DEVIL'S PUNCHBOWL

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PROLOGUE + PLAYLIST 🎶

There’s a scene in the movie ‘Jennifer’s Body’ where a mysterious whirlpool at the base of a waterfall sucks in objects that are never seen again. Scientists drop all kinds of things into it, ping pong balls, coloured dyes, but as the narrator says, “nothing ever surfaces”. It seems symbolic - an endless hole, a yawning maw leading to unknown underground dark places. Named the “Devil’s Kettle,” by the locals, this waterfall is the namesake of the fictional town in which the events of the movie unfold. It’s a story in which a teenage girl’s body is taken over by a hungry demon, seducing the boys in her town so she can consume them.

Thus we set the stage for our dark tale…

ON THE SURFACE

A storyteller sits in an old armchair. A heavy book rests in her lap. Cradling the spine with one hand, she cracks open the cover, dust swirling and spiralling out from the untouched pages. Finding her place, she begins to speak…

“How long has it been, dear reader? This bookmarked page has sat, waiting patiently, for five whole years. And how much has changed, my beloved? Much has happened since we last sat together…”

So much has happened, and yet I have been silent.

This particular story was a long time in the making. The pictures were taken back in 2019. They sat, waiting patiently, like all the other stories that are awaiting me in my drafts. Calling to me throughout the years with soft unworded whispers that drizzle down to pool in my chest, making me ache for all the things I have desired to say and do and create during the dark years.

You see, I got sucked into a kind of devil’s punchbowl. At times things were so turbulent that I did not have the space to write. At other times I was lost deep in the dark waters of self reflection. I did not take photographs. I did not write. I did not film. Aside from the small stories I shared on my Instagram during this time, I did not create.

Then, in 2021, the words began to come. I sat on a leather couch, in a lamplit lounge on a palm-lined street in L.A., my heart hurting, and began to write on this very page. What came pouring out were the first chapters to a much larger story. My Story. The story. Our human story.

Soon, it all became too overwhelming. It was too much to tell My Story. My Story that was still unfolding, as I sat in the lounge of the partner who would turn out to be my second abuser. I already had a lot to say, but I still had a lot to unravel before I could find the main thread of the tale. It would take another few years before I uncovered the heart of it.

So I gathered up those initial words like seeds. I cut and pasted them, sowing them into another document where I have been slowly tending to them ever since. I write My Story in stops and starts. It is both painful and healing to dredge up my past. Mostly, it is exhausting. I spiral around it, sometimes leaping away, wanting to leave it all behind and let the past be the past, before I am drawn back, desiring to understand my past, and, through it, myself.

That story is long and unfinished. But it started here. Its roots are right here in this very page. This is the beginning, the scribble that I cannot unwrite or unsee. I want to begin here. I want to name it. Place it. Put words to it, as a sculptor moves clay, bringing earthen form to the thing of their mind’s eye.

I am sitting in my bedroom in New Zealand. It is currently Wednesday September 18th. Opening the page, I discovered that tomorrow will be the anniversary of my website’s creation, a fact that feels poignant. I have waited, the hope and desire to write coiled inside me till this very moment when it all burst forth on the most ordinary of days, prompted by nothing spectacular. I am recovering from a cold. I have a pile of to-dos still cluttering my list, all of them seemingly important enough that, up till now, they have taken priority over writing. I figured I would get to my writing… one day soon. When I had gotten my things in order. Dear reader, my things are not in order. But there is a candle burning in the corner, and one on my altar, and I am ready. I am finally ready.

I wish to take you back, before we go forward, for I feel that there is so much to be gotten from sharing the unspoken pasts that have shaped my present. Both for me, in the telling, and for those who might listen. This will be the first of a number of very old and dusty memories that I publish here on my website. I am excited to bring them to the surface, to look at them and remember them with fondness and heartbreak and nostalgia, before moving on.

The pages I am about to share with you come from chapters that seem like distant memories to me now. They have become my own legends; tales I occasionally tell to new friends over a beer at the pub, when I am explaining the course of my life. They underpin every adventure I have set out upon since 2019, and every misadventure that has befallen me.

