Sick Woman
It has taken years to be able to talk about my experience with Sick Woman without crying, and I don’t mean shedding a few poetic tears, I mean ugly, cathartic, involuntary sobbing.
It has taken years to be able to talk about my experience with Sick Woman without crying, and I don’t mean shedding a few poetic tears, I mean ugly, cathartic, involuntary sobbing. I have held these stories deep in the webs of my fascia. I have been uncertain of how to begin to speak on what exists within me without a language. I have fretted over each word, do they do her justice? In the end, I have to let go of the modern obsession with sense making stories and let the story breathe on its own.
Meeting Sick Woman is the greatest honor and challenge I've come to know in this life. She did not give up on me even when I yearned for death. She believed in me, she saw the story from a view I could not yet conceive of, the threads weaving in and out in the great tapestry of wyrd. I asked her once if it was potential she saw from her eagle’s eye, and she said only “fate.” Without her I would surely have taken my own life, or death would’ve taken it from me. Either way, I owe her a debt.
It’s been seven years since I first met Sick Woman. She did not so much as knock on my door as she blew down my whole house, huffing and puffing like the big, bad wolf. Growing up the cultural orphan I had, I was unprepared to meet her gaze and she knew it. It didn’t matter whether I was ready and it didn’t matter what I had planned.
I was twenty-one. The world was my oyster. The world was fertile, slippery, spilling over with freedom. I was a seeker, rosy cheeked with adventure and charmingly naive. As far as I knew, Sick was some brief inconvenience that cleared up soon enough for me to be on the next train. I was a hitchhiker, an aimless wanderer in pursuit of a truth which I could not name.
Sick Woman sat by my bed that first night as I thrashed and moaned. She placed a gnarled hand on my head. In my fever dream, I thought her briefly my grandmother, although how she got to the Balinese hotel room I hadn’t figured out. That night became a week and then two.
For the next nine months I was unaware of her presence. In denial, I suppose. Ego death does not come easily to strong willed youth and I carried on how I saw fit- which meant drinking until three in the morning and then another shot with my morning espresso. My body was crying out for help and I suffocated every symptom with cocktails of caffeine, drugs, and alcohol. I knew no different, a child raised on a steady diet of capitalism and christianity and white bread, dissociation was just how we handled our problems.
My health continued to deteriorate to the point that I was no longer able to work or pretend something serious wasn’t going on. I moved from the East to the West coast of Aotearoa.
The day I moved, a storm blew in, causing the worst flooding the West Coast had seen in years. Bridges were impassible. The rain was relentless and the trees blew sideways looking like cartoons. I stood under the black sky looking up. My clothes clung to my skin, soaked through completely, and I felt a heaviness in my chest.
I sat in the house, still soaking wet. It was cold, there was no heat but the stove that lived down in the basement, winding its way up through the walls. The entry room was shaped like an A frame, a great viking lodge. I sat with my back to the east shivering, my gaze west towards the windows where the storm howled, and wept uncontrollably.
I slept for two days. Then I dreamt with Sick Woman.
From that moment on, we are never apart.
Sick Woman is there when the phone calls dry up. When your friends no longer know what to say or are busy going about with their lives, Sick Woman sits on her rocker, creaking back and forth. Sick Woman knows what it is like. She is often not invited either.
The days when the shades are drawn and you dwell in darkness, like a cave creature blinded by fractals of light, collapsing into yourself, into that Holy Bed which has become your kingdom, Sick Woman is there.
When Pain becomes stronger than five dried grams and you’re swirling through the spiral of non-linear time, Sick Woman comes along for the ride. You hear her laughing, that dry cackle, and you tether yourself to the sound of her voice. It is here, outside of time and space, she looks into your eyes, and says “You wanted to travel? Begin with your mind,” as the world goes black around you.
There are so many parts to the story, and for years I was relieved of experiencing linear time, so they are jumbled in my head, each a living thread lacing in and out of other memories. I try to place them in a way that makes sense. Often they might not.
Sick Woman and I traveled often. She is a trickster, like Coyote, and loved to show me the inverse manifestations of my dreams. I thought it was the world I was to roam, the greatest adventure that my young mind could think up. Sick Woman showed me that true freedom lies when you leave your body behind. I slipped in and out of trance states, my heartbeat slowing to a murmur like a mother bear in the depths of hibernation.
