Week 11: The Hidden Well of Courage
- Jay Berghuis
- Nov 4, 2024
- 4 min read
On Saturday, celebrating Day of the Dead and All Soul’s Day, I planted over 300 bulbs in containers. I planted them deep in the earth as a ritual symbol of all the multitude of ways this winter season will nurture and nourish the fresh growth of spring. I was grateful Uli lugged around all the heavy items. Well – yes – it was too much, undoubtedly my last gasp of summer yang – ha!
I thought about courage all morning.
Courage in the 21st century is known as the strength of mind to power up and carry on - in spite of danger or difficulty. It is the ability to do something that frightens us, to find strength in the face of pain or grief. Courage of this form is at the heart of the heroic journey.
Is this the courage you long for - no matter what happens after November 5th here in the US?
Recently I’ve noted my personal courage wax and wane in this recent journey of bodily catastrophe. Like the moon that has so many stages, every day I experience something new and often unsettling.
Where does courage come from?
Why in some circumstances can I find it and in others, I flail about in the mire of internal angst?
Initially, after the crash, I saw my virile lion heart rise and take charge. Nothing was going to stop me and in an almost manic show of strength, I pushed on to find whatever came next on this healing journey. Being bold and ballsy is all about a very masculine energy that has served me well in many experiences throughout my lifespan, and for that I am grateful.
What has become clarified is that this recent experience has jolted me into a collision of consciousness that has been waiting for me from the day I was born. At the beginning of this year, I set an intention to be cosmically attuned and aligned with my elder soul’s purpose, so I can live most fully as an embodied spirit with Earth-being in all her glorious, multi-faceted forms, until the day I die.
How uncomfortable to experience my own healing body like a fickle lover! One day she seems trustworthy and then suddenly shows herself as undependable and emotionally capricious. I’ve been curious about these shifts in mood for many years, learning more often to wait in the gloom of heaviness. Sometimes being able to fully trust these fluctuations, expecting that on the other side of darkness, light waits for her time to shine. These past weeks, as I learn to walk again and strengthen weakened muscles, it’s been emotionally exhausting to tap into a cracked well of courage that says about every change: “I can’t do it. F… it - I won’t do it. It’s not fair!” More outrage that I have ever experienced before.
As enlightened humans we’ve thankfully learned to take this kind of vulnerability into a therapist’s office or into personal prayer, or even to a friend and trusted confidant, all of which are essential layers of healing. And – there’s more.
“The root of the word courage is cor – the Latin word for heart. Courage originally meant ‘To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.’ Over time, this definition has changed … Heroics is often about putting our life on the line. Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line.”
Vulnerability is possibly the most important thing I’ve learned over this past year. It takes a completely different kind of inner embodied courage to be vulnerable. From the first days of this year, I’ve been learning step by uncertain step, that without safe and trustworthy connections in community - inside and outside my body - I will keep falling into this leaky well of heroic individual courage AND as a soul guide and leader, I will continue to drag others and pieces of our beloved planet down with us. Unless I/we do this courageous work on all our behalf.
The most curious aspect of this journey is that it is deepening and healing my ancestral relationships, especially with my mother’s lineage. I’ve often joked about my British ‘stiff-upper-lip’ emotional heritage, but the regal matriarchal line I come from were forced to live in a divided world.
Cut-off from their/our psychic bodies, they/we did our best to stay connected in the shadowlands of a patriarchal ‘benevolence’ that lauded the masculine way of courage. To live from our feminine selves is to relish and release the hidden underworld of our vulnerability as earthy beings who are utterly helpless unless we rest in the arms of one another or join with the broken fierceness of our Earth Mother.
Trusting this vulnerability is indeed the challenge, the new face of courage we each face in this season of change. As the results of this painful election season emerge. As winter’s darkness enfolds us in Love.
A Challenge: No doubt you are also aware of your vulnerability today. Courage waits in you. Speak your mind with your whole heart. My invitation is to identify one person, either a loved one who has passed on, or someone trustworthy and safe.
Your words are fast becoming more impactful as I lay in bed with a soft cast on left arm, yes the dominant one, following a simple fall onto asphalt while working in the yard dislocating my elbow. Flooded with emotions while exposing my vulnerability to both loved ones close by and dear neighbors. xox MaryP