So, let’s begin on this bookmarked page.

DIVING UNDER

I swam upon the Devil's lake

But never, never, never, never

I'll never make the same mistake

No, never, never, never


~ ‘The Wind,’ Cat Stevens

It was a dark time, and it was a growing time.

The pictures that remain are softly lit, but the period was a murky one. Like a bittersweet pomegranate, or an apple with a shiny surface and a rotten core. I remember the good and the bad.

There was a sweetness to these moments. I took these pictures and that video on a day trip in the mountains. We all piled into the car, blasting music with the windows down, hair streaming out in the wind and sunlight. I remember sharing ripe blackcurrants picked from bushes down by the waterside, and the moments of companionable silence spent with the girl in the video, as we watched the shimmering leaves of the yellowed aspens; reaching out to touch ashy trunks, leaving our fingers coated with a fine film of sour aspirin-laced dust, like that magical-sad accident when you touch a moth’s wing and find that you have stolen some of its flying power. There were the moments when I would turn to find Oliver’s smile, or when he would take me into his arms to spin me around laughing. Love-filled moments. There were whoops of joy, as some of us jumped into the waters of the devil’s pool. The youngest of us, my nephew at the time, jumped into the azure river, far away from the bounds of the pretty ultramarine and midnight blue colours that belied the yawning depths of the middle of the pool. We had food, and shared jokes, and soaked up the sun, anticipating the winter to come, still feeling so young that time seemed to stretch like an endless Indian summer ahead of us, brimming with further road trips and possibilities.

Yet these pictures are tinged with darkness too. I can see it now, creeping into the corners, burning and smoking, threatening to set fire to the film. I think so much of the pain in these images comes from the people who appear in them. My heart hurts to see them. For a long time, I thought it was because of the falling out that had happened, and the wrongs that were done to me. My relationship with the girl in the video - my sister-in-law and close friend - got thrown against the rocks when we tried to live together. It ended in a brutal wreck, both of us retreating from the scene with new wounds. It was partly because of the flotsam, the still-sharp shards of that wreckage, that I left Colorado and returned to New Zealand; to escape that situation, and moreover, to escape myself. I overhead a conversation in Spanish in the kitchen: she was coming back for Christmas. I went to the bedroom and without a second thought, I searched for jobs in New Zealand, found one that sparked my interest, and booked a flight. It was mid-Covid, but I was hell-bent on leaving without saying goodbye. Within a couple weeks I was on a plane. I got that job. I began working at the National Archives of New Zealand. Ollie soon followed me. But the darkness followed me too.

One cannot escape oneself for long. I was met with my inner demons once again, and this time the wreck was much more severe. I ruined my own marriage.

This is the story left unspoken till now.

I want to share a little about the demons that live inside of me. The devil, the hungry ghost, the horrible gnawing thing inside me that consumed my life till it was all gone, leaving me with nothing but hope for a new one.

DEEPER

I have been the bearer of great pain.


I knew I had been hurt, but I did not realise I could hurt others.

Strangely, the pain I feel when I gaze at these images does not come from the wounds that were inflicted upon me. It comes from someplace deeper - less fretted over and worry-worn than the replayed arguments and the jabs that stung. Somewhere more subconscious, dark and dim. It comes from knowing that I hurt these people. I loved them, and I hurt them.

First, there was the wreck of 2020. Even the most angry parts of me, the bits that remember overhearing whispered words like poison in the walls, or that time I was told I should stop voicing my opinions, even the label “know-it-all” and the misdirected accusations and the scapegoating that drove me to a point of near-insanity, making me actually physically lose my voice, even those angry parts do not hold a candle to the self-reproach that I feel when I think about the lasting hurt that I may have caused.

Let me put it in plainer words. I really fucked up. I did not support my friend in the way I should have during her pregnancy. Instead of believing in her, I worried for her. The words I used, my tone, my attitude, it all landed in a way that caused a deep rift. I did not intend to hurt her, but I did, and I can see that now. I can see the way it must have felt, and it pains me to think about it. Because I know exactly how it feels when someone substitutes worry for real care. It has taken me years and years to see the picture this way.

