Moss. Mother. Moon.
A circle gathering with Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Five days ago, when the full moon was 99.8% illuminated (or effaced as I like to call it), I sat down to my laptop to join an online gathering of women – my first, in fact. And it wasn’t planned – I just happened to see the post about it a day or so prior, and I knew in my bones that I must go. I’d always thought if I ever did attend a gathering like this, it would be in person, and probably as part of a weekend retreat somewhere far away. A place that facilitated an escape from daily life, offered the chance of hitting the re-set button, and to get to know the other women in the circle.
It turns out none of that is required in order to fully step in, to meet yourself exactly where you are, and to know the fellow souls that have gathered in their own homes, all over the world, to witness.
It was last July, at the height of my most fractured, post-grief state; when I discovered the wondrous facilitator of this circle, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, through a deeply moving interview she gave on Katherine May’s podcast, How We Live Now. Here was someone talking so eloquently about how we heal from our traumas, as a collective. How rooting, and understanding our ourselves deeply, is so vital to how we connect. I knew I needed to read her work, and so I went and bought Cacophony of Bone at the first opportunity, consuming it piece by piece, letting her words wash over me and through me.
How strange, to encounter this work, as I neared the end of recording the day-to-day of my own nature/grief memoir, which I started the September prior: encompassing burnout, my search for myself, and the unexpected and seismic loss of my beloved dad… the tectonic shifts that have shaken me since. The deep interrogation of Mother; all that it means, carries, holds, and is not. The expectations and the disappointments. The unravelling of all I once thought I knew.
I’d read Kerri’s gentle, careful words (somehow I felt utterly held, like a baby bird exhausted from breaking out of its shell) and wonder, how they could chime so perfectly with my own experiences and questions. Did she know, four years ago as she wrote this, that they were everything I needed, four years into the future?
People close to me made babies and thought it would be a wondrous thing if I (despite a plethora of odds stacked against me) made them too.
People close to me made babies and (thinking it would be a wondrous thing if I did too) told me so.
Babies were everywhere, all the time – as always they are – but we still never spoke of them, not even once. Not when each year crept round the corner, reminding us that time is an oddly boned creature; one that waits – as well you know – for no woman.
Never once did we sit together and talk about the delicate nuances that marked our lives. Things that made it seem certain that babies were definitely not a thing on our horizon. Things such as illness, age, circumstance, money, the past, the future, the present.
Next month, on the cusp of the summer solstice, coinciding with the full Birth Moon, I will turn thirty-eight. I always thought I’d be a parent. But my partner and I (of twenty-two years) have never yet tried. Along with the uncanny points made in the above passage, there are other things that weigh heavily – not least the shifting plates, and some huge unknown (but knowable) factors with my future health that are too terrifying to peer into, for now.
For years, I have been untangling threads across lifetimes, generations, that meet here, in my personhood. I have been finding myself. Individuating. Rooting. Giving birth… to myself.
Our gathering at Kerri’s invitation – Moss, Mother, Moon – felt like an initiation ceremony into the next phase of my being. Her words and her state-of-being are a balm, in such times. Gathering against the vast cruelty and trauma in the world, in ourselves. We showed up, right from the moment our screens connected. I didn’t know what to expect, but Kerri started off by asking us to consider how we view ourselves as women, and sharing her thoughts on the importance of the Moon, and our connection to it. She shared some of the ancient, beautiful names the May full moon has come to be known by:
Flower Moon
Milk Moon
Leaf Budding Moon
Planting Moon
She then went on to say how to her, Moss was such a deeply powerful creature, which resonated so strongly with me, as I’m forever to be found with my nose in the microcosm of nature (or my fingers running through just-after-rain moss, when the petrichor’s at its sweetest) and I think of the natural world as fully, totally alive and sentient.
Then we came to Mother, which she said we could ‘talk about for decades’ which is so true. It felt really inclusive to be told that we don’t have to have given birth, or raised children, to be mothers. We can be mothers in a myriad of ways to the world and to ourselves.
As someone who has been a carer for my own mother for most of my life, who nurtures by default, this was extremely powerful.
