There Are Many Ways Back to Yourself

And then there is the life that comes after the return

For years, I thought if I understood enough, I would eventually find my way back to myself. I read, wrote, questioned, remembered, traced patterns, went into ceremony, trained my body, made art, and kept following whatever seemed to take me deeper. Some of it gave me answers. Some of it opened questions I didn’t even know I needed to ask.

But understanding was never the only way I found myself.

Some of the most important things I’ve ever known came before I had language for them.

Nine months before my first sacred ceremony, I had the unmistakable feeling that I was pregnant. Obviously, I wasn’t physically carrying a child, but something in me was gestating, and I knew it. During those months, images began coming to me, many of them in the dark hours before dawn when the rest of the house was asleep.

I found myself awake and in conversation with a woman who seemed to be readying herself to enter the world.

That conversation became a series of images I called Womb Flowers.

I didn’t plan them. They were unlike anything I had painted before and, even now, unlike anything that came after. As the months passed, the images changed. Each image felt like another glimpse of her becoming more fully herself. I could see and feel the movement from one painting to the next, almost as though she were letting me witness her coming closer. I wasn’t analyzing any of it. I was simply in conversation with each one as it was appearing. By the end, the feeling in the images had changed completely. They no longer felt like something forming in the dark. They felt like someone who was ready to be seen.

There was no intellectual process involved. I wasn’t analyzing symbols or trying to extract meaning from what I had made. It felt far more intimate than that, almost like the paintings and I were in conversation. They were showing me something I hadn’t yet found words for, and that became one of the ways painting worked in my life again and again. The image often arrived first, holding a truth I hadn’t consciously reached yet, and by the time I understood what I was seeing, the painting had already been carrying for me.

Writing came differently.

Writing gave me the chance to see things in black and white.

Something that arrived first through an image, a dream, a ceremony, or a feeling in my body could finally sit in front of me on the page. Words helped me gather the pieces and see connections I hadn’t recognized while I was living inside them. They gave language to the guidance that came through painting and poetry and allowed me to see the larger shape of things.

The writing didn’t replace the painting. It brought another part of the experience into focus.

And then there was cloth.

For years, I had been making for other people what I had spent much of my own life needing. The weight, the softness, the beauty, the feeling of being wrapped in something that asked nothing of you—none of that was accidental. I was making the experience I had longed for, even if I hadn’t fully understood that yet.

But making it and receiving it were not the same thing.

The night I spent in the hospital last summer was the first time I really let myself experience what I had been creating. There was nothing anyone could have said to me that night that would have made me feel safe. No reassurance, no matter how loving, could reach the place in me that needed to be held. But wrapped in my own Soul Wrapture, my whole body knew something it had never known in quite that way before. I felt what it was to be held in grace, safety, and love without having to earn it, explain anything, or take care of anyone else.

That was when the work changed for me. I finally knew in my body why I had been making these pieces all those years and how deeply I had needed what they were giving. Until then, I had been the one creating the medicine. That night, I received it.

And once I had, I could never see my work in quite the same way again. It wasn’t only that I understood the pieces differently. I knew why I had been making them in the first place. What had felt intuitive for years suddenly had a purpose I felt in my own body. I saw the power in the way each piece held someone without asking anything in return. The work wasn’t simply something I made. It carried the experience I had needed myself, and now I finally understood the depth of why I had been compelled to create it.

There are truths the mind recognizes long before the body is willing to live them. Cloth reached me where words couldn’t. It provided an experience rather than an explanation.

Looking back, I can see that each of these forms reached a different part of me. Painting often arrived before language and showed me something I wasn’t ready to explain. Writing let me put the pieces in front of myself and see connections I hadn’t recognized while I was living them. Cloth brought the knowing into my body. Ceremony took me beyond the limits of thought altogether. Even physical training, which I once understood mostly through strength and discipline, eventually taught me how easily strength can become another way of overriding yourself.

None of these was the way back.

They were all ways.

For years I moved through painting, poetry, prose, ceremony, illness and my body itself, following whatever seemed to bring me into closer contact with something true. I rarely knew in advance what each experience was going to reveal. Most of the time, the understanding came later.

I didn’t see at the time that all of these experiences were part of the same return. I was remembering myself through every language available to me.

That eventually became Soul Woven. It didn’t come from deciding I needed more kinds of work. It came from recognizing that different parts of us respond to different things. A painting may reach somewhere a sentence cannot. Words may give shape to something an image first revealed. Cloth may settle the body long before the mind feels safe. A conversation may open a door that years of solitary reflection never touched.

I know that because I have needed all of them.

And I think that is why I have never been invested in one prescribed way of finding yourself. My own return was far too unruly for that. It moved through art and body, spirit and language, beauty and grief. Sometimes I knew exactly what I was doing. More often I understood the significance much later.

I’m not trying to find my way back anymore. I did the work of remembering, and then of learning how to live from what I remembered. Now I’m in a place I haven’t been before, and I’m finding that the way forward asks for the same kind of attention that once brought me home. I notice what stays with me—a conversation, an image, a sentence, a person, a piece of work—and I follow what feels alive without needing to know yet where it leads.

That changes the whole feeling of the journey. There’s less searching in it and more relationship. Less need to decipher every sign and more willingness to notice what stirs me. I don’t have to know where it leads before I respond.

Maybe that’s the part I never understood when I thought of “finding my way back.”

There may not be one return. There may be many moments when something brings us into closer contact with ourselves—a painting, a sentence, a piece of cloth, a body that finally gets our attention, a conversation we didn’t expect to matter.

And once we have returned enough to recognize ourselves, those same doorways may begin opening in the other direction.

Not back.

Forward.

Continue the thread

There are many ways we come back into relationship with ourselves. Soul Woven grew from following those different ways—through image, words, cloth, story, and the body.

Explore Soul Woven →

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