This month features a story offered in reciprocity for receiving a grant from The Circle Way. Rebecca Puterbaugh (USA) attended the Cascadia Quest, hosted by The Circle Way founders, Ann Linnea and Christina Baldwin. Below is her beautiful, poignant rendering of the Quest’s powerful support in helping her heal grief.
A Circle of Stones:
Healing Grief In The Midst of Modern Life
My arms ached, the skin red and slightly raw from carrying the sandy stones. My legs shook. Sobs tore from my throat into the windy air as, misty-eyed, I gathered those stones, carried them to the stick-drawn labyrinth, and set them down, creating a circle. Over and over. Up and down. An eagle flew above me, to and from its nest, crying his juvenile song, and it felt like encouragement.
I knew this labyrinth would disappear with the high tide, which soon would be whispering over the rocks, creeping back into the estuary behind the driftwood-laden dunes. I wanted it to. The voice of my spirit, if not my gasping throat, prayed to the sea to take it. The work of this body, and the sacred pathway I created with it, were offerings to both myself and the earth.
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When I first emailed PeerSpirit early this year and made arrangements to attend the Cascadia Quest with Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea at the Skalitude Eco-Retreat Center in the Methow Valley of Washington, I was deep in the sea of grief. My best friend, who I had known and loved for 20 years, had ended her life just a couple of months prior. During that time, I discovered that there was little societal or community support for the loss of a best friend; people didn't know what to do for me beyond a pitying "I'm sorry." There is infrastructure, so to speak, in the consciousness of current society for the loss of a family member, but not so much for a friend.
So I coped as best I could while trying to live my life as I had been: as a single working mother. I'm sure, after the first agonizing couple of weeks, all but my closest friends couldn't tell that I had lost someone important so recently. But inside, I was in crisis. The ship of my being was lost at sea, no lighthouse to guide my way home. It seemed that all I could do was keep sailing, keep parenting, keep working… and hope land would come. Hoped the vision fast would build that internal lighthouse to guide me.
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On the last night of my vision fast, at the feet of the Sacred Mountain, I entered into my purpose circle not knowing, really, what would happen, and not having a plan at all. I had done some work in the previous days with my inner child and with my Shadow, but for the most part felt there was a puzzle piece missing, some epiphany yet to be had that would allow me to go back to my day to day life with a sense of direction. A compass, finally, for my ship, lost at sea for seven months.
I offered sage smoke to the Directions after arranging my altar, and I breathed into the forest's silence. Gradually, I felt a song rising from my belly: it was an intuitive song, as unplanned as the ceremony, and creating itself in the moment. It began as a song about the elements; then, as I started to sway and a sense of floating washed over me, it changed. It became a song about my body, and about Home: that my body is the place I belong, the only thing that stays with me from birth to death. The song was about that belonging, and about what Home really is.
As I shared my story a couple days later in circle with the other participants, I realized: maybe this is why my best friend ended her life, separated her spirit from her body. She didn't know, never got the chance to know, that Home had to be inside herself, or she would never, in this life, find it without.
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I didn't go to the beach that day intending to build a labyrinth. I went because I was back in my Alaskan beachside hometown for a family visit, and this was the first day in weeks I'd gotten alone time. Ever since I touched down in the airport almost two weeks before, I had felt disconnected, out of place. Disconnected from myself. I felt embarrassed to realize that I hadn’t done a medicine walk since my vision fast, though it was recommended by the guides to help with incorporation. So, at the entrance to the estuary trail, I stopped before a small driftwood log. I looked at it, declared it the door to Between The Worlds, and that I was going on a medicine walk with the intention of healing, rejuvenation, and re-connection. A deep breath, a small step, and there I was in the Between, where anything and everything is possible.
I walked along the small pools left by the tide, gazing with mindful attention at the exposed water plants and listening to the seagulls flying overhead. Soon, I came to a place that I felt, in my heart, I needed to stop at.
The estuary by the beach is fed by the sea through a break in the dunes, and in a flat space vacated by the tide was a thick oblong-shaped stretch of sand, laying in small, gentle, wave-patterned slopes. Rocks lay in discordant piles around it, and the stillness of the overcast day as well as the unusual lack of passersby let the voice of my soul bubble up: "build a labyrinth."
