The iconic graphic novelist Jean Giraud wrote a series called The World of Edena over the span of about 18 years. In his notes about his process, he wrote:
I purposefully left several points obscure in my story... These obscure areas are like reservoirs of imagination that my unconscious mind creates now for me to explore later. When I try to find my own interpretations, I feel like a witch doctor reading the future in the entrails of an animal.... There are some things I drew in this story whose importance I will discover in the months and years to come...The project will change according to my own evolution. I established some plot developments that exceed my current skills, and that's very interesting to me because, if I want to get to the bottom of this story, I will have to go over my own head. I will have to work and grow up.
I love this idea as an artist, but also as a person committed to growth in a trajectory not completely controlled by myself. I've wanted to write for most of my life, but only settled into the idea a few years ago that what I have to say isn't ready yet because the parts of me that need to come together in order to say it are still forming. I still get impatient, but I'm excited for the writer in me that is learning to speak.
Even more recently, it's begun to dawn on me that the realm of the physical is something I've been experiencing since I became conscious, and yet I feel myself just waking up to it. I am late to considering my own body. She has taken good care of me, and I've been lucky enough to take that for granted. So much so that I rarely associate my self with my body. I think of myself as composed of a body, a mind, and a spirit. I identify my sense of self mostly with my mind.
As I've started to pay closer attention to my body, not only do I have new questions, but I've found that body, mind, and spirit are more connected than I knew. My body is both familiar and puzzling. I've come at this study-of-self through the practice of rest and the rhythm of my period.
Sometimes I can't tell if my body is changing or if it's my awareness that's changed. Leading up to a recent period, I felt strange for about a week. At first it was a boiling at my core that persisted with a manic ferocity. The timing of my period is consistent, but the feelings - physical and emotional and perhaps even spiritual - that orbit my period are diverse from month to month in their presentation and intensity. That can make it difficult to decipher whether it's "just PMS" or something else. But as I want to explore, a flippant explanation of "just PMS" is itself a symptom of cultural fear and ignorance, and our tendency to splinter the body, mind, and spirit.
The days surrounding my period often give me a dual-minded experience. It's not a true out of body experience, but I often get the sense that my self is bigger than me during my period. This might just be an increased awareness of the interplay of the aspects of self, since it is easier for me to see one thread through my body, mind, and spirit during my period. I'm still me, but it also feels like I'm looking at me. I see myself as both fragile and powerful, and potentially dangerous. I carry around my own psyche as if it were a deadly weapon, protecting it from the outside, and protecting the outside from it.
But even the language of weapons betrays how ingrained the idea of danger or volatility is in the way we view some functions of the female body. Some people reclaim this idea of danger into power, but reclamation or realization needs to be more than mere reaction. There is still an attitude (I know because I often share it) that the intensity I experience or exhibit surrounding my period is a uniquely female malfunction and results in emotion or action that needs to be apologized for. I have an urge to protect and contain myself during my period, but ultimately I want to learn to be in harmony with that energy that I can't yet define, instead of hiding it.
The humming intensity of my period hormones (that I experience mostly as unpleasant) wears me like a cloak for several days. It's not simply a heightened reaction to ideas or circumstances. It's a thing that comes from me but also hunches over me. I can see its shape, but I can't make it obey me. I tremble at its voltage, but also it is thrilling. Because it's not a demon, but it is energy that is bigger than I know how to harness. It gives me a sense of self that isn't fully in my control.
Something that interests me about this feeling is that I occasionally sense other women, usually older women, who radiate this energy in a stable form. They've harmonized with it. Rather than a cloak engulfing them, they wear this aura in beautiful, sweeping capes. It doesn't surprise me that women with this aura are feared or praised as spiritual. To be in harmony with your full self and what is beyond yourself - to be at peace in chaos - requires mastery. Or to experience lack of harmony and not be destroyed, but adapt - that also requires mastery. It's a state of neither mind over matter nor matter over mind, but a balance of the two of which the self is an expression, not the orchestrator. It's not a subjugation of energy but a harmony with it.
by Jean "Moebius" Giraud
What's daunting about trying to grow in this ability to harmonize is that the flow of energy fluctuates. When my period ends and the ferocity hibernates, in its place is a yawning valley of tension. Not a high strung tension, but a humming tension. If I sit very still, I can feel my core humming, like a gear shaft. This hum consistently leads me to write because that is one of the tools I have for resolving tension.