No one appreciates beauty the way Sick Woman does. Once I had moved past the tantrums of wanting to end my life, she took me by the hand and we took to sitting on the porch steps in Spring watching the sun rise. Sick Woman points out the dew drops on the Kawakawa and the wind in the Rimu. Not knowing if I'll feel well enough to sit tomorrow, I gasp every breath of fresh air with renewed fervor. Sunlight on the nape of my neck like a lovers kiss, I never knew such fleeting sweetness.
Sick Woman never told me what to do. She knew I was far too stubborn to listen. While in the throes of depression she did not divulge what was to come or show me the way out. She was a companion, that was all. I had to do the digging myself. That’s always how it is between us, she won’t do the work for me. She’ll wait until I’m ready and then walk with me into the next room.
Each milestone was like a knot in a tapestry only she could see. The largest knot came after four weeks without eating solid food. I was in denial about my choice to abstain from meat. I was a militant vegan despite it contributing to my demise.
Sick Woman had been telling me for weeks to make a broth of bones and bits. Accepting meant killing a part of my identity, it was a dissolution of selfhood I was unable to bear. Who are we when all the identities we’ve attached to ourselves fade away? The person I had been was nothing more than a ghost, and I watched her shimmer and slowly fade, leaving only the infinite blackness of possibility.
The choice ultimately came out of desperation. All of the juice fasts, crystals and positivity couldn’t save my failing liver.
So we did it her way.
Nothing scares Sick Woman. She talks of Death like an old friend. She has seen civilizations crumble to dust and life return again from the ashes. Sick Woman sees the healing in everything. She tells the truth and always smells like burning mugwort and rising bread.
Sick Woman taught me not to care. She doesn’t give a damn about her looks and thought neither should I. We were Sick Women! Sick Women don’t comb their hair, they wrap themselves in blankets and wool even in the summertime. Sick Women were liberated from the shackles of beauty standards and comparison. Sick Women were invisible, moving like mist through gates and guard towers.
This was hard for me to adjust to. I still spent too much time thinking about my peers, comparing my life to theirs, and generally feeling sorry for myself. I continued to plan elaborate adventures from my sick bed, never knowing if I'd survive or be well enough to do them. Sick Woman just sat on her rocker and let me. I cried about hair falling out and all the weight I’d lost. The bloated stomach juxtaposed by jutting hip bones.
‘Sick Women don’t have time for vanity’, she would say and cackle. We were too busy doing other things.
It was Sick Woman who told me to build the garden, or rather, she showed me in a dream. A vision of her, sitting by the cabbage with her weaving, and I, harvesting Calendula flowers barefoot under a driftwood archway. The next day all I did was draw and dream of seeds. I’d never kept a garden before and didn’t know the first thing about starting one. I certainly did not feel well enough to take on such an endeavor. Sick Woman promised to help.
Those tiny seeds brought me hope. Gave me something to tend outside of myself, somewhere to place my attention. I delighted at each set of leaves curling out of the soil with the enthusiasm of a child.
It was around this time that I’d given up on the doctors and specialists who all had no idea what was happening in my body. I was tired of giving over my power to an establishment that had failed me at every turn. As I left the last clinic room in tears, Sick Woman whispered in my ear
“We don’t need him”.
We returned home with armfuls of driftwood.
When Summer came, so did the cicadas and Sick Woman told me I was strong enough to begin taking walks. So we began our Sick Women strolls, the thump of her cane keeping the beat. At first it was to the mailbox. Then to the edge of the street. And soon we were hiking up the mountainside behind the house that backed onto the wide expanse of forest. This was slow going, with both of us needing to pause to catch our breath. I couldn’t believe how hard my lungs had to work. The body I once knew would run ten miles and be back before noon. This new body had shaking legs and a burning in its chest.
Sick Woman began pointing out the different trees, slyly at first. Later asking me if I remembered. Then we turned our gaze to the moss covered floor and I learned their names one by one. She’d make the introduction and leave the rest up to me.
