On Threads and Resurrection

It’s been a minute.

I want to speak to you about soul. And a thread. And about courting soul, or as I often say, ‘courting the sacred’. And sometimes, maybe even often, it’s hard. She doesn’t want to be seduced. Or reality is not giving in. Everything hurts. Life is so damn stressful and honestly annoying so much of the time. Gosh, if I could record my hours wringing out my skin with customer service chats because yet again things are not working and people are being useless, and probably profoundly underpaid.

We ‘out of the blue’ had to buy a car, unexpectedly, and choosing even a very cute but shitty cheap car, that we absolutely couldn’t afford right now, not in the slightest, but we had to, and we fumbled some days to buy insurance because we didn’t have the money, and I’ve never been stopped by police ever in any car here, but of course, in the slim insurance-less window we had, we drove late at night, and there was the police waving us over, running the car. The fine was the price of the car, Spain loves an out-of-proportion penalty. And it really felt like divine intervention. In the casual, calm, fuck-you way. What are the chances. Years and years and years of driving without ever being pulled over, but of course 48hrs without the correct paperwork and boom, there’s a routine check and we cruise right into it. Life’s a bitch. We didn’t have money for the car, and we definitely didn’t have money for the fine. But it all felt divinely orchestrated somehow. Of course that needed to happen. Somehow.

I’ve been on this kind of roll with life for a while. It’s been stewing me. I have been looking around for signs, but have felt as if I’m in a labyrinth of locked doors, every path leading to dead ends. Very sexy. The fermentation of failure. It is definitely its own kind of secret spiritual sauce for sure. Only for the deep devoted raw-doggers. Where is divinity when shit is quite annoying?

These days when you say ‘Tantra’ people think of Burning Man orgies - but the original Tantrik cults were underground, mostly secret, initiate sects where practitioners were wrestling with the notion of God-as-everything, and if divinity is everything and everywhere then it can be found in the depths of our aversion as much as in our ecstasy. It wasn’t all tantric BDSM and nipple orgasms. They practiced on graveyards, they drank semen out of human skulls, they sought out displacement camps for outcast lepers to immerse themselves in what the separate-human-identity labelled as gross, other-than, un-godly. They were not seeking more pleasure - they wanted to wake up, now.

…and found in the depths of it all that being in intimacy with reality, is inherently blissful…is a kind of fulfillment that knows no opposite…

I’ve just returned from being 10 days offline at a Ritual Theatre training in Italy. There were a million reasons why it was awkward for me to go. I turned it down first, as we often do. There was an immediate spark and recognition, and divine excitement, and then logic came in and money and travel and we’re still just getting our new home situation in order. All the reasons why it was not practical. But life carved a way. It pushed me out of the door.

And there it was…….the thread….. All the past lives of me, the years devoted to theatre arts, my previous life as a dancer in the Norwegian National Ballet youth company, years of drama school, of being a passionate fanatic of physical theatre in all its forms, wedded somehow to deep prayer, spiritual inquiry, a symbolic language to speak to the invisible forces, to carve new story in the psychosomatic and mythopoetic currents that move us. Suddenly I’m hearing Pina Bausch and Jodorowsky’s names again and I see all kinds of weird twists and turns of my life coming together in a thread - also divinely orchestrated. Seemingly unconnected, even juxtapositionary.

I learned this week that the first word for liberation ever written literally means “Return to the Mother”, Ama-gi in Sumerian.

We centered our piece around the sacrifice and resurrection of patriarchy, and as I was walking through Rome in my 6hr layover time there to deliver a Damascus Rose from the land we had been weaving our prayer on, to the left foot bones of Mary Magdalene that is kept in a church of St John the Baptist at the gates of the Vatican, I felt such a profound sense of direction and vocation and deep alignment. My one-stop airport train had dropped me off on the other end, so I had a delicious 50 min walk wrestling my way through American tourists with melting pistachio ice creams in one hand and selfie sticks in the other, Indian men trying to sell me “Ciao Bella” tote bags, and Roman locals in their cars who do not believe in pedestrian crossings. Tbh fair game, you’d never get anywhere in that city. Swallowed whole by ultra-tourism. But I had a dramatic playlist of “Dead Can Dance” and clutching my rose in my bag. The church was supposed to be closed for siesta time in my layover hours, so I was just planning to leave our offering at the gates. But as I sat alone, my back to the big wooden door, waves of delight gushing through me, a curious character showed up. He seemed genuinely very very drunk, and had the shaky unnerved manner of someone who might be sleeping rough, but he had a pocket full of keys and seeing me he proceeded to open the door without a word and disappeared. So I had this holy pilgrimage site to myself. And reading the placard next to Her divine foot, it said something along the lines of “First foot to have stepped inside the tomb after the holy resurrection”.

Something I also realized in all of this. Is that we need each other too. I’m such a loner. And I love my solitary self, and the depths of which I’m willing to be in myself with whatever is there, but as many of my elders say - we heal in circle.

And as my teacher Tara Judelle once told me, it is often painful to untether ourselves from what binds us, we can get frozen and stuck in those shapes, we can feel safe in their predictability, however dysfunctional and distorted those veils are.

I needed to be in a group. In the flesh, but definitely in a group. To be in the field of others and otherness, and to be surprised, and to be held by my teachers. To be introduced to new pathways, and in that process discover that I am still holding on to the thread and the thread is still weaving me and it never left, it just went into hiding, shaping me in other ways.

Find the thread. Don’t let go of the thread. And if it’s in hiding, search for it in all the impractical places.