♥ HOLY SHIT ♥
Shift-shaping from being a shit-head, to loving all of me — all… of me…
It was a superlative winter day in southern California, to the consternation of friends of mine freezing in northern habitats. Mid-January, and temperatures were in the high seventies. The combinations of very recent heavy rains followed by bucket loads of sunshine had produced all manner of tall, green, grassy meadows, freshly budding leaves and pungent scents. Early flowers were springing up everywhere, and I had to get out in it, leaving behind any other responsibilities.
I packed my doggy Kristol on board, and set the Probe out for the little town of Vista, my old stomping grounds. I chose a much loved trail, part of which moves along a creek, replete with cattails and old oaks. I wondered if I would find more of the strangely provocative red-capped mushrooms gathered during my last visit: was it a hallucinogen, or simply poisonous? These cohorts from the plant kingdom possessed an energy that drew me to them, for whatever reason. And I suspected it was more than their fiery caps.
The sun felt deliciously hot, and I stripped off my tee-shirt. I had on a bathing suit top, and tried not to resent my decision to keep it on. There occasionally were male mountain bikers around, and I wasn’t feeling hardy enough to encounter them bare-breasted just yet.
Profuse rains of the past few days had melted into the ground making a lot of slushy mud, the dark, earthy kind that cakes to shoes, and to doggy feet. Kris seemed blissfully unconcerned, white paws dancing around and occasionally through the sloggy turf as she nosed her way along, startling several large birds out of nearby brush. In noisy protest, they succeeded in startling both me and Kristol with their self righteous squawking, getting even by giving us both a good start for invading their resting spots.
Crossing the creek, we managed to avoid getting really muddy by stepping on a cover of long reeds and large stones. Just over the bank, we came to a field of large rocks. Scattered here and there, they seemed to beckon me to lay myself down for a moment or two and get quieter inside. Kristol was hopping along ahead at a fairly good clip, looking back now and then to see if I was keeping up. I always hate interfering with her fun; yet, I also needed tending time to listen to
my insides. I compromised by continuing a ways up the trail, figuring I could find another site, more rocks on up ahead.
Which I did. Although more meager, a small area loomed ahead. Following my own animal instincts, I forged a way through the brush and soggy, now reddish earth, arriving moments later in what appeared to be two adjoining circles of packed ground, littered with rocks and fallen branches, with just enough room to move about, or to stretch out. I felt a lazy, creative rush. I might do some low key ceremony here. Not too physical: I really wasn’t feeling very active, yet there was an unmistakable inner urge to put myself into sacred ritual mode, sink into rapt inner attention.
I moved to the back encircled area, noticing it was already fully enclosing me with shrubs, brush and rocks. No need to haul rocks or branches and make a circle: Mother Nature had done it for me. I found a forked stick and stuck it in the center of the ring, representing the spiritual fork in the road of my life. I had realized in the past few days, that a paradigm shift was making its way through my resistances: I could choose to continue to act as though I had to “do it all myself,” and continue to be as mindful and heartful in the act as possible, or I could choose to head for complete and total Surrender, and find out what that might really mean. I could continue to act as though I were separate from Source, or I could assume I was not, and “let go” of my attempts to mastermind my life.
This choice might not seem so monumental, except that currently, “my life” too often appeared to me to be either in shambles, or to have disappeared altogether down a crack in the menopausal abyss. Depending upon my mood and hormones, I rose or fell with these untidy facts: I still had no identifiable house/home or community, no clear cut service or work, direction for my talents and passions, no man to partner with, unpredictable energy and health, and four storage units of “stuff” awaiting my decision making. Thus, to surrender completely to an Unknown -the probable possibility that “God” would “handle the big stuff” if I took care of the rest -seemed an enormous risk. Still, Surrender was in the air, all around me, calling to me, seducing me to give up the notion that I really had control over this event I called my life.
I motioned for Kris to lie down in a shady patch, strewn with dried sage leaves. I pulled off a couple of fresh twigs nearby, and inhaled the familiar aroma, dragging deeply, as I ambled over to two low laying rocks that I’d noticed while scouting from the trail path. They lay on either side of the footpath and were particularly intriguing, since the whole thing resembled the opening to a womb. I imaged myself taking off my clothing and lying down in between them, thighs up on the rocks, -as though I were going to birth something, something noble and innocent and powerful. This new thing would come out of me and then move down along the path of life that I saw stretching out before me. I reflected upon my recent drawings that chart my difficult menopausal passage, the ones in which I appear birthing a new self, often in the form of a baby or a snake.
Yes. I will enact this vision. Uneasy, I stripped and lay down, first spreading out a worn towel on the ground between me and the moistened path of sand and dirt. The sun bore hotly down southeasterly. It must have been about noon. I hoped no one would come by.
Straddling the rocks, spread-eagle, I felt very vulnerable. I sighed, offering my vulva to guardian spirits. Nervously, I began to breathe a deep, full, rhythmic breath, a “rebirthing” breath. Kristol paced protectively nearby. My hands began to tingle. An anguished moan escaped me, interrupting my breathing efforts.
