I’m reading Clover Stroud’s book The Red of My Blood. It’s a memoir, Clover’s experience of her searing grief in the wash away of her sister’s death. Involuntary sounds escape me as I read; a possum in a gum tree hollow, its body recognising this agony. My head nods and my heart gallops: I know this. Clover herself, writes of similar wee noises.
Nine years ago, I lost my daughter. And my granddaughter, aged two. Whom I’d helped deliver. Not to physical death. To what is named ‘ghosting’. To the switch of railway tracks that is complete estrangement. Another reality. Shock. Dislocation.
It was not simply to myself; it included her father (my husband at the time) and her brother (our son). Yes there is a backstory, but some of it is not mine to tell. Another’s journey with mental and emotional health is not my terrain to speak.
What is mine to name, is my experience.
Some of you reading this walked some of the pathways beside me, in botanical gardens as I struggled to walk, in your kitchen eating (or trying to) a cake you’d baked for my visit, in dance studios as I’d howled around the room, barely able to breathe. Some of you watched through the lens of social media as I made pictures. Know that I would not have made it through without you.
My late spiritual teacher pulled me through during one night when I knew to decline my husband’s pleas to call for an ambulance because I knew a team in the A & E would not know what to do as my body shook so violently I rose up and down from the bed. For months and months, fire roared through my body. A nervous system burning.
Until, eventually, it didn’t.
There were many things that helped me resolve from the trauma of my body’s experience of evisceration. Chief amongst them, was walking. Making images.
I walked around the lake here. I walked in bushland and swam in a reservoir where bellbirds surrounded me as I hung suspended in deep tannin waters;
a cathedral of tenderness ringing my cells home. Cradled.
And then, I met someone.
Not truly whole’d yet, from that safe online space where I shared my images another connected with me. A photographer. A word weaver. A-merican.
It was in-toxicating. Ecstatic. It was en-chanting.
It was f**king dangerous.
But I didn’t know that. Yet.
I divorced my husband. Of 36 years.
I culled my belongings and packed two suitcases.
I got on a flight to Hawai’i.
I sang all the way across the Pacific.
I was ‘in love’.
I arrived. I was met by a gaunt man who looked like they’d emerged from the smoke and fires of a disaster. You know: the Hero stepping out of the flames of a collapsed building. Two eyes raked my body tearing the skin off. I shrank.
I was raped. I was screamed and sworn at. Called names. Abuses hurled at my husband in the process. My body was grabbed and shaken. Ripped, I bled.
I left.
But:
I returned.
I did not know there was a thing called ‘trauma bond’.
I did not know there was truly something called ‘narcissistic abuse’.
Or, psychopathy. I’d thought that was just a throw away line;
’He’s a psychopath’.
Fourteen months.
I ‘married’ this man. On a black sand beach at dawn. On Waimea Bay.
I abandoned myself.
Flying around and living in parts of the world that sound like magic; north shore Oahu Hawai’i, Mexico’s coast and Oaxaca, an island in New Zealand, the stunning landscapes of Tasmania and glorious beaches of mainland east coast Australia. All paid for by yours truly. His face pressed into mine, snarling.
Smokes and mirrors and delusion.
A ‘business’ named after a subtropical tree and a desert plant.
Where “I want all of the images to look the same so no one knows who made what image or edited it or who wrote what words. It’s all ‘ours’''.
“Our Story” to be a book to be made into a blockbuster film. Paris photog fairs.
Of my beloved (international) yoga Teaching and lifelong honed embodiment:
“No one knows your name anymore. Your work is deadwood”.
I was the “pathetic Australian”. And, “nothing but convict stock”.
On and off again. A total of over three years.
I nearly lost my mind.
Until I reconstellated:
By walking beaches,
making pictures of sand and water and rocks and seagrass.
By re-membering my body:
Over and over and over again.
Medicine.
All of it.
Saltwater Songlines have flowed through my blood
all
my
life.
From standing on windy sandstone cliff top edges with my Dad at age four,
From feeling the tides sweep through my cells in rockpools with starfish,
To waltzing through ballrooms like the 1-2-3 of my venous return.
All, on Gadigal Country.
This, is the fundament of The Saltwater Songlines Project.
It is a re-memberance of our original selves.
Before we estranged ourselves from the body of Earth.
It is luminous art and it is braided language.
It is love and it is joy.
It is a journey Home.
To yourself.
In Place.
Join me.
I made a short 2+ minute film for you:
The Saltwater Songlines New Dreaming begins in just two weeks.
March 11 - June 30. Six virtual Rooms. Each, with Lessons.
Three Individual Mentorship Letters with me.
There are just eight spaces in this Session.
There are currently four spaces left.
When the world swirls and the sand spirals in the waters,
Know this:
I love you,
Narelle xo
PS Happy Full Moon in Virgo.
(conjunct my natal Venus and Pluto)