Some cultures sequester women during their periods, and I never can decide whether I'd like that. Sometimes I'd like to be alone, but not banished. I like to be cared for, though I'm not ill or somehow diminished. I think the cultural current that leans toward hiding or shaming unbridled female hormones are particularly strong surrounding menopause. I'm not immune to the feeling of fear and something more negative toward menopause and women experiencing it. I get the sense that women experiencing menopause feel the same way. But it's not the body breaking, it's the body working. So there must be a way to honor that, and even celebrate it.
Isn't it interesting how much we associate the energy that some women have with other-worldly beings? Witches, goddesses, oracles, angels, and even aliens. Our collective imagination associates women we can't control or women who harness powers we don't understand into these categories. It's also common that humans fear what we don't understand. Jonas and I were arguing about the intent of UFOs drawn to nuclear power (apparently this is a phenomenon). He thinks it's inherently ominous, but I don't. Since I'm not invested in the intentions of UFOs one way or another, it's easy for me not to immediately assume that the inexplicable is dangerous.
We have a lot more data about women. Think about "the humors" in antique medicine and smelling salts, and the ways in which women were treated as ill for having big or inexplicable feelings. Or when a woman was in knowing harmony with her energy and used it in social or medicinal ways, it was revered or reviled. The concept of witchiness, both by those that praise it and those that shun it, encompasses the idea of control or cooperation with things that are not reasonable or that we otherwise find mysterious. Before modern medicine in Europe and the colonized United States, midwives and herbalists were often considered witches for their ability to address bodies in ways that we did not understand. Most of us continue to fear the unknown in its modern iterations, medically and beyond.
But even further back, and in some more enlightened cultures than those of my ancestors, women with knowledge of bodies and in harmony with female energy weren't treated as ill at all. I suspect this is because the special powers that hormones can provide were seen as both healthy and even as a gift. I sense that I have this potential, but I don't understand how to guide it. I know that it can be destructive, but I will use it destroy evil. I've never heard of menopause discussed in previous eras, and it may have been beyond the life expectancy of many women in many eras, but I suspect that there used to be a much healthier culture surrounding it.
Recently I read the published journal of a young Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for his children's books about Madeline. I like the way he recognizes sensations he feels when he experiences his surroundings. He says that elation begins like fear, and "in this excitement, many doors open to walk out of the house of reason."
With my ingrained emphasis on my mind as the primary self, reason has always been a god I seek to please (if only I could find her!). Anything that derailed me from reason was my enemy. I was going to Figure Things Out, and then rest. Rather, figuring things out was sure to bring me rest! Times when my body intervened, either unable to keep up or with hormones, felt like betrayal. Those were times I'd try to push and pull my body up and make her take me where I wanted to go. Anything that beckoned or shoved me off the path toward reason was something I feared and turned from.
Reason isn't bad, but it is finite. It can only lead you down a straight hallway to a door. It is something else entirely to open the door and step out. Women possess the impetus to take that step (and men too, but I can't speak on it). To wear that cloak of harmony, with the self and with the universe, you have to let go of controlling reason. And for a woman like me, you have to walk down a lot of frustrating halls to get ready to wear that mantle.
Ludwig Bemelmans noted that the doorways out of reason were accessible through elation, but that that feeling could come from fear, too. Three times at least, in Psalms and Proverbs, we're told that "fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom." But this fear of God isn't assumption of punishment, but a reverence for beyond-reason. Poetically, Wisdom in the scriptures is always embodied as a woman. She who steps through the doorway and harmonizes.
If you live with attention to each of the three selves - body, mind, and spirit - there's a lot in life that is an invitation to the unknown or the reasonless. I spent a lot of time fearing or ignoring that invitation. I also think I'm more open to it from a place of rest, and if that is a prerequisite, that might explain why so few people say "yes" to that invitation in the end.
My fullest self, "the best me," is growing into someone different than the me I wanted to be for a long time. A self at rest is not our natural predilection. But leaving space for your future self to fill in the gaps is the work of growing up, as Jean Giraud said:
I purposefully left several points obscure in my story... These obscure areas are like reservoirs of imagination that my unconscious mind creates now for me to explore later. When I try to find my own interpretations, I feel like a witch doctor reading the future in the entrails of an animal.... There are some things I drew in this story whose importance I will discover in the months and years to come...The project will change according to my own evolution. I established some plot developments that exceed my current skills, and that's very interesting to me because, if I want to get to the bottom of this story, I will have to go over my own head. I will have to work and grow up.
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