Circle of Stones

If a woman is trapped in a collective framework, unable, because of family or economic pressure, to give time to herself, her need for rescue may fall to the unconscious, and its response may come in the form of a depression.
Sometimes, into the lives of women who seem to be successfully fulfilling the standards of the surrounding society, depression may come as a settling embrace. It may come to a woman who is terrified that there will be nothing there, inside, if she allows herself time to rest, to separate from her extraverted hyperactivity in the outer world. Or it may come to a woman who already vaguely senses a different way, a more elemental mode than she is living out. Perhaps she has dimly glimpsed a way, more in touch with herself and life, that would reflect more truly her own feelings and life values. Yet she has chosen as she has chosen. Her choices may have seemed better, safer, all she was able to do at the time.
The old story: unable to leave behind that which one has been taught is sensible, practical, normal, rational, proper, decent convention. Better to regard the group over the individual, the publicly acclaimed over the privately treasured, the objective over the subjectively valued.
Into such a life, depression comes as a gift, bringing the chance to strike root in a deeper ground inside oneself. Depression comes as a gift forcing one to listen to the voice of the Self within.
Depression comes as a gift wrenching one from the comfort of the collective to the isolation of one’s own feeling values, from the safety of the wide gate and broad way to the doubts and fears of one’s own unmarked, rocky footpath … a gift: for hidden in the seeming safety of the broad way was stagnation and illness—death to the possibility of becoming oneself.
Depression comes as a gift that stops one from hurrying briskly, confidently into the market. Stops one from rushing to the shopping center to buy one more bargain blouse for an already overcrowded closet. Stops one from emptily mouthing what one no longer believes in anyway.

This chapter depicts a number of ways in which woman grounds herself: with food and furnishings, in the simplicity of daily tasks, in claiming her own time and place. How do you ground yourself? Where do you go or what do you do to feel centered

Over the last ten years, in hundreds of women’s circles around the country, women have gathered to study Judith Duerk’s books. In a typical evening, one woman may read a single chapter aloud while the others sit listening, with their eyes closed. And then at the end, they may share their personal experiences or images—or perhaps memories from old dreams—that are evoked during the reading.

“I ask what is asked of us, and I know that the answers and attitudes for a new feminine consciousness will not be found in the collective realm. They will not come from the mass, but from the voice of each individual woman as she seeks, tentatively and hesitantly, to live out her life in the values of the ancient feminine.
“Perhaps what is asked is that each of us come to her own renewed grounding in the Archetypal Feminine, come to a conscious awareness of that grounding … a conscious awareness, understanding, and embracing of it in her own being and her own life.”

Or, if she is ill at ease, she may hand her script over to the animus and let him play the role for her, not out of her feelings, her relatedness and vulnerability, but out of an abstracted, polished, harder side of herself that feels a pressure to have all the answers, that has lost touch with softness, uncertainty, and weakness

Only woman can gestate a return to a deeper feminine consciousness containing that holding. By acknowledging her center and her needs, she can allow an ancient awareness, uniquely feminine, to re-emerge … an awareness with substance and strength as well as softness.
Only out of woman, conscious of her feminine grounding and the world’s desperate need of it, can be born a new awareness, strong enough to contain the anguish and anxiety of civilization driving itself to the breaking-point, fragmenting under its burden of terrorism and torture.
It is as if the whole world were a latchkey child waiting wistfully and fearfully at the door, hoping to be let in to the warmth and nurture it so deeply needs to sustain it … waiting to hear a voice, a new clear feminine voice of substance, softness, and strength, “Come home … to rest.”

How can we listen for a still, small voice that says, ‘The orphaned child within each of us is howling in terror, No more. No more violence. Let us be here in our pain and sorrow. Let us be here, present, to our anguish. Let us acknowledge it, cradle it, and comfort it.’
“Let us give it a place to come home, to rest.”
The creature in us needs comfort, nurture and holding, and deprived of the soft, holding, maternal, withers and dies. Years ago in well-known laboratory experiments, baby monkeys languished when fed mechanically from a twisted, cold wire figure but prospered when comforted by a softly pillowed form. We seem predisposed to forget this most basic lesson

nd the paradox, even if those we serve truly need help, is that if we are not open to our own anguish, to the orphaned child within, we harden ourselves and become busy, cheery dispensers of aid. We become unable to truly nurture or be present to either woundedness or healing.
For only by being present to the woundedness within ourselves can we be present to the woundedness in others. Their woundedness and anguish must be related to and embraced. It must be experienced in all its pathos. The woundedness of each of us must be fully owned and fully suffered for it to receive succor and be comforted.

“For me, the balance between doing and just being is the most important and dangerous question. If I am guilted or lured into achieving too much and lose the stillness at my center, then it takes me a long time to regain it, and I do violence to myself or those I love because of fatigue and pressure.
“I have had to give up ‘winning big’ because I love my life when I am connected to it, and I hate it when it and I get caught up in competition and deadlines. Then I have an overriding sense of impatience … my foot taps … I swallow food whole, I spill the coffee as I pour it, I burn myself on the stove … I rip, and wrench, and tear. There is a violence that takes over every act and shrieks orders at me.
“I am finding that it takes a lot of time to be a woman, to have a feeling of space and breath, a chance to sink into myself… as long as I take time every morning to light a candle to my life, it remains my life. But if I hurry into work without that small moment of quiet, then Vve already lost myself, and the day. The task, for me, is to care, daily, for myself and my life … to love and to nurture, within myself, moment by moment, the quality of quiet presence, quietly being present to my life, which sanctifies it… to live as if the candle is lighted.”

The winter is for us to nurture ourselves in that same way—a long time of preparatory darkness and inchoateness … a very long time to nurture and to begin to begin to bring forth … A time when it is in the natural order of things to be still, to rest in the quiet blackness. A time to trust that one will be refreshed and brought again to new creativity just as is all the rest of nature … to trust, once again, in the cycles of light and darkness in nature herself and within one’s own nature.”