When walking in the dark
Remember you are the Light
Hello my Friend
And thank you for still being here. What an absence and a silence this has been. An underworld journey spanning three years and three generations. Now, under the light of this waning full moon in initiating Aries, conjunct Chiron, the wounded healer, and squared both by activating Mars and Lord of the Underworld, Pluto Himself, I am being urged by my heart to write to you again. To put aside silence and doubt.
Listening to my Heart
Three years ago my heart stopped me. I presented at the Emergency Department of Wellington Hospital with heart palpitations that gripped hard at my chest. I was calm and also concerned. In triage, with an ECG monitor recording the irregular spikes and dips of my heart rhythm, I felt the temperature of the room shift. I was in an event that was bigger than me, and I knew this hurting heart was also my father’s heart, broken but still beating when his mother slipped under the train. And here was the pressure in my left temple and eye, my mother’s mind tormented by seeing things no one should ever see.
The doctor who came to attend me was named Katarzina. The name of my maternal grandmother. The one who died, her three remaining children lying with her on the mud floor of a hut in Kazakhstan, a gangrenous leg showing her she could not go on. That day my radiographer’s name was Stephanie. The name of my paternal grandmother Stefania. My namesake. And also the name of my dearest friend who drowned of a sudden heart arrhythmia three months earlier.
I could see was in the midst of a constellated ancestral pattern, with loving ancestors and my beloved friend close. They were revealing to me where I still carried the wounds of a family lineage of trauma, and the unshed tears of loss and grief. And they have been with me ever since.
Detail from “Kuan Yin Places the Blue Flame of Freedom into my Heart.” Artist: Stephanie Sinclaire Lightsmith, with permission for use given by her daughter Katherine.
Navigating this wounded world
In Palestine and the Ukraine and so many other places on Earth, these wounds are still being inflicted, as those who have been wounded wound in retributive return. As so much of the earth floods and burns.
And so I began, in July of 2021, an Underworld journey to retrieve the lost souls of my family lineage still living in unrelieved trauma in me.
Oh my mother, oh my father! Marmey and Tata. And so too, in-dwelt my Babcias, grandmothers Katarzina and Stefania, whom I never knew. And also my beloved Stephanie. A kindred sister of both my Heart and Soul. All this during an epidemic and lockdowns and rising fear and centralised control.
Initially, I was diagnosed with Takotsubo cardiomyopathy - broken heart syndrome, where the heart misshapens as it deals with an onslaught of either sudden loss or intense grief.
Then, as my heart began to heal, and as my partner also healed from an operation on his heart, a pericardial effusion began to form.
This excess fluid around my heart, held in the pericardial sac, I came to know intimately (and at first, fearfully) over the next few months of ED visits, as ‘tears’ around my heart. I drew them in my journal, one tear for each soul born into both my maternal and paternal lineages; each soul who was lost through the forced deportations to Siberian Gulags that the Russian army conducted during 1940 in the Kresy region on the Eastern borderlands of Poland.
This past three years, I have gone into the Underworld, like Persephone, like Inanna. I felt my mother’s grieving with Demeter, demanding to bring all the lost children back. In 2022, my father then 91, passed. And I experienced a prolonged depression, and then another sharp and intense descent. I had sessions with therapists and healers, shamans and astrologers. Each one helped me understand how I could dry the tears, both sea-salt wet and war-torn, both physical effusion and intergenerational wound.
I came, step by slow step, to understand and honour the dead, walking with them, and then onwards from them and for them, while holding their gifts for me close to my heart… And I learned how to cherish each heartbeat and breath… I learned how to live. To live to write this. To live to write the story that would honour them and, in doing so at 58, free me to create a new life no longer filled with unshed tears that were, and were not, mine alone.
As I recuperated, I planted an apothecary garden after a Shamanic journey, where my Babcias came to me wearing seed sacks slung over their shoulders saying, “Come on Stefcia, we’ll show you how to sow seeds”. I planted two Linden trees, after a dream of a man who stood beside me, arm around me, on a hill saying, “One day we will plant Lindens.”
Only this year I found out that Lindens are revered as sacred trees in Poland, trees known to heal the heart. I have planted one each for my mother and father lines. And as the plant healers grow, and as these trees put forth buds with roots now home in a new land, I know I will continue to heal. Soul come back into Body, Heart at rest and Hands in the Soil.
And I now know I came to help women walk this Underworld journey to heal, too.
This past year I have reimagined my sacred work - as a new focus emerged after a dream of following the sound of a Woman whose call was the heart-song of a cello. I followed Her call to the centre of the Earth, recognising Her as Gaia Herself. I was instructed to walk in the dark, listening only to the sound of the instrument of the Earth’s heart. My Heart. It’s shush and beat and flow and tone resounding, playing back and along intergenerational heartstrings.
