We are woven of stories - the ones we tell about ourselves, the ones others tell of us, the ones that lurk in the shadows of our and others' minds that shape, often unconsciously, our beliefs, patterns of behavior, habits. We might, rightly, as my wise, challenging Jungian analyst showed me, develop a necessary supportive (or defensive) belief or habit with its accompanying story, wholly appropriate for its moment, yet as time progresses, it becomes at best a worn shell better discarded, at worst a self-defeating neurosis holding you bound.
And what shifts these stories and their attendant possibilities, writing with us anew?
The careful sifting of memory, the circles of care or neglect we live in, our conversations with others, the lowering or deepening of the circles of our awareness, the practice of trying on different frames, new versions of ourselves; and, of course, events!
Tanya Shadrick's beautifully written memoir and manifesto explore many of these dimensions of the stories that wove and weave her life, with searching intelligence, honesty, and candor. It opens with an event.
Safely delivered of her first child, she subsequently begins to hemorrhage and she hovers between life and death, she has a near-death experience accompanied by that familiar light that seems to vibrantly enfold and connect her with others, with the world. She apportions no necessary metaphysical or religious explanation to this but it does shift the boundaries of what she imagines possible for her life, here and now. Supported by the husband, she met at university to build a securer life after a challenging childhood - her mother the only single parent in the village, divorced, disastrously remarried, and retreated from her best hopes, abandoned by her father who yet lingers at margins uncaringly - she now discovers renewed challenges. Her choice of birth was primarily a response to her husband's desire, her capacity to love and care for her boy uncertain; and, the luring sense of renewal that her near-death experience has given her prompts thoughts of escape. This and sheer bloody tiredness and continuing health problems!
But she chooses differently and decides to stay put, dig in, "to polish the stone'' (to use a Zen expression) of her experience and discover within and without a new world of wonder, that genuinely opens up her felt possibilities. In doing so, she deploys many of the practices alluded to earlier - and finds herself on a liberating journey towards herself as writer and artist, that like many such journeys, rightly honed, gifts space to others to discover their own potentialities, to liberate their stories towards abundance and away from harm.
This is undoubtedly not a story without struggle, inwardly and outwardly, it can be difficult to leave harmful scripts aside even when we recognize them, change often threatens those we love, interestingly the divorce rate of those who have an NDE is high as their partners fall out of sync with the new, renewed values of the recipient; and, of course, the world does not necessarily spring to our assistance. It remains a world of multiple discriminations against women, around class, against artists, around unsettling, assertive differences of belief and behavior. And, of course, all the practicalities of money and childcare and so on and on ...
Yet she emerges, is emergent, wondering in her place, working at what feels is her vocation, though she is reserved about any such language, within and with her family but also with cherished independence. All this is traced in precise, moving, revealing language, stories that make the heartache outwards towards and with the participants and that have you alert and awake at the end, asking yourself what are the stories I could tell about myself that might lean into new possibilities, new wonder; and, which are those I might hope to lay to rest, reframe as a past, that I might honor as a reality but to which I am no longer bound.
Each section of the book is given an epigraph from Walt Whitman whose 'Leaves of Grass' famously opens with, ''I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." When we celebrate ourselves in this way, as Tanya does here, we make a gift and an invitation of recognizing that if we step out in this way, it is, in truth, an exercise in true humility, we stand exuberantly in our place, alive, as each and all are invited to in their own ways, their places, uniquely contributing to that light that enfolds us all.
Now that would begin to see the world aright to quote another poet of liberating light.
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