Dancing, Falling, and the Feminine Hero's Journey (Part 2)

The winter of 2021 was a significant low point for me. I felt trapped and turned around like I was winding through a maze and kept running into a bewilderingly persistent series of dead ends: failed endeavors, rejections, my duties as a mother, the constraints of care work, and, you know, the demands of a novel corona virus. Each commitment was a wall that had boxed me in to a life that I didn't know how to emerge from as something more than my responsibilities. My reserves of patience were depleted. I burst into tears at a physical when my nurse practitioner asked how I was holding up through all of this. She encouraged me to reconnect with my therapist. My bishop encouraged me to seek out a spiritual director.

At each turn down a new passageway, I was looking for a story to tell myself that would explain how I had ended up where I did, and maybe that story would also have clues about how to find a trapdoor or connect with a bit of string left behind by someone who had made it through.

I began reading three books simultaneously: The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd, Falling Upwards by Richard Rohr, and Wintering by Katherine May. I was astonished by the holy synergy that these books created with each other. Every time I started reading one book or the other, it was like God was standing close by to say, "Here you are, and here is your way through."

In Falling Upwards, Rohr describes the scope of the journey that people must go on in the second half of their lives. To help illustrate the landmarks of that journey he draws on the story of Odysseus from The Iliad and The Odyssey. He says that the bulk of the story that we are told about Odysseus is first half of life work (I think lines up well with Joseph Campbell's A Hero's Journey, a model for the masculine hero's journey), but at the very end of the Odyssey, there is a brief passage that mentions a second journey that Odysseus goes on. After returning home, reclaiming his family and his throne, he leaves once more. He travels so far that the people he meets do no recognize his oar as an oar, haven't heard of the sea or ships, and do not salt their food. Rohr says that is the journey of the second half of life. To undo oneself until we are more transparent, translucent, and generative.

I realized that Sue Monk Kidd's book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter is the story of a woman who has gone on the journey the second half of life demands. She also lifts up a Greek myth as a model: the story of Ariadne as the archetypal journey that women must go on. She identifies that women must be betrayed by the roles and stories that society has allotted to us until we eventually claim ourselves and create our own homes grounded in Dionysian ideals - liberation, celebration, frivolity, wildness, ecstasy, transformation. To sink so deep into ourselves, into our own pleasures and desires, that we refuse to be easily recognizable by the world.

Here, May's book (a very timely published book as the Northern Hemisphere headed into its first, full, collective, Covid winter), reminded me that there are times in life when we must die back in order to grow once more. That winter is a crucible that nature must make its peace with. Each of us must make our peace with our own wintering periods in order to better navigate them and to earnestly welcome them. There are things that you can learn only in winter.    

They all in their own way talked about how wounds are portals to other places. When you are wounded, you are invariably handed the question "What are you going to do now?" It is up to you to interpret that question. Is it a taunt? A challenge? An invitation? A shriek? A curse? A whisper? And then answer it.

I recognized in the progression of a masculine story that the protagonist departs from home, journeys, and returns home changed, worn and wiser, both in the first half of life and the second. But for Monk Kidd's outline of the feminine journey, the protagonist leaves their home in order to create a new one. There is no going back, no journeying in order to return. For those on the feminine journey home is lost and must be rebuilt so they move, they shift, they relocate. They travel from one home to the next.

If the masculine journey is a circle, then the feminine journey is a bow. If the masculine hero returns home to reign with honor, then the feminine hero, as I puzzled out with my spiritual director, was to become the person that others traveled to.