I knew I had been hurt, but I did not realise I could hurt others…

Then there was my marriage. The wreck of 2021.

The truth is, I cheated on Oliver. Not once, but multiple times over the years that we were together. I cheated, then vowed never to do it again, then would cheat again. 3 times. 3 people. 3 deep gashes. That is what it took to break my marriage.

To explain why I did this, I would need to write several thousand more words. The river runs deep at this point, the caverns dark and horrid, but I have been exploring them these past few years, in order to face my own demons. Suffice to say, I felt a gaping hole in my heart where selfhood and a sense of secure love should have been. In running down all the wrong paths, I was reenacting those scenarios that had played out first during my childhood and then in my later teen years, when I went through 5 years of intense coercive control and abuse at the hands of a romantic partner.

… I knew. I knew I had been hurt. Yet still I did not realise I could hurt others. Not till it was too late.

Without intending to, I took my own hurt and passed it on to the person I cared about the most. In trying to fill the hole in my heart, I went and hurt Oliver in the exact ways that I was hurting. I cannot even begin to describe how it feels to know you have passed your pain on to a loved-one this way. Gut-wrenching. Sleep stealing. The worst of it is, I know that pain like the moles on my wrists; I heard its familiar ghostly voice when he spoke to me of the newly embedded question that was gnawing away at him: why did I look for love elsewhere? Was he not enough?

INTO THE HEART OF THE DARKNESS

I feel it in my soul,

I feel the empty hole,

the cup that can’t be filled…

The beast that can’t be killed.

I know I shouldn’t love you, but I do…


~ ‘Bitter Water,’ The Oh Hellos

Not enough.

That is how I felt all the time in my own mind. My inner critic was like a constant hum, a tv playing in the background of my life, waiting for me to make a mistake, and then an invisible hand would turn up the dial and I would be sitting with my arms over my head, trying to hide from something that I could not shut out.

If shutting it out didn’t work, then maybe shutting myself away from the world would. So, I began to build a wall. Without ever consciously thinking about it, my mind set out to protect myself in whatever ways it could find. Apparently, what it found was that I could numb myself to pain by never really touching the outer world. Never letting it get to me. At this point, everything felt so raw that numbness was a welcome relief. Unfortunately, I did not read the fine print at the bottom of the contract… Build a wall to keep out the pain, and you are building a wall that will keep out every other part of the world. Pleasure and suffering, achievements and pitfalls, curiosity and challenges, awe and uncertainty, love and loss… Each is bound within the other. You cannot shut out one side of life. You either live, and experience the world in all its fullness, or you don’t. To live is to be invested, and to be invested is to risk something. In short: living is caring. Indifference is death. These were things I did not know, at the age of 20, when I decided to retreat from caring about the world.

Another couple points of fine print I did not foresee:

- Walls of indifference keep love out. Both ways.

- The hole in my heart would only become more hungry.

- The less I felt, the more I craved feelings. I wanted to feel something, anything! Adrenaline became my only way back, a return to feeling alive.

- The word “whatever” can lead one into recklessness.

Most of the time, the river of my life ran under a summer sun, and I floated along lazily, feeling relatively peaceful and detached. There were long stretches of time where life would mull on happily in this way, and Oliver and I were the best of companions. A lion’s share of our time together was spent like this. Happy, exploring, cooperative.

Looking back, I can see that the waters only became dangerous when a figure would appear. Someone hazy, just out of reach. A person who would first call to me, then dive away. In plain English, I was captivated by anyone who was initially interested in me, only to become emotionally unavailable… even cruel.

It was as if I hoped to reenact the pain of my past loves, so that I might change the ending. If only I could make this person like me. Love me! Then I might feel whole again.

So, I chased them.

I chased them because it was familiar.

Because I felt more comfortable earning love than having it. Especially when I felt internally that I didn’t always deserve it.

I chased them because I wanted to finally prove to myself that I was lovable, even by the most unloving of people. That was the impossible glimmer of gold I sought to capture. The love of the unloving.

