Calling My Bones Back to Me

Dedicated to love and all the ways it will break your heart. Dedicated to M, to TJB, to all the children of Gaza. 

Sometimes grief feels like you are on fire, and sometimes it is misplaced and backwards, and always it sparks creation, sooner or later. As they say, we are spirit beings living in a human world, but sometimes we get to live between the veils. That is the gift of grief: a chance to practice being alive and dead at once, but it is also a gift of a life in balance. The mundane doesn’t sustain our spirits and the spirits don’t pay our bills. We must live in both.

Down on the banks of the Mississippi at a place called The End of the World I found my spirit scattered amongst the wet trash and the punk funerals, the painted labyrinth and the lapping waters. I threw driftwood for dogs with no name. I collected my spirit in a paper bag and took it home to be assembled, twine and sticks, thread and cloth. I now hang beside my bed. Safe at last, I called my bones back together.

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Clarissa Pinkola Estés tells the story of La Loba, the Wolf Woman. La Loba is the wise one, the ancient one, the spirit of ineffable power that lives inside everyone. La Loba collects the bones of desert animals, carefully seeking out those who are in particular danger of being lost. You know, the lost ones that wander the Earth, searching for the missing pieces of their soul. You know, the lost ones that broke apart when they were small. You know, the lost ones who can’t grieve or whose grief has been untold. “This is our meditation practice as women,” dare I say, as people, “calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of life itself,” says Estés. This is a practice of being wild. 

La Loba's favorite animal is the wolf. Once she has found an entire skeleton she brings the bones back to her cave where she chooses the right song to sing the creature back to flesh and breath. The wolf wakes, leaps, runs throughout the night until in wild abandon she becomes human again, feral and whole. This creature is the space inside us that knows what it is to be alive and live in our truth, live in accordance with our divine nature. This is the space inside us that lives inside the dichotomy of life itself: joy and grief. This is wild. But wild might be taking afternoons off work to sip tea and contemplate the prickling spines of stinging caterpillars because that is what is on your mind. Or your wild might be dripping blood from your body on the green earth under a pink sky. Or it might be standing up to authority. Wild is what is authentic, not what is out of control, though sometimes it might be that too. 

Our bones are grief and sorrow, joy and pain. Our bones are wild, are free, are love, are stones that breath and live and attune to nature. But sometimes we forgot our nature, then all we can do is run and sing and hope to remember how far we’ve come. Sometimes ancient mud lives inside our bones and we try to stay alive that way. Bones that are stagnant calcify. Or sometimes we misplace our bones, thinking we can hide from ourselves. Without bones we operate like tar rolling over newspaper, leaving only impressions of our previous life. Without bones our structure becomes malleable, like worn out ligaments dislocating femur from socket. We have no feet without bones. We have no story, no purpose, no place to ground ourselves and listen to the rain. We become ghosts of our formally functioning selves. But with bones, we are alive. With bones we are stable. With bones we are wild.

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In essence, I am grappling with what it is to be free but I'm not going to get too caught up in that word. Wild feels more full of life. Love and grief both make me wild—makes everyone wild, as far as I can tell, and there has been a lot of grief in the world lately. On that note, I have been trying to write this piece for many months, since October 7th to be precise. Well, maybe since October 9th or 15th, something like that. But I didn’t know what needed to be said. I have a propensity to want to process something as it is happening because it makes me feel “in control,” or perhaps muzzled. I’m afraid of the wild unknown because it can't be predicted, which is why it is unknown. I am so tame I need to know how the story ends before it begins. So I had to wait, and wait, and listen. But I sometimes fear if I listen too deeply to my inner wisdom I might rock the boat. Or I might jump ship all together. I might have to find my own adventure. I might even have to stop doing so much, slow down, put the phone down, and live in the moment. I might have to sit with myself. So here I am releasing a small smattering of what has been moving me. Here I am beginning to show off my bones.

I guess I should be honest and disclose that the final catalyst for writing this piece was not genocide—though that was the beginning—but heartbreak. Or maybe it is more fair to say the disillusionment of fantasy. From the time I can remember I have carried the fantasy of a perfect love, but underneath the fantasy of this perfect love was a perfect grief for so much unnamed insanity. Fresh grief, when understood properly, keeps us alive, it keeps us present, it keeps us in love. There is a lot of unexpressed, ancient grief in the world though, and when deeply felt, it can bring us back to a perfect union with all of life. Grief's gift is that it keeps us in touch with our divine nature by keeping us relating to beauty. Since October 7th and now my step-father died. He didn’t raise me as a child, but I’ve known him all my life. For some reason this question is always asked so I’ll just say it: I don’t think we were that close. But close enough. I took him for granted in that way where you think something is stable because you lose track of time and it seems like it's been forever so nothing will ever change. Then one day forever is reduced to ashes and stability is limited by gravity. 

