Your story is my Story

Recently, in the early hours of the morning I finished the book, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding by Australian author, Holly Ringland.

For me, it is primarily about relationships. About the constellation of families and their lineage and legacy. About women's secrets and how they weave their story into the lives of the ones who know and the ones who don't know.

About the bond between women. About loss and grief. About despair and love. And about the beauty of the sea and nature and wildness of the heart.

About women's stories. About kinship, motherhood, and daughterhood. About the beauty of good men, good partners, and how they can hold a woman's heart and help heal the mark others have left upon her.

About how our stories, spoken or unspoken, are written in and on our skin, into our bones, sewn so unmistakably into our hearts.

As I read the last page, I sat up wide-eyed and open-mouthed, reading the description of where Esther lived ... the orange lichen rocks, the bronze kelp, the shells ... oh my goodness, the east coast of lutruwita, Tasmania.

Unbelievably, I'd been there just the week before, right there in the story of the place where it was partially set. Little did I know that this book that I'd been absorbed in for months concluded at the very spot where I was.

This place that wove its silence around my heart. That captured my spirit as if speaking through the constancy of the waves, the sea leaving its necklaces of beauty, the interlacing of shells with coloured seaweed on the white shore. The thick kelp, like parts of women's skirts, dancing around the rocks and laying on the sand as if discarded at the whimsy of its wearer.

All telling an ancient story of the gone-by past. Holding its beauty in its nuanced secrets. Ancient wisdom. Right there in the body of the earth, the body of the rock, the body of the water.

It made me think of our stories. And the stories of women's bodies.

What is the story of your body? The story of your heart? What do you yearn for?

We think that we are alone in our stories. That our stories are too shameful to tell. Too painful to say.

The thing is ...

...Your story is my story....

Speaking our stories sets us free.

Come... maybe it's time to share your story. When we speak our story, our psyche hears, our body hears, and our heart hears. "Ah ... she, he is here for me. Returning to me, once again." Find a trusted other and let your story loosen its grip.

                                                                        ~~~

Come and have an experience of returning, of listening, to the mystery and myth of your story at Womantime Retreat ~ Ancient Wisdom for the Modern-Day Woman

When we step into Womantime Retreat, we step into liminal space, standing at the threshold of the unknown and the unknowable. And over the course of the weekend the veils fall. The retreat weaves its gentle mystery around each woman to return her to her true essence, the unbridled lightness and joy of her being.

'Everything in your soul only has a chance of becoming if you show up.' Holly Ringland