All the while I scorned the love of those people who truly cared for me. My husband. His family. My friends. My own family. I never believed in it, let alone felt it. I felt alone.

And the hole inside me gnawed, never filled, always hungry.

Till the day it consumed my entire world, my marriage, and all I had known. Gone.

Only then did I realise that something needed to change.

SWIMMING UPWARDS WITH GEMS

Where I go, will you still follow?

Will you leave your shaded hollow?

Will you greet the daylight looming,

Learn to love without consuming?


~ ‘Thus Always to Tyrants,’ The Oh Hellos

Since then, I have been trying to unravel the knotty clump at the heart of it all. I have learned to love myself, but I am still learning to love and be loved. It is not easy. There have been missteps and setbacks, all of which have helped me to grow. I am the fool, bumbling along the road, unsure of the way but never faltering for all my ignorance. I am determined. I will not let my heart calcify around the hurts. I continue to feel, despite it all. Loss is intimately wrapped up in love; to love is to lose. For so long, I wanted to keep myself from feeling the pain and the loss that I associated with love, (my innermost fear is that I am slowly losing every single person I love - that the more they get to know me, the less and less they love me). I thought that if I guarded my heart from caring, if I stopped caring altogether, I would be safe. My motto, without realising it, had become “Whatever. I don’t care.”

However, I can see now that the real work is to hold my pain with care, so that I do not pass it on to others. I don’t want to create any more hungry ghosts. I can be the point at which the pain stops.

My motto for the last 2 years has been this:

What happened to me is not my fault, but it is now my responsibility.

RESURFACING

The greatest thing

You'll ever learn

Is just to love

And be loved in return.

~ ‘Nature Boy,’ Nat King Cole

I wish, in writing this, to take responsibility for my part in this sad story. I wish to tell the story, and in the telling, have it be touched by that magic that happens when one weaves their experience into words: to sooth, to process, to put it in the past, place it in the fabric, counting the threads that make up the picture before moving forward to weave some more. This section is part of the tapestry of my life, and although it is unsavoury, it is real.

So often, we want to turn away from what is hard to look at. I believe it is a difficult but worthy practice to face the darkness in ourselves and to name it. In doing so we may open the door to change. And so it was - this time was filled with the power of great change. I have had to change, in order to stop hurting those I love so much. This time was the rich black wormy soil from which I grew. The soil itself is unpalatable, stomach churning, but the fruits… they have been beautiful.

My greatest fear has come to pass. I have lost love. At the core of it, this little story has been about the love I lost when I lost a part of my family: Oliver and all of his family, the people who had taken me in and cared for me - people with whom I had shared hundreds of meals, laughs, and cherished experiences. In many ways, my fear of losing love was the very force that drove me to push their love away. My fear of pain lead me to callousness, and a “whatever” attitude, and in this way, I was like a starved wolf. Hungry and dangerous. Slow to trust. Apt to lash out.

Yet, my greatest wish still lives on. Underneath it all, I know my heart yearns for one thing: to love and be loved.

And I am on my way, opening a little more each day. I am taking care of my hurts. And I have been allowing myself to feel the love that already surrounds me. In my palm is a tiny seed of hope that I hold as I walk.

For you, at last, to comprehend

the kind of love of which I speak.

~ ‘This Will End,’ The Oh Hellos

cliff-jump-devils-punchbowl
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love

For Oliver.

Who stuck around, and continued to care for me, even after I started to push him away. I am so sorry. You are enough. I hope that you will go on being your wonderful self, unburdened by any fear or doubt. I wish you only love.

A CINDERELLA STORY

~ A Glimpse Behind the Pages ~

The following article is part of a collaboration with my dear friend, Caitlin Gemmell.

Before we step into her world, I want to share a little more about Caitlin. Like Cinderella, she shines with a gentle strength and kindness. We met online many years ago and became fast friends, bonding over our shared love of natural magic, storytelling, and enchanted-yet-ordinary moments. Caitlin is an artist and wordsmith, sharing her creative gifts with the world through her writing, poetry and fibre art. She has published many of her poems in magazines, and in beautiful books such as True North and The Wistful Wild. She is also the author of an enchanting newsletter called Musings of a Selkie Witch, which I always enjoy reading over a cup of tea.