“Giving birth is painful,” said my Voice. I tried to bear down, as if that would assist whatever it was inside me to come out, to get out. After a few pushes, the notion struck me that to be lying down like this was rather like being in stirrups during a pelvic exam. Or giving birth in a sterile hospital setting. I wasn’t in a natural, birthing position; no gravity was helping me out.
I maneuvered into a new position, squatting down between the two rocks, now midwives in my strange, organic ceremony. I began to bear down. To my surprise and dismay, a narrow stream of pee came out of me, yellowing the already damp ground, curling around my left foot. Uh oh. There was more coming: two small, squishy turds now also lay beneath me. No miraculous newborn life, no great wisdom, no peak moment, here: I had given birth to pee and two turds. Babies, urine and excrement: all coming out of the same general place. Something to think about.
I took a small stick and stuck it into the waste matter, lifting it to examine it. Perhaps there was more to get from this; I certainly hoped so. Oops. The stuff fell off my twig onto a small, flattened rock. I took the interesting altar piece and placed it beneath my squatted gaze.
“Are you ready to handle your own shit?” queried my Inner Voice. Wow, I thought to myself. Gingerly, holding my breath, I rose to the dare and picked up the greenish, brownish aftermath of my last meal. Ugh. I hastily picked up a chunk of earth to mix with the fecal material, as if to make the odor and the mere fact of it disappear.
“Can’t handle it yet, can you,” remarked the Voice. “You’re still trying to hide it, apologize for it, deny it.”
Guiltily, I stared at the shit and earth ball I had made, and reached for some of the pee-wetted soil to add to the mix, as if to make up for my former lack of daring. The dark ball looked back at me, like a body-less head of a doll I might create.
“Shit head,” remarked the Wise One. “Denial of truth produces shitheads. Shitty thinking.”
Well, what next. I sighed and took my creative ball and put it in the center of my forked stick. Then I took my creation over to the two rocks and stuck the stick in the ground next to me, then clamored onto one of the rocks to sit and contemplate the whole mess again. The ball stared back at me.
“Wherever there is shit, there is something of value nearby,” I was Reminded. An incredible thought was dawning on me: that something valuable was ME! I, the maker of the shit was valuable!
“Don’t stop. You’re onto something,” came the Reply before I could think it clearly myself.
I took the shithead ball in my hands and began to take it apart, letting it fall in little bits back to the earth. My shit, literal or figurative was, after all, part of the earth, part of creation, part of Creator,-just like me. Just like my guide Voice. That would make it no less divine than any other aspect of God: Holy Shit! Wow. Like most everyone I knew, I devalued it: shit was a waste, “negative,” shameful or useless, or it was dirty, smelly and contaminating, certainly something to be flushed out of sight. I better not speak about the fact that I ever produce the stuff, and god forbid they should discover that I actually investigated it with my bare hands. Yukk! Disgusting.
An ancient image of my father’s mother flashed through my mind. When I was an infant, apparently the job of changing my “soiled” diapers fell into her hands: “EEEHHHHHH!” she would exclaim. I found this out as a young adult one day, braving the question to my mother as to why our family used to refer to bowel movements as “eeehhhhhh.”
Eeeehhhh was what I had thought not only of my excrement, but of that part of my female body that made it and expelled it as well, my “down there.” A shitty legacy, I thought.
“Can you accept your own shit,” came the Query? “Even better, can you love it? Can you truly claim it as an emanation of Creator?”
This was heady stuff. I packed up my gear and, re-clothed, washed off my hands with the drinking water. I realized I had been given a next step to work with, and that I might as well get dressed and head back for the car, because it wouldn’t be completed this afternoon. Hiking slowly back, reviewing all the movements, so to speak, of this ritual teaching, I wondered whether I dare write this up to share as part of my book: this is embarrassing, this is risky, this could be the end of me.
“That’s what a shithead would think,” was the Reply. “Your task is to own your shit and take responsibility for it. And that responsibility is to value it as much -or as little- as anything else God has mysteriously co-created through you. Then you extend that to other people and their shit, which is their denial of their own divine basis. And to have compassion for how difficult this is, and to forgive all the judgments that occur around shit. This is a big leap from where you started at the beginning of your book.”
I was shitfaced: in the humblest of ways, the “lowest” of ways, I was being brought to my Maker with the opportunity to Surrender to the ultimate possibility that truly, NOTHING of this world is without inherent value when recognized as a divine emanation.
“A further word to the wise,” came my Guidance. “The only value you will experience in anything throughout your earthly life, is value YOU place on that something from your beliefs, and from your Faith. To again quote your earlier writing on the matter, where there is shit, there is value nearby as you create it with your perceptive ability, and with the openness of your heart. With enough love and gratitude, your consciousness about shit can be transformed. No need to transform shit: it’s already Goddess. Just change your attitude.”
Lots to mull over. I was anxious to get to my computer to try to get it all down. I trotted down the trail, stopping to pick up a few incredible mushroom samples along the creek side trail; now, back to the Probe, back to civilization.
Life may not get much better than this, except in finding ways to share it.
[This story is featured in the memoir IRON JANE: Tales of Awakening A Wild Heart, Vol.1 ©M Singer 2011, revised 2019)
