What if I can still create?

A half-burned piece of wood…holds within it an ember that with the smallest of breath can be coaxed into a flame.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Warming the Stone Child

In a recent journal entry I asked ‘what if I can still write?’ to which I had no immediate answer. In waiting for words to come – words I could turn into a story or a book – I instead received dreams, signs, and symptoms.

In dreams I tell others I’m the failure of my family, I’m drenched with regret at not having fulfilled my potential or I find I’m back at school in my adult body, learning what my small daughters learn.

A fly appears every day to remind me I need to – what? – fly? Or that I must persist? Or that there are things that disgust me that I should acknowledge. I don’t understand what it wants – the fly doesn’t say much and all that I can do, in the end, is squash it and tell it I have no idea what it wants.

I lie to myself and say “yes – I’m trying to pay attention” because I know I should. But I’m not. I haven’t been.

My body has things to say with increasingly alarm. My heart aches, races and pounds away in my chest and my womb floods while strange things grow there instead of the sibling I want for Agnes.

I return the the page: James Hillman wrote that “in symptom is soul”. He was a student of Jung – who taught that “the gods have become our diseases” – and his life’s work was to reimagine the gods – the archetypes of the unconscious – into a language.

Hillman would say that a medical move is a move against the soul – that to cure away a symptom is to silence the soul:

” Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind-that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way.” (Insearch)

The neurosis is real. I feel invisible, insignificant and incoherent. No one listens to me and no one sees me. I feel I’m no longer attractive or interesting or fascinating to anyone. I’m not strong. I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything. I’m immobilised. I’m made of stone.

And because I’m stubborn and impotent I invite a surgeon to cure me by cutting away the symptoms I would prefer to ignore.

I don’t welcome the news that the surgeon couldn’t remove the intruder as planned – this thing can’t be excised without taking parts of me with it – there is no cure.

So now for now I live with a secret invader (that may or may not be the end of me) and I have no choice left but to hear it.

What it says is that creation is not a choice for me. That my enduring need to give birth to new life is what sustains me. That beauty is the breath that coaxes the tiny embers in me to become flames.

It tells me that my children are not my greatest creations – even if I don’t know who I am without them or who I could have become if I hadn’t chosen them.

It shows me that a part of me is still an unloved, un-mothered child, and another part is un-fathered. A part of me still waits for my father to come home and protect me – save me.

It says that I’ve got to call upon my inner reserves and love these parts as if they are children I can’t fail or refuse: they are me – they are mine. Even if they disgust me – as my tortured, crying symptoms do.

It’s time for me to come home.