Grief is a funny thing because it shakes loose things you might rather not lose. Grief cleans your bones whether you want it to or not. Grief shakes you to your roots, makes you question everything, it makes you slow down. The loss of my step-father ushered me through a portal I call something like: go down a deep well and stop digging holes all over the front yard. I can’t say why exactly, but his passing gave me a lot of perspective on what it means to be focused. Perhaps that was the collective energy of his life: he wore deep grooves into the world by staying the course, not meandering from interest to interest like so many of my contemporary peers. My life too has been quite discursive, going from this thing to that because I was looking for something I could never quite find: I was looking for my authentic nature. When I finally stopped distracting myself, when I stopped moving so fast, when I finally got quite enough, I was finally able to find my bones…and they are wild.

Speaking of bones, I have been thinking a lot about the bones of children who have died recently, or rather, who’ve been murdered. I think the number is 15,000? I can’t imagine what 15,000 children look like, though I can with some accuracy imagine what a classroom of 15 children look like. So if I just imagine 15 kids times 1000 then maybe I will get closer to comprehending 15,000 children being grieved by 30,000 parents, all of whom have roots that go back to the beginning of time. Or actually, maybe not that many because most of their parents are dead, too. In fact, whole family lineages are now gone. I’m not sure what the numbers are at this juncture, but there are families that no longer exist on the registry. I wonder if La Loba calls songs in that part of the world. Or at least someone like her. Maybe she will put the bones back together and help us name their spirits. Or maybe we can all sing like La Loba to the children who have lost everything. Or maybe we can grieve them like they are part of us, because they are apart of us. If we forget to grieve these children, these trees, these animals, their bones will continue to haunt the world—can't you hear them calling?—just like our own lost bones haunt us. 

Maybe what I am trying to say is, please remember to grieve. For decades my grief ran me, I did not feel secure. For decades I was top heavy, trying to escape my body. For decades my grief came out sideways, I apologize for the shrapnel. And then suddenly as my grief began to heal I became more whole. Then suddenly as my grief began to heal there was less fear. Then suddenly as my grief began to heal I began to love myself and I found love everywhere. Unfelt grief is poison in the world. Global sorrow is so palpable because modernity demands that we forget how to be still and listen. If you can't listen to yourself, how do you listen to your neighbor? How do you listen to our common Mother? How do you listen to the laughter of children? Grief is not a trifle endeavor. Grief demands to be heard, and when it is not, it will burn cities to the ground; it will hunt people down; it will do insurmountable harm so it does not have to feel. We need to slow down. We need La Loba helping us to call our misplaced bones back together. We need to find our wild nature. 

And actually, maybe this writing really started when I was 25 and I spent 10 days meditating in Thailand. That was when I first learned that I needed to be quiet. After 8 days of silent meditation I had one single, solitary moment of silence. Internal silence, that is. One. Moment. Thankfully that one moment has turned into many and the reason I bring it up is because it is in the silence that I now find my authentic nature. If you can’t sit still and pay attention to your inner guidance, what is guiding you? It turns out my wild nature wants me to often be in solitude. This is no small endeavor and it will never look cool on a resume: Needs solitude; found peace; loves God.

 And here’s the thing, life lives in a spiritual paradox: to go out we need to go in; what we need is to be wild, and to be wild we need bones, and to have bones we need to listen, and to listen we need to be quiet. Inner wisdom is often telling you a lot about your grief, fears, and unresolved pain. And also your joys, your whims, and your delighted pleasures. I read a quote by someone though I can’t remember who and I’m going also going to butcher it but it was something like this: “the problem with Western society is that people can’t sit still in an empty room.” I suppose it might give me more credibility if I could cite this properly, but I maintain the sentiment is true and I would say it even if someone else hadn’t. Either way, I wonder why we are so afraid of our quiet selves and what it has to offer. So, what happens when you sit still in an empty room? What happens when you listen to your wild nature? What happens when you slow down? What happens when you listen to yourself? Emotions are wild, can you play with them? Can you allow them to move you? And more to the point, have you grieved love today? Have you kept your heart open today?

Have you called your bones back together?