Sick Woman taught me it was important to greet each by their own name, as I would my own kin. She sees the world subject to subject, the stone or stream was not an object to be dominated. Slowed and made tender by Illness, I moved through the world differently now. I paid attention and noticed that the world perceived me in return.
Sick Woman knew a lot about everything, but didn’t let on. She’d share what you were ready to hear, no more, no less. My mind often got in the way of receiving her knowledge and guidance. It would take years before I was able to trust her, to trust my body, the slow cultivation of building secure attachment to Land.
Sick Woman broke me open, humbled me to my knees, burned away every story I had about myself and brought me to the Teachers that would shape the rest of my life.
What I came to see with my newfound vision and widened net of more-than-human relations, was the earth was just as sick as I was. My body was a microcosm of the macrocosm. We suffered the same poisons, the same abuse, the same neglect. I found depths of empathy I didn’t know existed. My cells the same as the beached whale and the disappearing redwoods. My lymph a polluted river, my inflammation a wildfire. My body raising the alarm that something was not right, both a plea and a prayer.
Illness came to me and dropped my masks, widened my gates of perception, and returned me to wholeness through process of initiation. Devoid of any living elders or intact cultural traditions capable of guiding me, Sick Woman stretched out her gnarled hand and met me in the space between here and there.
I spent thousands of dollars on specialists and tests and left with only a longer list of “diseases” afflicting my small body, all equally mysterious, malicious and untreatable. When I plunged down the rabbit hole of so-called alternative medicine, I was met with naturopaths pumping me full of supplements, colonics, and (what I now know were) contraindicated herbal remedies. Both were allopathic in their approach, rushing to place bandaids over symptoms, and neither were the medicine I needed.
There was a point in the journey when I began to understand that no one else was going to heal me. No one was coming to save me. There was no magic exotic herb or meditation that was missing. I had to take radical self-responsibility and bushwhack down an infinitely harder path, where the ‘doing’ and seeking ceased and the listening began.
Listening to my body, listening to the plants, to the moon, to the water. I had to go so deep I learned new languages that you don’t hear but touch. I had to sing my bones back together with songs as old as time and as young as the sun. I had to abandon my timelines and dive underneath the fabric of fear to return gasping for air and holding a bloody, beating heart in both hands, remembering what it is to be alive. I had to offer up the betrayal of my own body on the altar to Life itself, sacrifice my victimhood with an athame of sharpened stone and walk away and never look back.
I clawed my way with dirty, broken fingernails towards the sweet honey of remembrance, cursing and praising creation the whole way there. It feels like teaching yourself to see new colors; for awhile you are blind, all snipped wires and shaky with trust. Over time, your neural pathways shape-shift and the blurred edges come into focus with ultraviolet hues.
How do we verify gnosis? Does it only come from certifications and living, breathing human teachers? Or can we learn to trust that knowledge can come in any form, all equally as valid, “real” and powerful? In a postcolonial world, our teachers may seek new bodies as they invite us back towards wholeness; the willow, the swallow, the riverbank sedge.
That being said, the foundation of spirit work relies on keen discernment; the ability to decipher between your own projections and that quiet space of receptivity where knowledge seeps through.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that our cultures are lost to us because human beings who once carried those life ways no longer walk the earth. It is contingent upon a western mythology of time and fails to acknowledge the permeability of spirit.
I have spent years speaking about spirit work behind closed doors and carrying around ancestors in coat pockets cradled by snail shells. It is an edge for me share this, to speak their names and place them up upon the mantle.
There are many stories I could tell about Sick Woman and her teachings, but for now I will let this be enough.
Who is Sick Woman?
It’s hard to say, for she evades definition.
Sick Woman is not a piece of fiction nor is she merely an archetypal creature.
Sick Woman is an ancestor and she is the ancestor I am destined to become.
Sick Woman is me and she is God and she is alive and she is long dead.
She came because I called her and
she came because she called on me.
Who I am,
this work,
is dedicated to Sick Woman.
So beautiful, I didn't know you had been in Aotearoa, (my home) I was surprised when I saw Kawakawa pop up there....my respect for sick woman is deepened, still walking with her myself, for sure.
Insufficient
words
🖤