NEW WOLF MOON: mess, mystery + medicine

writing from the body: the inner landscape in the dark moon days

Walnuts.

Warm January greetings to you, INKLINGS reader, at the peak of this WOLF NEW MOON.

It has taken me some time to sit and write after the winter break because there is so much that I want to write about and I haven’t quite known where to begin. So much is stewing about in my mind and a heap of ink-on-paper notes in my notebook of threads, links, research, and images have my attention. All of those inklings that have arisen in the deep darkness of mid-winter when I took my foot off the gas and made some ocean time, literally and metaphorically.

When I first began popping up here and there with a NATURAL INK. colour den and stall I had a small wooden sign that read mess, mystery + medicine. Over time this signage changed to some more straightforward words about what it was I was up to - inks made from found and foraged plants and metals - to connect with the confused faces of some passing folks.

I have noticed that there are three types of folks I encounter at events and markets; those who look baffled or non-plussed about what it is I am up to and wander on, sometimes not breaking their stride, those who look a bit confused or curious and wander over for a rummage and chat, and those whose eyes widen with knowing and fascination as they were drawn into the potions and colours, like blackbirds to a worm.

It is a curiosity about the mess, mystery and medicine of making and tending a creative, alive life that I am writing about here today, squinting at my screen as the low winter sun streams through the window. Writing to you on the dark moon means writing to you in the days of my inner winter and bleed. To be in this uncomfortable, nauseating and often incredibly painful point in the physical cycle, messy and unkempt, bloated and thick-headed, with a great power glinting at the core. There is a different dark alchemy here to the brightness of the full moon that illuminates and beams. A power in writing from the darkness and the mess. I feel it as I sink into the page, seeping from my fingertips as I type. I turn from the material of the outside world, of plants and colour and people, to the material of the inner landscape and I invite you to traverse with me and find your own waymarkers in the pitch-black words on white.

MESS, MYSTERY + MEDICINE

The current way that we understand the word mess to mean untidy has its roots in the rise of the industrial age. For centuries mess was used to describe food provisions and the places where people would gather to eat, as it is still used today in military contexts. It is likely to have transitioned more towards its more modern meaning in the early 19th century when referring to the mixed ‘mess’ of animal feed made from different sources, now produced in industrial quantities, and onward to then take up its current meaning as a condition of untidiness, from the mid 19th century.

This I find very interesting and not wholly unsurprising; that it took the mechanisation of human-making processes to create this meaning and to enhance an understanding of what we now understand to be ‘messiness’ - that which is not pure and mechanised. That which combines things in an unruly manner. That which is natural and human.

We are messy.
Creation is messy.

We are born in blood and agony. We wail and cannot speak our needs, even after we can form our words and grow into fully formed humans. We lash out and we love, for little seeming rhyme or reason. Our bodies remember the pains of their past, unconciously seeking the right kind of arsehole comment to trigger a fresh wave of healing, if we can allow it. Or the backlash and doubling down on why the world is made up of horrors and twats. We lust and we restrain. In the constraints of our longings and internalised judgments of our animal needs we breed neurosis and narratives of subjective truths.

The mess and muddle of physicality as a whole is a reminder of our animal nature and the course of our evolution, albeit one that a wide swathe of human conciousness would prefer to forget. But we are animals. Our hunting and gathering, scavenging ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years in the raw exchanges of existence, evolvoing from creatures whose lives were even less detached from it; this past ten millenia of emerging civilisation has not much changed out basic nature… it is only in the past hundred years or so that our western culture has removed itself from the mud and blood of living.

Emma Restell Orr. Kissing The Hag.

We have not become machines, and yet our language speaks as if we are bolts and rivets, cogs and consistency. Of productivity and stability. We are required to keep up the pace through winters and personal dark nights of the soul. To automate and make efficient our systems.

And still we see things crumble. Political parties back bite and jeer. There is 60% less nature on this plant than there was when the machines began being built, and we are stressed and tired and sad and in dis-ease and we are still not allowed to fall apart and dismantle the parts that have grown rusty and fused.

I have fallen apart time and time again and I have felt such shame for it. At 19 I was told I had an illness that would mean I “shouldn’t have kids too late”. Those words were uttered to me as the only means of medicinal support from a Spanish doctor who softened the K in kids with soft guttural flare. I was cut open once, twice, and three times in the following 15 years to have pieces taken out and other things seen to, and I began to weave together the language of my body. I was in my 30s when I was told that resting on my bleed was a necessity if I did not wish for menopause to floor me. It has been a necessity since to claim this messy spot of bloat and malaise and pain and it has taught me how to be here. Showed me where I have tried to avoid the murkiness and stay up and out and clean. Highlighted to me how conditioned we have become to want to ignore the fecund places in favour of the neat and pristine.

The process of returning to self-trust in this body with its rhythms and needs, to the mind and heart with its wounds and human animality, has been a slow and strengthening affair. In cycle after cycle of traversing the mulch I have become sured up in my creative power. A natural flow of aging, perhaps? But not one that is a given. When you go against the consistent, neat machine you are cast out. I did not receive a letter, I wasn’t physically shown the door. I had all of the years of internalised pruning of my own humanity. Learning a new language took its own sweet time. Listening and paying heed is a tyranny to the machine. Ignoring and avoiding is a tyrannical abandoning of my own flesh and bone.

Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that what I tell my students. We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of survival to each other.

Melissa Febos - Body Work.

I am thankful to those who have unravelled before me. Folks who have walked here before and who walk alongside me. By writing that which once lay woefully and shamefully whispered into private pages and sharing it in service to the wild mess that wants us back, I am part of the web of this great de-centering of the mechanised. Not a casting out of that the skills of the modern age, but not centering its power-hungry habits and greedy preferences over everything else.

The beauty of the mess is that it is beautiful. It brings with it acts of creation so moving we can no longer dare to believe that we are alone. It brings connections so wind-soaked and rain-singed that we cannot believe ourselves to be weird or damaged any longer. In this, we sense the permission to live our own dear lives in touch with the mystery of what it is to be fully alive.