I am currently convalescing while on a writer’s sabbatical in Northern New South Wales. And I have been having tree encounters. On the left I am standing under the heart shaped leaves of the Bodhi tree on the terrace outside the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. This Bodhi Tree is a descendant of the tree that Siddhartha Gautama sat under in Bodh Gaya until he attained enlightenment. On the right, in a small Byron Shire NSW town called Clunes, I met this exquisite Tree Being, full of seedpods from last summer, and just beginning to green with new Spring leaves. This tree, I intuit, is such a one as in the painting above, painted by my beloved friend Stephanie. Almost as if the veils thinned and in this moment she came close, placing a blue flame of peace in my heart. Since I have been here my heart has settled, and this area, originally settled by the Bundjalung people, is known as a meeting place - a place of great abundance and healing. I feel it, and am deeply grateful - hence the smile.
A Woman’s work is Together done
I now understand my work is with women specifically. And especially with women making their journeys through the doors and gates and rites of passage - from menarche into Womanhood, into Motherhood, through perimenopause and menopause into Queendom, into WiseWomanhood and WiseElderhood, and beyond.
I have now walked that Underworld menopausal journey through heat and sweat and burning grief to the other side.
Like Hecate, I now meet women at their crossroads and say, “There is meaning and beauty and power in this threshold, in this unknowing.” There we begin a resurrection journey into a luminous, full and meaningful, soulfully vibrant new life. A life they begin to re-member as a distant, and often thought unrealisable dream. And we wake it and walk it through the dark, into being.
A detail of a 3rd century CE Roman statue of Hecate (or Hekate), goddess of the Moon and Keeper of the Crossroads. As here, she is often depicted having three heads and bodies - one of maiden, one of mother and one of crone. (Vatican Museums, Rome).
Western women will heal the world
I will be launching a sister website to TrueStory — The New Sophia – with this new offering soon.
I feel called to this work because my beloved teacher Thay, and the Dalai Lama, and so many women like Arundhati Roy are speaking up for each other and the Earth. Zach Bush also recognises that Generation X western women hold a key - to regeneration - of not only themselves from systems of oppression, but for this world.
We’ve come as a healing cohort (a new coven with deep wisdom) and we each have a unique gift to offer the world at this time. Together we are unstoppable - a Love Force, a Truth Force.
Gathering in sanctuary and in womb
From our purpose-built guest pavilion and our lovingly planted healing garden nested in a regenerating native forest, I’ve created a Resurrection Retreat. In the South Wairarapa region of New Zealand, I’ll be offering one-to-one mentoring and oracular counsel online and on land. I will curate weekend retreats, lead forest bathing, walk labyrinth and dreams walk, too. I will facilitate rites of the womb, and begin a women’s wisdom circle. Gathering together again.
We will meet together, to gather to-get-Her, on the whenua that has healed and continues to nourish and support me. In the circle of Tītoki Kuia, in the Kānuka Cathedral. We will hold each other’s hearts tenderly, as Papatūānuku Herself births us into our fullest calling, into our deepest wholing and our furthest visioning.
So, under the waning light of this Aries full moon, I invite you to contemplate what old behaviours might hold you captive still. Where are the places in you still tender with wounding? And what might be calling for release?
For me it is very definitely the fear of speaking up and being seen. I hear the voice of my mother saying, “Be careful, Stefcia, they’ll find you if you make a sound.” My father seeing his father shot, shudders at the thought of his daughter also being lost. A bullet to the heart. And yet I reassure them both that my words are needed now more than ever. And I tell them I have walked through the fire. Through the fire that they too endured.
An invitation to come
So I trust that those of you who yearn to remember will find me… and together we will find your way back… no longer walking in the dark. No longer forgetting your Light.
Your Light is so needed now in an old world going into the dark. Old systems crumbling, old grips tightening, and the Earth Herself quaking and flooding. Birth pangs and waters broken.
And we are, I know this and see this, re-membering our collective power as Nurturers of the Newborn, as Midwives of the world to come, now so close to birthing that She, and we together with Her, are Her crowning.
And so, I’m so thankful you’re still here. I thank you for your patience as I went into a deep silence, stepping back into Siberian snows. And into the snowmelt of tears. Led by my Heart.
And I’m thankful that my Heart and my own beloved circle of sacred sisters and women friends, along with my helping spirits, guides, healing team, beloved teachers and loving ancestors helped me cross that threshold, that frozen steppe. They helped me open the great iron-forged floodgates of my Heart.
What a Heroines’ journey awaits us. As Anam Cara, a friend of your pilgrim Soul, I’ve returned to the crossroads and am here to walk with you into your new life.
Photograph and digital superimposition by Catherine Adam of Wonderbird. The composite photo is one of my hands, holding a rose photographed by Italian photographer Simone Dalmeri on Unsplash. While digitally composited, these images are real, and no AI has been used.
Aroha nui,