This story is a really special one. What Caitlin has shared is deeply personal, like pages from a beloved diary. Yet, through this little gilded window into her world, we may find a view into our own hearts. It’s a story that will speak to anyone who has felt a bit soft, or sensitive, or out of place. What she offers is nothing more or less than an empowering new perspective on a tale as old as time…

Reclaiming Cinderella as a Story of Empowerment

~ by Caitlin Gemmell


My gentle nature is my strength.

My gentle nature is my strength.


These are the words I repeat to myself, a mantra uttered in times when I feel pressured to be someone I am not. 

For many years, I’ve been on a journey to discover my personal mythology. Pieces of stories have wended their way to the sanctuary of my heart, yet the story that has been with me from the beginning is one I refused to acknowledge as belonging to me. 

As someone who grew up with bold, adventurous parents, my gentle, timid ways were buried as I forced myself to live up to the Gemmell family name. 

I grew up hearing stories about my great-grandfather who traveled across the ocean from Scotland to Australia at the tender age of twelve. The notion that we are gutsy people who go after what we want was deeply ingrained in me. 

But when I was honest with myself, I didn’t want a life of adventure, of packing up the entire household and moving to another country. I only wanted a peaceful, quiet life. It’s the simple things that bring me joy. The quiet things. I wanted to find a place where I belong and sink my roots into the ground. 

For years, I forced myself to be a little bolder, a little louder, a little more extroverted than what comes naturally to me. The idea that as a woman living in the world today, I was required to adopt a warrior spirit to get ahead in life replaced my natural inclination to embrace my femininity*. And yet, it was through my femininity that I discovered my magic. When I reached menarche at twelve, at the same age my great-grandfather went on an external journey, I journeyed inward and discovered I am a witch. 

Quietly, and unobtrusively, I began practicing witchcraft. I healed wild birds who found their way to me in times of need. I protected myself from men who would otherwise have claimed me as one of their possessions. I learned to read tarot and had prophetic dreams. I allowed plants to talk to me and accepted their medicine. And I pushed aside the fairy tale that is a major part of my personal mythology, because I told myself it didn’t make sense in light of who I thought I was becoming. 

. . .

The one fairy tale I loved with all my heart since a young age ultimately made me feel ashamed of who I was, in a world where I was supposed to be a feminist Superwoman. But what if I didn’t want to be a highly successful, career-oriented Superwoman? What if I wanted to live in a cottage where I spend my days baking bread, gardening, feeding the songbirds and chipmunks, tending to my children? What if the traditional feminine role that is looked upon with disdain in this day and age is actually what my heart desires? And what if embracing my gentle, feminine nature is what actually empowers me? 

These questions haunted me for years. They cropped up when I was pursuing my undergraduate degree, because I was expected to go after my dreams and find myself in the world of higher education. They followed me after I became a mother who was blessed to stay home with my child at first, but was forced to leave my cozy nest and venture into the loud world while pursuing a graduate degree because the father of my child couldn’t keep his promise, hold down a job, and I had to become the Superwoman I didn’t want to be. 

As an undergrad, I discovered Joseph Campbell and the concept of personal mythology. As a graduate student, I took this further and developed a course called Unearthing Your Story that helped the participants find the pieces of their personal stories to begin weaving them into their personal myth. 

Yet, as I delved into unearthing my own story threads, I continued to refuse to accept that the story that empowers me is Cinderella. Instead, I talked about how this story was one of my shadow stories, that it highlights the more negative aspects of my personality, that by recognizing my damsel in distress archetype I can overcome it and become bold. I now realize how erroneous this assumption was. 

. . .

. . .

What empowers us is following the map that leads us to our true north. Each of our journeys will be different, because we are all different individuals. How boring if we shared the same personality and the same life goals! By being confident in my quiet way and showing up in the world as I truly am, I am following my true north. To force myself into a traditionally masculine role as a feminine woman is what oppresses me. But when I embrace my true nature, my spirit sings. We should be celebrated for being authentic, whatever that means for each individual. 

