores in waves.
As I am learning to relate to my grief in ways I have never experienced before, more waves came to my shores. It has been deeply humbling to go through this process in the aloneness of this pandemic, quarantine, and world great turning.
It is indeed not surprising that our culture has almost no sacred space for grief and that the unprocessed trauma of genocides, wars, race and gender attacks, white colonial privileged status, capitalistic scarcity, and social separation is present everywhere and in everyone.
That same culture has created a well-shielded self, individuals, and communities, deeply separated from the immense depth of their grief and offered a broad range of shield with technology, alcohol, social status, spiritual materialism, institutionalized anger, judgment, despise, savior syndromes and border walls.
Even the spiritual community words and actions (disconnected from systemic actions and carrying the same cultural shields) too often keep coming up with "fixing" advice, and the illusion of awakening goals that prevent intimate relating with our own depth of shielded grief and therefor prevent to truly hold space for those who only need an unconditionally loving space to let their grief unfold.
We have made our grief a disease when all it ever was a sacred revelation of how alive, human, and connected we all are.
Voices and the sacred silent presence of elders, friends, unexpected angels, and my connection to the magical land here, have helped me stay in trust and faith in this deeply human process. To inquire more deeply into it, and to understand the sacred weaving into the collective grief.
Finally, I am home. Home with self. Home with the collective. And I am learning, again and again, to find truth and beauty in the wild expression of all my emotions.
With tears rolling down my face, I walk in beauty.
May we all remember.
May we all embrace our 2nd cocoon.
May we all trust those sacred tears as we release them into the salty waters of the ocean, the collective grief.
❤️
Angell Deer