I found a driftwood stick, then drew the ancient geometry of the seven-tiered labyrinth, with lanes just big enough to walk in. I sang a song of gratitude and balance to the Directions as I muscled the stick through the wet sand, and as the primal shape took form, I felt strange: hyper-aware of both senses and the symbolism of the world around me. The stick, when I was done, I plunged into the center. But I wasn’t finished.
From the piles around the sand, I began to haul stones. Soon, tears started to run down my cheeks, and though at first I was confused as to the reason, the answer soon came.
The stones were not simply stones, they were manifestations of my grief: all my grief, not just for my best friend but all the grief and sadness and anger I've carried for months, years. I cried and I carried. I carried and I cried. And I found myself, at first unconsciously, chanting, over and over, "Pave my way home… Pave my way home with the stones of my grief…"
Halfway through, the tears and chanting faded, like the dusk, into an internal and external silence. All there was, was me and the stones and the labyrinth coming into being. The twisting lanes. The spiraling path. And from the wave-resounding silence, some song lines, pulled from a Trevor Hall song I had nearly forgotten:
"Don't you carry stones
Don't you carry stones
Don't you carry stones
in your Bowl of Light."
So many stones I had been carrying, for so long, and all of them blocking the gentle light of Home. How easily I could have followed my best friend into the darkness of the stones - how similar we were! But the stones were not worthless, either. So I picked them up, gently, from the Bowl in my chest, and placed them in the sand. I built my own lighthouse from the stones of my grief.
And as the high tide trickled in, I walked my way Home.
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When I was asked to write a story for The Circle Way, in reciprocity for the grant I received to attend the Peerspirit Cascadia Quest, I wasn’t sure what to write.
Grief is so painful, I think, because it is wordless, and because it is cyclical, coming back over and over, usually right when you think you're "over it." So as I considered a topic that would be relevant to the Autumn issue (published in a season which, itself, is about loss), I thought, "Maybe I'll write about using circle elements in life as a single parent." I thought, "Maybe I'll write about my vision fast experience." I thought, "Perhaps I'll write about sacred space and vulnerability.”
But I cannot speak on any of those things without speaking on grief. Something we all share, single parents or otherwise is grief, and the older we get, the more our grief deepens, and is added to.
For some of us, grief deepens into bitterness and anger. Others become almost manically active workaholics, for better or worse. A few turn grief into art. And some of us walk through our lives like ghosts, searching for something we cannot name.
"You don't have to be a ghost
In amongst the living;
You are flesh and blood
And you deserve to be loved
And you deserve what you are given."
-Florence and the Machine, Third Eye
We are searching. Grief launched us from the shore of our souls, and we keep searching for belonging everywhere… everywhere but Home. The Home within us.
Few of us were ever taught to look inward and to seek healing and understanding with our inner world in times of grief. Most often, in this hectic, modern, adult life in the first world, we're given a small slot of time in which to grieve a death, a breakup, a trauma, or another emotional crisis, and then we are expected to square our shoulders, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get back to work. If we still have difficulty, better go to a psychiatrist and get a prescription so you can get back on track straight away. Here, have a bandaid fix. You've got a paycheck to earn. Rarely are we given a truly supportive space to healthily work through our grieving process. Those of us who do are both privileged and resourceful.
For people like me, a single low-income working parent, stress tells us that we have to put on a strong face and charge on, and trust that "time heals all wounds" and "keeping busy helps."
But our grief needs more from us than that. We cannot allow ourselves to drown in it while proclaiming, to ourselves and the world, that "we're fine." Ignoring the call of the kind of healing only intentional attention holds, we risk a catastrophic crash-and-burn down the line.
There is a way to give ourselves what we need to heal from grief, while satisfying the very real demands of our responsibilities, and that is by cultivating sacred moments in our daily life. Even people who are unsure about the presence of the divine benefit from sacred space in their grief process, not only because it gives our grief space to speak, but because the elements of sacred space speaks to the part of ourselves that is still immersed in the imagination and limitless possibility of our childhood.
And it is our inner child, I believe, that is hit the hardest by grief: it is our inner child that stands at the bow of the ship of our psyche, searching for Home.
Rebecca Puterbaugh is a writer and a single mother living in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. For the past thirteen years, she has independently delved into the world of spirituality and writing, has self-published two poetry books (“Reveries” and “Cycles”), and is currently attending college. She believes in the transformative and affirmative power of both ceremony and the written word, and their ability to bring us into awareness of our innate wholeness.