As soon as I realized this, and accepted that I can be both a wise witch and a gentle Cinderella, and that I don’t have to be a fierce warrior or a successful-cutthroat-businesswoman, it was as if an egg around my being cracked to reveal the true me buried beneath. Instead of looking at the Cinderella story as an aspect of my personal story that I was ashamed of, I accepted it as a core part of my being. 

Now, I remember my first Barbie was a Disney Cinderella one. Joyfully, I remember how much I loved not only the Disney animated Cinderella as a child but also every single live action Cinderella I ever watched. The highlight of visiting Disney World as a child was meeting Cinderella. Receiving a letter from Cinderella on one of my birthdays is still one of the magical highlights of my life. My highschool nickname, Cinderella, is no longer one that embarrasses me, but one I embrace and encourage others to use for me. 

. . .

. . .

As a graduate student, I researched the various Cinderella stories and found that I don’t see her as a damsel in distress. No, she is someone who has had a hard life but through her own agency and magic changes her life for the better. 

Even in the version that is most widely known, the one that inspired Disney’s animated Cinderella but was originally recorded by Charles Perrault, and the one in which she is the most helpless, it is clear that her kind nature is what ultimately empowers her and brings about positive changes in her life. Would her fairy godmother have ventured to help her had she been an ungrateful, miserable child? It was because of her kind nature that her godmother acknowledged she deserved to go to the ball. 

In Aschenputtel, the Cinderella story that was recorded by the Brothers Grimm, and the one that I most consider to be a part of my personal mythology, Cinderella asks her father for a hazel twig which she plants beside her mother’s grave. She waters this twig with her tears so that it grows into a hazel tree (hazel is a symbol for wisdom) and a white dove appears in the tree. In this version, Cinderella is allowed to go to the ball if she finishes her chores on time. She speaks a cantrip, calling her animal friends to her and they help her complete her tasks. But of course her stepmother says she can’t go after all as she has nothing decent to wear. She watches her stepmother and stepsisters leave for the ball and then visits the hazel tree by her mother’s grave. She speaks another cantrip and the white bird in the tree throws a fine gown down to her that she dresses in and hastens to the ball. 

There are so many threads to pick apart in this story, as there are in countless versions of Cinderella (there are at least 300 versions that have been recorded, the earliest is assumed to be by a Greek geographer in 7 BCE in which the heroine marries the King of Egypt). 

For one, in Aschenputtel, Cinderella clearly has some magical ability. She could very well be a witch, for she speaks a cantrip. She also engages in ancestral worship, through visiting her mother’s grave and planting the hazel twig which she then waters with her tears (another magic spell). And her animal helpers could be thought of as her familiars. 

In one Swedish version of the Cinderella story, The Little Gold Shoe, instead of doves as animal helpers, it is a pike who helps when Cinderella sheds tears in a spring. He tells her to venture along a birch tree lined path to an old oak tree in the woods where she will find the gown she is to wear to the event where she can mingle with the prince.  In this version, she also speaks a cantrip. “Light before me! Darkness after me!”

In another Swedish variation, Crow-Cloak, Cinderella is so beautiful that her stepmother and stepsisters force her to wear a cloak of crow feathers to conceal her beauty. Instead of an animal helper, there is a little old man (fairy godfather) who helps Cinderella because she was kind to him. He brings her to the woods and conjures magic through his pipe that makes her glorious outfit materialize. 

There are several variations of this Crow-Cloak story including one in which she asks for a crow cloak to wear to disguise herself as a scullery maid. She does this because she is the King of Denmark’s daughter who is in love with the King of England’s son and they are not allowed to wed. She visits her mother’s grave to ask for advice and is told to demand three gowns of her father (two fine ones and one crow cloak) and then journey to England to work as a scullery maid in the castle, only going to church dressed in finery to see the Prince of England. She speaks a magical cantrip to avoid capture as she flees to England, following the advice her ancestor gave her.

So, yeah, this is my argument that Cinderella was a witch. 

