Life sometimes lays things at our feet that cause us to pause.
Sometimes it’s less subtle and we find ourselves thrown into a life that we neither wanted nor asked for. A tiny death. Repeated tiny deaths.
Tiny deaths that mean that life will never be the same, that cause us to stop what we are doing and pivot, sharply. Sometimes these tiny deaths are our own, sometimes they are the tiny deaths of others that cut our own skin like a blade. The bitter sting in waters that are supposed to soothe.
In January we explored The Skeleton Woman from Women Who Run With The Wolves in The Wild Creative and the synchronicity of this story at that time was just too obvious to ignore.
In the first reading of the story I was stuck in this idea of tiny deaths.
The repeated depths we travel that strip our soul. I couldn’t quite let go of this idea of shedding and the lives I had experienced, and then, like a wave, I had the news of a new tiny death in my own life. Unexpectedly dragging me under water yet again, I pushed my face to the surface. Took a shakey breath and tried to recall the lessons from all the other tiny deaths I’d lived through before: the endings, grief, loss, redundancy, relationships.
This time also came when I was reading two other books (because I don’t do anything unilaterally) and I started to think about how much I am anchored to these tiny deaths and my own story telling around each of them. How with each retelling I become more and more embroiled in the narrative, entangled like fishing wire. And try as I might to pull free, another part tightens its grip.
I also read Tiny Experiments (Le Cunff, 2023), where she writes about approaching life as a series of small, low-risk experiments and keeping ‘field notes’ – gentle observations about life – things that interest you, experiences, learning and how it feels.
It made me think of all the field notes I’ve made across my life so far: the journal entries, the fragments of learning, the quiet observations gathered from moving through this life-and-death cycle. Not proof of accomplishment, but small footprints of attention and curiosity (I’ve always been incurably nosy).
“I’ve done this before” I told myself.
“What do I do?”
“Remember. Remember”
I knew that by poking and fixating on the myriad of different outcomes, what could have been or might be, that I would make things exponentially worse. Like picking at a scab, that pulls and itches, demanding attention.
I then finished The Untethered Soul (Singer, 2007), where Singer describes how trying to resolve something by thinking your way through it is like attempting to smooth the ripples left by a fallen leaf on a pond. The more you reach in to still the water, the more disturbance you create.
Peace doesn’t come from interference, but from allowing the surface to settle on its own. *I still need to think about this some more as I immediately thought of hostile and abusive situations which required more than acceptance (has he written another book?)
Nevertheless “Leave the leaf alone” became an internal mantra every time I felt that urge to poke around at the metaphorical leaf.
“I’ve done this before”
“What did I do?”
One of the benefits of tiny deaths in quick succession, albeit that they can hit you like a punch in the throat, is that the body knows, and remembering is easier.
Move, write, mark make, say ‘yes’, keep things simple, control what you can.
And so the end of the story of The Skeleton Woman accidentally coincided with the last days of the year of the snake.
A dramatic shedding. And although things are uncertain, I can’t help feeling a sense of optimism, knowing that when I’ve traveled these depths before, life pivots in interesting ways.
And so as we step into the year of the horse, and get ready for our next story in The Wild Creative, I’m taking valuable lessons from a The Skeleton Woman.
Move, write, mark make, say yes, keep things simple, control what you can.
Leave the leaf alone.
Le Cunff, A. (2023) Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. London: Profile Books.
Singer, M.A. (2007) The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.