Awake my dear. It is I, Gotega, Old Woman of the Earth. Startled, I am woken from a dream about being reborn as an adult, birthed by the Primordial Mother.
While travelling through the years of menopause, I have begun to learn about and connect more with the Old Hag, Bone Mother, Crone within me. She is of the earth, connecting me to my natural cycles as well as the earth’s of death and rebirth, to my own mortality. She teaches me to honour my past, yet she comes to challenge my stories, my patterns, my fears, my inauthenticities, my truth, so I can release what must be released, and those parts of me can die. She then invites me to embrace and trust in the new that will come after this.
I am here to hold you when you need me, just as you lay here on this warm sand, connecting my skin to your own, feel my warmth on your belly, and the sun warming your back. Release those bubbling emotions into me, so that I may transmute them.
It is in these liminal spaces, like where the water meets the earth, and the sun greets the day, that I connect with her today. These places seem to open a magical portal into the realm that we have become disconnected from, this place is full of deep-rooted remembering. It is in these spaces you can let die what no longer serves you to be reborn into a more authentic future. But, you must meet her here in truth and trust in the unseen, the unknown and be guided by her wisdom.
I journey to her heartbeat, to one of the places in which she dwells. A dark cavern hidden deep in the side of the mountain. I see her old and weathered face aglow from the fire. She looks both terrifying and motherly. Her wisdom shines from her eyes and the sagging wrinkles of a life well lived. She is holding a wooden bowl, grinding charred wood into a fine powder. She beckons me forward, and begins to draw ancient symbols upon my body.
It is time to walk through the fire, through the circle of ice, to climb the mountain to its peak. Go forth, it is there that I will meet you.
There is an unease within my body, I know she has come for that, the tension has been building for some time, the emotion is spilling out of me at every chance.
This intense emotion I am feeling takes me back to a trip I took to my ancestral lands. Where I walked in the feet and souls of those that came before me. The unexpected deep grief that I encountered was overwhelming - of being torn from the Great Mother of my birth lands and of finally being reunited with her again.
As I made my offerings to her at different sacred places she pulled me to her depths. Re-connecting me to some ancient part of myself. I hiked her lands, I followed her river along, her curves meeting my own, sensing and seeing the animals and bird messages within the landscape around me. I observed the creases and deep ridges sculpted into her face where the water has flowed for an eternity. I heard her music swell up in me, as I begun to hum a tune, it felt familiar, from a time long gone.
Collapse yourself with your worldly troubles into my arms, the arms of my earth, and release all the sadness that sits inside of you, I will purge this out of you while I hold you as you need to be held.
It is in a great void that I find myself now. She will leave no stone unturned. I know there is no use in resisting, it only hurts more to hold on and she will continue to peel back each layer, until she is satisfied.
As you allow your earthly desires to fall away your purest essence of self will remain. Open your heart, release all the human pain of disappointment and heartache, that attachment that has become too much to bear.
From here I am able to look beyond what is in front of me, to feel into the presence of what is behind what I am sensing, it is here that truths are revealed.
I am always with you, after all you have come from me, as all creation does. Care for me, strengthen and build your relationship with me, be my voice. I feel your heart hurt as mine does when you witness how I am treated, there is much disconnection. People have forgotten that spirit lives inside them and in all things. Stand for those ones that cannot speak for themselves, the trees, the waters, the animals, the birds, the earth, everything that is a part of me …. but firstly you must stand for yourself.
I walk through the fire to let burn what needs to die within me, yet to also illuminate the path ahead toward that ring of ice that will take me beyond this realm into the next transforming, clarifying, & purifying as I climb the great mountain to meet her. There is a desire building in me to be with her as much as I can each day, to walk and live in the dreaming state, to remind others of this magic. I do not know what this will look like or where it will lead me but I have a trust and a knowing that it is the path ahead for me. For with this connection comes profound gifts of love, trust, truth, peace and comfort.
She is there waiting for me when I reach the summit. My wings are laid out at the cliffs edge. I walk to her and she turns me around to fasten them to my back.
It is time, she says. It is time to be free. Now my love, fly.
The full moon rising cloaks my back as I stop to smell the intoxicatingly sweet fragrance that fills the air from the Lomandra flowers blooming either side of the stone path. It speaks stories to me of connection between the seasons, the moon and its flowering, and the dreaming of old that weaves through this precious place, spiralling their way through my body as I walk and build loving connections to these new lands that my lineage now call home, a rebirthing of a more authentic connection with the Great Mother of this country.