Once I realized this, it became easier to fully welcome the Cinderella story as my core personal myth. I actually got tingles when I realized how much power Cinderella actually had as a witch capable of weaving magic and changing her destiny. 

. . .

These days, I claim Cinderella as my personal mythology. When wild animals venture close to me, I speak dove-like to them and offer them my services anytime they need a bit of magic. When engaging in ancestral magic, I remember that Cinderella honored her ancestor too. When donning a fancy dress to wear just around the house, or for working in the garden, I remember Cinderella found dressing up a thrilling experience too. The other day, I even stumbled upon a window display that was so clearly the scene from the Disney animated Cinderella in which her animal friends were piecing together a dress for her to wear to the ball. The display was so cleverly put together, and it was all the more magical because I happened upon it so unexpectedly. 

The stories that speak to our spirits will differ from person to person, and from one phase of life to the next. Cinderella has always been one of the main threads that makes up the tapestry of my personal mythology. I’m glad I found the courage to admit that it is a story that empowers me and helps me to make meaning of my life.

. . .

cinderella story book illustration silver shoe

*I want to provide a note about gender. I have not changed anything in Caitlin’s text, as I feel it is important to let her speak for herself, and I believe that the gendered terms she uses are ones that hold layers of personal meaning and intent. I would like to speak to my own principles for a moment, to reaffirm that I recognise the diversity inherent in the expression of gender, including the spaces between and outside the traditional terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’ These words hold meaning - traditionally assigned values and concepts of what it means to to be either a masculine or feminine person. Of course, the characteristics assigned to each have changed much over time, and our understanding of gender continues to change and expand, but here the terms are used in their more traditional sense. I believe the discussion of femininity is one that still holds great significance, as the values traditionally associated with femininity are often segregated, looked down upon or made inferior. It is exactly through this kind of story-retelling that we can reclaim those characteristics and see their worth, allowing ourselves and our society to be whole beings, each in our own way, all respecting each other.

MY NEW CREATIVE RECIPE

~ A Little Backstory ~

I wrote this article as a part of a collaboration with a dear friend. Her name is Caitlin Gemmell, and she is one of the most magical people I know. She is a fairy godmother in human form, I swear!

Caitlin shares her own creative gifts with the world through her writing, poetry and fibre art. She has published many of her poems in magazines, and in beautiful books such as True North and The Wistful Wild. She is also the author of an enchanting newsletter called Musings of a Selkie Witch. That is where this piece of writing first appeared.

This story was born out of a really long break. To anyone who has visited my online world before, welcome back. This is the first thing I have written and shared in over 3 years. It is the story of how I rekindled my creativity…

Welcome. My name is Zoe Eccles. I am about to share an important chapter from my life story. In this tale, I use two symbols: 

1. A map 

2. A recipe 

These items are special, because they are both personal and universal. Your life journey may take you down different roads than the ones I have walked. Your recipe might call for different spices than the ones I like. But the map and the recipe book are still there, in your story, if you choose to see them. They are fairytale objects - ordinary tools that can be endowed with magical meanings, helping us to envision where we are and what we want. They can become our guides, if we let them. Wherever you are, and whatever you wish for, I hope you can find something of your own in my story. 

. . .

When I was a young girl, the thing I loved most in the world was making art. I would paint and draw and write and craft. I chose to sit in the classroom on sunny days, carefully crafting things, and attended after-school art classes in draughty studios that smelled of turpentine. I made every Christmas gift I gave, and attempted to sew my own clothes. Creativity came so naturally to me. Art encompassed my entire world; it was the way I saw, the way I understood, and the way I expressed my innermost thoughts and feelings. 

As fate would have it, though, before I entered the bloom of my teenage years - a time when most people get to make mistakes, learn, and grow into their skins - my creative journey was warped and changed by my family. You see, the strictures of my family’s value system were set in stone long before I arrived. Large engraved words: “Bene aut Nihil” - “Success or Nothing”. These values were explained to me by a family member, who sat me down one day, and told me all the reasons I would never succeed as an artist. He invoked the horrors of poverty, struggle, and, above all, a fear of failure. Thus, my youthful, unselfconscious creativity was stolen from me before I had a chance to develop it into a more robust practice. Something unknowably special was taken away, and in its place new things were added. There was still my love for art; I continued to paint, learned to take photographs, and made my own website filled with my images and writing. But simmering alongside my passion were new ingredients: a motivation to succeed in the harsh, uncaring “real world”, and underneath that, a deep fear of failure. Eventually, my fears bubbled and boiled over, till, bit by bit, my creativity sputtered and sparked and seemed to die. 

