Your Voice is Too Powerful

A ritual of making home whole

I don’t know if it’s just me, but in the last few years there has been a rampaging Sea God of a storm that has torn apart everything that I held close. Land, community, homes, friendships, delicate networks of relational intricacies of nest and snow, Ravens, petals, dust, Sun and canvas, the thousand thousand different things that collaborate to give me meaning and vigor and breath. Ah - the tiny thin bodies of new nettle seedlings coming up out of the carpet of aspen catkins. The bullet whir of the night hawk in the sweet cool of an August sunset. Grass on my calves as I wash the dishes. Those sorts of miraculous things.

Life has devastating torrents of things going a different path than what we had imagined, whimsical twists of unfolding lined with the broken glass of New Hurt and Old Hurt and all the in betweens. I am beginning to understand that Life is a bit like spiritual cross fit. It isn’t personal, but sometimes it is. Sometimes you fuck up and there are consequences. Sometimes you bring in repeating patterns, so they have a chance to resolve. Sometimes it’s not your fault at all. Sometimes it’s a mix, or other workings entirely.

Let it all burn. What is left after the hell fire has swept through your life will be trued. Let loose the white-knuckle grip you might have on the last shreds of what you cling to. If it is meant for you, if it is a True thing, it will be there after it all. Trust that.

There are old, old stories. A woman uses her voice. People grow afraid of her, wary. They start watching her out of the corner of their eyes, start spying on her through the forest, trying to catch a glimpse of her dancing naked with the Devil. What part of us trembles at the Woman with a Powerful Voice? Who inside of us feels threatened from the womb words we don’t want to hear? And what happens to us when we banish that woman from the village inside of us?

I once had a fire to burn all of the last remains of a home I had built by hand. We were kicked out by the County, called in by the neighbor for singing thanks to the plants that fed us, for dancing naked on the hillside, for praying to the spring that watered the orchard, for living in canvas without electricity, for refusing to shit into our drinking water. And so, I had packed up my things and torn down the home I thought I would raise children in, and had my last fire to burn away all the tidbits of magick that needed to go. One of those things I had to burn was a miniature version of my wall tent that I had built out of unfired river clay, gathered in ritual, crafted in ritual, and tended on my altar.

The cleansing fire raged as I fed it bits of cloth, bundles of dried plants, little scraggly leather scraps and threshold offerings and who knows what else, and the time came to add my mini-house. As I held it in my hand and reached out to place it in the fire, my dear friend Tatter-Hawk and I locked eyes in the glowing light and immediately understood. We went wide eyed, both of us murmuring “ooohhh” as I set it in the flames. All of a sudden what I thought would destroy this home, marking the end of this era and these memories and this life, was actually firing the clay to make it harden, to strengthen it, to make it last.

The fire burned for hours, and when it was done, my little clay home was left standing. Bolstered by the heat of everything else burning down around it. I scooped it up out of the literal ashes and placed it lovingly it on the dashboard of my pickup truck, where it still rides today. I’ve moved four times since that fire, and every time I see that little home, I am reminded of my ability to be a home-maker.

The Sea God storms of tearing my life apart have passed, and right now my life is in one of those incredibly sweet, blessed waves of goodness. I am full of praise and gratitude for the fertile ground that is upon me. And so, I am welcoming in all the bones of my past lives that are still left in the ashes, as I cobble together a new home here among the spidery maples and jurassic ferns, blackberry jewels adorning the geranium meadows.

This substack is filled with the things left standing in the ashes as fires burned and continue to burn all around us. They are flame hardened, strengthened, and trued. They were released, set free, thrown into the abyss of letting go, with no hope that they might stay. And yet they did, and new things come fluttering in everyday. Tested and testing.

This substack is an experiment in what happens if we trust our voice. If we practice allowing what we carry to be set forth, moths sent out from mouths trailing golden dust from their wings. If we welcome back the Woman with the Powerful Voice, and all the others that were banished from the Village.

Maybe I can spin some beauty from it, a few glowing glimpses into the bizarre Divine wonder that weaves itself into the small moments of life. Wanderings down the paths through the Forest.

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May it be of some sort of nourishment to those who come to sit in this understory.

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