Dear Beautiful Ones,
I hope you’re all fine. Here’s part two of the return to the well I am in. Although, maybe it’s safe to say ‘I was in’ :) Part 1 can be read here.
Heartily, Alja
(keeping it short because the piece is long)
‘What you seek, is seeking you.’
~ Rumi ~
Autumn 2024
After the remarkable experience in the summer of 2024, in the autumn of the same year I joined a ‘pack’ formed by a writer who shares stories and insights based on Myths and fairy tales, especially Celtic ones.
I could not get any closer to the stories I had longed for that were once part of the Low Lands and I enjoyed every newsletter and story intensely. I recognised myself in them as well as the universal life processes and laws I had immersed myself in and became aware of over the past decades. It was a celebration of recognition and an acknowledgement of life itself.
It nourished my soul and I felt deeply connected to these ancient wisdoms. It connected me to a nutrition that made me feel secured and connected to life at all levels, like an umbilical cord connects a child in the womb to the mother and is cared for and nourished by her.
From one moment to the next, however, I became completly unexpected unsubscribed. I was shocked. Not much later, I found out that the monthly contribution had been reversed. It turned out that I was 0.13 cents in debt and the bank had immediatedly, automatically reversed the payment. This while I had checked my bank account that very morning and thought it was settled. I tried to still make the payment but the door was closed and there was no way I could still make the payment and re-register myself.
It was as if the floor was pulled out from underneath me and I tumbled into a ravine. Luckily I knew there had to be a bottom and when I found it and could breathe again, the first thing I shouted out with some sense of drama was ‘Why is it that what I love is always taken away from me?’ followed by quite a forceful expletive and tears of frustration. Anyone who knows a little bit more about my life journey will know that this is not even that far from the truth.
The intensity of the physical telling and the emotions I experienced told me that this experience went much deeper than what seemed to have happened on the surface. I was facing a transgenerational trauma.
Grief overwhelmed me and after a restless night, I emailed the ‘leader of the pack’ the next day to apologise and share what had happened. The reply I received initially sounded logical and genuine, then turned into a wondrous assumption over and distortion of my reality, which was elevated to a truth and the message ended up being quite short-sighted, leaving me with a feeling of being unimportant and unloved. Of being ‘collateral damage’.
Moved to the bone, I went through a pretty intense process in the following days. It opened my eyes to the reality, expressed to its essence in the myth ‘The Well Maidens.’ In all its simplicity, this is the source from which every pain is born.
Celtic Myth ~ The Well Maidens
Originally, throughout the land, there were many Maidens of the Wells. These enchanting, faerie-like, women were the site guardians of all of the sacred springs and wells. Across the land, any traveller, pilgrim or knight, could visit the local Well Maiden and be refreshed with food and drink from the sacred spring of that location.
All was idyllic until one dark day, a bad king, King Amangon, raped one of the Maidens of the Wells and encouraged his men to do likewise with all the other Well Maidens. Because of this crime the Well Maidens took away their golden cups and left the land – thus the land died and became the barren wasteland of the Grail stories.
Against the background of global, devastating developments, my experience was a mere trifle, insignificant compared to the magnitude of wars and genocide. A splinter. Splinters, however, can cause stinking wounds and if left uncared for they can eventually lead to death.
It was my splinter and those of many generations before me. A splinter that demanded healing and physically expressed itself in the same time in an inflamed shoulder that forced me to slow down. It evoked an intense frustration inside myself not being able to give shape to my inspiration in a creative way anymore. The pain was very intense and at times I almost fainted when, in a reflex, I moved through the pain. It forced me to slow down and come to a standstill. I felt wingless.
In the days that followed, I wrote a letter and sent it along with the owed money by post to the rightful owner, while in the meantime I also filled many pages of my diary out of sheer necessity to gain insights into what was brewing and rising to the surface inside myself.
Being excluded and cut off from what I loved, what nourished my soul ... I recognised the pattern in my life and the many experiences that happened in it. I also recognised them in the lives of my ancestors, especially my foremothers who were legally incompetent and had to settle for being submissive to men. Even in my youth, there was still the slogan that a woman's only right was the right of the kitchen (in Dutch we say; het enige recht is het recht op het aanrecht (the kitchen coutertop)).
Once upon a time, however, there was equality between women and men and people lived in a matriarchy. All indigenous peoples speak of this and are clear about this fact). The feminine in a human being is a receptive, life-receiving, -creating and -living force. She makes changes and transformations possible. The masculine is the active, decisive part of the human being that can bring out and establish the form, give shape to what is alive. He can give it 'hands and feet'. Hence the feminine is leading in life and the masculine executive.
Because the feminine primal force of the Mother in man has been demonised and uprooted over the centuries, the masculine has lost its foundation and a seemingly unbridgeable distance has developed between the two. Also inside ourselves.