Kerri repeated the world held, often, which is something I’m always seeking to feel, and to have others feel in my presence. It’s how I felt in this circle, as we shared our interpretations of what circle means. Infinite, connected, nurturing, belonging, cloud-gaps, witnessing – far more words than I can recall, but all equally powerful and shared.
As if in cupped hands, Kerri gathered us, and invited us to close our eyes, in order to visualise. So soothing were her words, I found myself asking, can the voice of Mother Nature herself be embodied here on earth?
I was instantly in the landscape she described: able to see the quality of the light, feel the balmy air, smell the twilight-freed nectar, hear the crackle of rushes as a swooping, silent heron scraped them with a wing-tip. The long, hooting cry of a white owl, and the burning orange gaze of a fox, slinking along the treeline. I heard my name and turned to find my sister-self, floating upright, totally still, in water (as I do) waiting. Feet-long auburn tendrils coil from her head over the water’s surface, over the land and up into the distant mountains. She is so calm, so solid and at peace.
The sunset sky burns vibrant orange and the sinking sun tints everything pink. Kerri makes an offering: a single word, pulled form a deck. Presence.
Three words rise in my mind.
Expand.
Expulse.
Root.
As we are called to waken, the scene burns bright, effervescent orange, white-hot.
Escape fire, to become fire.
We are invited (not expected) to share our words, and what they mean to us.
The women in this circle blow me away with their insight, vulnerability, and their willingness, to share their wisdom, and to witness. All wonderful, and one person’s response stood out to me in particular, who shared that her take on presence was connected to some writing by Virginia Woolf on planting bulbs around her garden: ‘To trust that what has come before was meant to happen, and it will yield what it’s supposed to. I don’t have to be too far ahead of myself, I can trust, and that allows me to be present’.
When it comes my turn there is one new, luminous word, floating in front of all else.
Ignite.
Kerri reads a beautiful poem, The Night Garden, by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, who’s words move me beyond myself.
Their humming sculpts the air like a night loom…
we do not know if this is our end
or our birth
they braid the future like a child’s hair
singing, and
sewing bright dark seeds into it.
If anything can capture the hope of women meeting in circle in a destroyed world, this is it. Our simply showing up here, is another stitch in the dewy fabric of this universe: the ‘bright dark seeds’ exquisitely conveying our limitless capacity: to love, lose, comprehend, and keep going.
I take the ringing in my bones as a sign that my New Year oracle reading, which I wrote about, is starting to manifest. Go to the water, let go, and bring your kin-folk with you.
We close with Kerri pulling six-cards from two decks, representing the past, or most recent season (an example Kerri gave of this was maidenhood), present (i.e this full moon, or a question we’ve had pressing on our minds) and future (summer into autumn or the next stage for you). The cards resonate deeply, asking a lot about patience and fear (past), balance and where our energy flows (present), and a white owl appears (future) – speaking of unprecedented growth and the end of a long journey.
I know what this means for me – and that the end of this particular journey, is also a new beginning, a re-imagining of myself and what I can be.
I’ve been searching for the threads that scattered when I lost my family home, sixteen years ago. They’ve woven through a novel, a nature memoir, countless poems – it’s been an undoing, of the highest order. A painful interrogation of home, of where we find it, how we rebuild it when it’s been lost.
I cradle it all, the broken egg-shells of it, as I bear the deepest grief I’ve known.
Learning the hardest, most formative lesson:
‘I am home’.
It’s impossible to describe such an event as this; when I messaged a friend the next morning, waking very early and off-kilter, all I could say was: ‘women are power’.
The best possible way to communicate that sense of both collective magic, and personal, as I lean in to being present, to giving myself permission – to ignite.
My greatest thanks and gratitude to Kerri for providing this safe space to gather, to witness, and to grow; and for her generosity in letting me share this post with you. It was a privilege to sit with these women on my first circle, and it won’t be my last.
Have you joined a circle before? What did you think? Please let me know in the comments xx
What a perfectly beautiful piece of writing. How powerful it is to find a graph of women to share our souls with.