on being a true hag
I've just had the most nourishing and enlightening conversation with a very dear friend of mine. It was all to do with looking backwards, and looking forwards.
Madreality has thus far been an exercise of looking backwards, and musing on my lived experience – that is, the experiences of depression and psychosis that form the contours of my youth and mid-adulthood. From whence did the madness spring, if not from traumas and woundings and relationships-gone-wrong? I've been drawing from a deep well of remembrance and reflection, of grief and remorse. And while looking back and drawing on past experience is valid and worthwhile and teaches perspective, it can pull one into a swamp of stuckness, which is where I have been dwelling recently.
But my wise friend had this to say: at our age (in our fifties, she and I both) we cannot afford to keep looking backwards. There's too much at stake in our lives, and in this world; our attention is needed on what is to come, not on what has been. There's only so much good in looking backwards, before it becomes problematic, and disabling. We are called upon to be brave, and to face the unknown that lies ahead. We are called upon to draw on our strengths and our gifts (and yes, our lived experiences) and to face forward with them.
I think this has much to do with what Sharon Blackie refers to as 'hagitude.' In her book of the same name, she shares a conversation with a friend Martine, who says this:
And so, from trying to be, or to become, something – grown-up, attractive, intelligent, successful, sensible; a good doctor, or mother, or friend, or all the other things I thought I should strive for – I suddenly realised that what I needed was to give in to something that had been travelling with me from my childhood years, but that I was always a little afraid of. To give in to being able to be weird. To having an uncomfortable edge. To acting beyond logic.... Now, after menopause, I find myself coming closer to others, and closer to a connection with the earth and all creatures she harbours. Is being a true hag about being able to wear the power of your weirdness comfortably? - because now you have reached an age at which you can truly ride this beautiful and unpredictable dragon. You can shake and burn away some of the too-comfortable and caging truths and cackle with laughter about them.
So I've been set to pondering what shape madreality might take, when facing forwards - when like Kwan Yin I ride the dragon and offer my compassion to the world and to my very self. Will I perhaps become psychotic again? I don't know. We talk about the allure of madness, the desire to return to that state of magical thinking and sacred power. I don't believe that I need to return to psychosis in order to tap into magical thinking and sacred power. It is already and always there for the taking, in the here and now. All one need do is open one's mind and heart to the madreality of one's weirdness.
I can feel the grief and remorse melting away, like candlewax beneath the heat of my determination. I am a true hag, cackling with laughter, and madreality is the world I will birth into being.