“Earth Elder”
“Earth Elder” - created July 15th, 2021
THE MANDALA PROJECT - How it came to life
If you know someone whose day would be brightened by this Mandala, please pass it along! Even more magical, with a love note from you!
The Mandala Project: #41
I love that there are earth elders among us.
I encounter them in the most unexpected places, but most often they reveal themselves in the patterns and rhythms of wood. This ancient one feels like she’s been swimming through the currents of the Cosmos gathering wisdom for lifetimes.
The mandala in the photo below is an earlier iteration. Didn’t make the cut, but when we returned the next day “Earth Elder” was born of it.
Throughout the process of its creation, Lily (on to the spell of tunnel vision that mandala making casts on me) was true to form, adeptly taking charge of her own entertainment.
I’m certain that with each submergence in this mountain lake she emerged carrying yet more wisdom, most likely through direct encounter with the mystical beings that occupy its depths.
A Map For Navigating Death
I’ve hesitated to dive back into regular posting of the mandalas because so many were created with Lily at my side. I know that as I post each one and share its story I will be reminded of her presence and her absence, and both break my heart.
I’ve been afraid of Lily’s death since she was 6 months old. (It occurred to me back then that I could find a lovely farm with nice, dog-loving people where she could have a perfect life, and give her away before I fell any more in love with her.) So when we found tumours in Lily’s liver 18 months ago, this fear of loss motivated me to reach out to Sarah Kerr, whose work it is to guide people in opening their hearts to death.
I didn’t want to cling to Lily’s life, I wanted to support her in having a good death and to do that I knew I’d have to rearrange my relationship with it.
Partnering with Sarah has been life-altering, beginning with a pivotal reorientation to death early in my work with her, followed by the clear direction she provided through the journey of Lily’s actual dying process, and continuing on now as she supports me in moving through grief.
She introduced me to a teaching tool she’s developed to help people meet death wisely, her unique version of the Archetypal Cycle of Initiation:
In Shamanic practice, an initiation is held as any experience that changes you, that alters your very being and renders you irrevocably different than you were before it.
If you’re able to meet an initiatory experience whole-heartedly, the change evolves and expands your relationship with yourself, and with life itself.
Sarah’s map is a powerful tool to navigate transition, be it death or any other significant shift in life circumstance, all of which are inherently initiatory experiences. It seems simple at first glance, but it holds a lot of complexity and warrants deeper investigation. With her permission I share some of that complexity here in one of my podcast episodes: “Trusting the Disruptive Energy of Change”: Part 1.
The Power of Ritual
One of the most important things I’ve learned in both my Shamanic training and under Sarah’s guidance is the powerful structure that ritual provides for energy to move through, and I’ve come to experience the magic of co-creating with it in surprising and fascinating ways.
It’s remarkable how surely ritual supports us in steering a course forward through the cycle of initiation (rather than retreating to the comfort of the ‘known’ or attempting to shortcut the process).
Sarah reminded me of this in a recent session. I’d felt sharp and clear as I accompanied Lily’s dying process and in the days soon after, but I was beginning to feel lost and aimless in my grief.
She said, “You had rituals leading up to Lily‘s death, rituals on the day of her death and rituals immediately following it. What will support you now are rituals that will take you deeper into this cycle of initiation. You haven’t gone all the way to the bottom.”
Not the news I wanted, but I felt the truth of it.
I’d stopped the descent, and might well have bee-lined it across the circle and back to “life as usual” (a common move when we’re confronted with painful initiations) without going deeply enough into my heartbreak to integrate it and be truly transformed by it.
I’m keeping this in mind as I begin again to post the mysterious, magical encounters that making mandalas with the wing-girl at my side were. I’m also heeding the words of Martín Prechtel, author of “The Smell of Rain on Dust”:
“Grief and praise are wings of the same bird. We turn loss into grief and grief into a song of life-giving praise. This is the metabolization of grief into beauty.
Grief is praise because it is the natural way in which love honours what it misses.
The challenge is to find support and open ourselves up to go splashing through grief’s messy and ecstatic route to beauty.”
As the mandalas continue to offer their wisdom I’m now also holding them as rituals—structures with which to experience a deepening awareness of what I’m discovering Lily’s death is here to teach me; grief is becoming intimate with the immovable truth that we’re not meant to hold on to or possess that which we love.
Sarah Kerr joined me on Tracking Yes for a fascinating conversation about death a while back, you can listen here:
“Creating an Empowered Relationship with Death”
*Note: Scroll within the box above to see the full list of episodes.