The epigraph with which Maureen Murdock has begun The Heroine’s Journey deserves a closer look, and what I post here and now may not be all I have to say about it. We’ll see. In the meantime:
“There is a void felt these days by women and men—who suspect that their feminine nature, like Persephone, has gone to hell. Wherever there is such a void, such a gap or wound agape, healing must be sought in the blood of the wound itself. It is another of the old alchemical truths that ‘no solution should be made except in its own blood.’ So the female void cannot be cured by conjunction with the male, but rather by an internal conjunction, by an integration of its own parts, by a remembering or a putting back together of the mother-daughter body.” —Nor Hall, The Moon and the Virgin
“Healing must be sought in the blood of the wound itself”: how many of us dare to probe the wound? I remember my mother telling me that she could not look when, after having surgery for pancreatic cancer, her dressing got changed by my sister, who is, conveniently, a nurse. I don’t know that I could have looked. I nearly passed out when my toddler son ended up in the emergency room after biting his tongue and bleeding profusely.
But the soul wounds? I have found the courage—slowly, slowly—to probe those.
The first time I read The Heroine’s Journey, I wanted to push it far enough away—letting it touch only my rational mind—so that it wouldn’t hurt me. I didn’t want Murdock to be right about women needing their own model for the journey to authenticity. I had already been on my own Hero’s Journey for three years, and it had been harrowing enough that I didn’t want to have to go back and repeat any steps because the rules had changed.
What was I really resisting? Was it standing up, planting my feet, and staying at my post—no matter what came through that gate? I had already fled the fortress I had built (both figuratively and pretty literally) and had managed to be better than I had been. I knew my journey was far from over, but I didn’t want to be reminded of that, and I wanted the last few miles to be easy terrain.
So, with the re-opening of Murdock’s book yesterday morning, I re-opened the wound and it has already bled profusely. But some of the pressure has been relieved, too.