As a result, the masculine has come to dominate the feminine and the feminine undermines the masculine in humans and humanity. Disconnected from the earth and her universal wisdom and seperated from each other, we have found ourselves in an escalating situation that requires us to open up to what is actually happening and what life is asking of us. So that we can come to the awareness that we are similar, not the same, as otherones and their suffering and death is our suffering and our death. And that our inability needs to become an ability so that we can respond to our authentic, original being.
Our Being, the love we are.
‘Sameness is not the same as Oneness.’
~ Sherri Mitchell ~
My and our ancestors all lived this in many wars and through struggles, and it is still being lived by many. What is not being lived, because of the impossibility when you are in the middle of happenings, is being passed on to subsequent generations ... of which I, you, we are a part.
'You hated me.' The voice of the thundercloud from last summer's vision echoed in my mind and my reply ‘You killed me’ I could understand.
However, I found no peace inside myself, until I watched an interview with an Israeli journalist in which she mentioned that; ‘Netanyahu and the entire Israeli government feel more comfortable at the position of the ultimate victim based on the Holocaust.’
This sentence resonated and I listened several times to the interview, because here was an answer; ultimate victimhood creates a ruthless dictatorship, an indifference. In which, in the name of ‘..............’, people say that they are doing the right thing and it is therefore justified to take children hostage, rape women, torture men. To cut them off from their basic needs, from that which brings them to life. To betray them, to suffocate and mutilate them, to kill them. Using pain as fuel, like all dictators do to destroy all life that’s being lived in freedom and love.
If this is our history and therefore also my history, which is cyclically developing, intensifying and evolving into a catharsis, how could the storm in my vision answer so calmly and quietly; 'I saved you?'
With bated breath, I watched the process in many dimensions unfold before my eyes. How misinformation, on all levels of our existence, isolates people and dehumanises them step by step, until the untruths are so perpetuated that they are ratified into THE truth. Based on an idea over others it seems therefor justified to cut off the supply of all life's necessities until death follows; spiritually, mentally, emotionally and eventually physically.
On a micro level, this was what happened in my world, on a soul-level, when I received the writing, after I apologised. In two lines, a misconception about me isolated me from others and what was believed became elevated into a truth. On that basis, I was cut off from that which I thought I loved ... from that which seemed to feed my soul. That umbilical cord was mercilessly cut. No questions asked. No compassion for what really happened.
In the days that followed, I looked the pain I experienced of betrayal and suffocation, the death of the feminine, dark primal force of the Mother to the depths of my being straight into the eyes. Her relentlessness. Realising that she rose within me to guide me so I could break the toxic patterns of centuries past and let go of my unconscious desires to ‘belong somewhere’. In my search for some kind of family and what animates me, I rediscovered myself in her and saw my creation (the human) and creations (my works) in a different light.
One day, when I walked during the following days through the forest I bowed my head deep in thought. Suddenly I saw my body and from nowhere I bursted into a laugh. I realized that the human I was looking for had been with me all along. It was Me. And that I always had been in direct contact with the Mother of all Mothers ... The earth itself. All this time she had carried and nurtured me. She had never been away and cared for me in a way that slowly became clear to me. She loved Me!
The trauma, passed down through generations, contained a primal life force that held a lived wisdom and preserved love for life and myself. The experience restored the umbilical cord that had nourished me all along, now grounded in a awareness in which I can know myself secured and deeply connected in life itself.
To my surprise and also dismay, during the same period (miraculously on the night of Samhain) the membership fee was automatically debited again and I was suddenly a member of the group again, without my consent. I stayed a while but the sparkle was gone. The message was clear. I shared my experience and gratitude in a message with ‘the leader of the pack’ and unsubscribed myself.
And as is the case with all patterns and desires, it takes mental discipline to actually become free of the pull that old hurt holds. One needs to take time for that with gentleness towards oneself. To be able to fulfil the wish to love without conditions;
'I wish to be
Me
effortlessly
Free'
~ Alja ~
And then winter came ...
To be continued.
Heartily,
Alja
If you are interested in Her-Story, for Dutch readers, the websites of Annine van de Meer and Karin Haanappel may be of interest.
For English readers, I heartily recommend Dr Sharon Blackie's Substack, website and books: The Art of Enchantment, with Dr Sharon Blackie.
The English book Woman's Lore, 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi written by Sarah Clegg is a gem and its content should be taught in every history class.
A Roadmap of Life
The process of becoming conscious follows universal life processes and natural laws. Over the past decades, I have spent many hours figuring out these processes and laws. Eventually I managed to put them into a simple diagram. You have to read it from bottom to top. Since your feet also stand on the earth and your crown reaches to the clouds ... it therefore starts with ‘To Be’.