Then came the dark years. In my early twenties, newly graduated, I could finally see that something was wrong. I felt as if the values that had been taught to me as a child were now choking me. Afraid to fail at anything, even once, I was more anxious than ever. I left home to escape, determined to rid myself of all that was hurting me. But I did not know how to extract the poison from the mix, and so I began to throw everything out the window in an effort to be free. To avoid the pain, I slowly stopped creating altogether. Without the flame of my creative passions, I felt cold and adrift. Lost. I had willingly entered the other side of the family motto. “Nihil.” Nothing. And for a long while, that is where I made my home. 

Till, one day, something shifted… “Surely,” I thought, “there must be another way.” Tired of waiting for my old inspiration to return, and sick of the poisonous fears that arose whenever I tried to make something, I decided to find a new approach. A new creative recipe. Moved by my own will, I took my first steps out of the Nothing and onto this experimental path. Now, a year or so later, I am still only a hop and a skip down the lane, but I have already gathered a handful of wondrous ingredients to add to my new recipe. 


Ingredient 1. Rest, love and acceptance

This ingredient is my absolute bread and butter. It is the pizza base on which I add the toppings. 

Rest, love and acceptance. These three things might seem simple, but their value cannot be overstated. Add them to your creative practice, and you will see that some kind of magic happens. Processes become imbued with a new softness. Difficulties alchemise into gold. Projects transform in ways you couldn’t have imagined. 

They are like three fairy godmothers, offering us their enchanted wisdom. Rest, being the first of the three, brings us back into alignment with our own natural rhythms. Love, the second, teaches us to be kind to ourselves as we work. Acceptance, Love’s partner, helps us bridge the gap between our expectations and reality, as our dreams unfold into being. 

I’m sure we all know that we need time for rest. We have all heard of the importance of self-love. But, truly, the simplicity of these concepts belies their potent power when applied, and their true value lies only in their application. They are practices, and as such, your results will improve the more you practise. Personally, it has taken me many years to learn these three things. 

I unearthed these gems on my own. My family always believed in Type A values: achievement, busy-ness, sacrifice, innate talent and intelligence. For the longest time, I thought these were my values too. It was not until I left home that I heard my heart’s own wishes. It turns out I like to rest a lot, I prioritise time with loved ones over productivity, and I thrive on unconditional love, not material success. 

After discovering what makes me tick, I still had to learn how to apply it to my creativity. I think, deep down, I hoped to return to the patterns of creativity that I experienced in my younger years. I know I am not alone here; I think many of us struggle to reconcile the productivity we experienced as students with our grown-up selves, (especially those of us who were labelled “gifted kids”). We get stuck in self-comparisons, or feel that we have lost our motivation. The simple truth is, I cannot return to the way I was. My fundamental values are different now, thus, my creativity will not look the same. It will not work the same. The moment I realised this simple truth was the moment I let go of my old ways to embrace a new way. Rest, love and acceptance are at the very heart of my new way.


Ingredient 2. Exploration + a compass

This ingredient was a gift from a friend. He taught me about the idea of a project compass. 

A project compass helps to guide you in the right direction, as you undertake a new project. Your compass keeps you on track. To create one, you must find your true north. Your true north is like a star you are following - it is the deepest and truest desire of your heart. It is what you were wishing for, when you first conceived of your project. For me, my project compass will always point towards exploration. 

It took me a long time to realise that I was chasing all the wrong stars - stars with names like “Quantitative Proof,” “Excellence” or “Perfection.” When I took a moment to really think about it, after talking with my friend, I found that my deepest desire was to simply explore. That is why I wish to create. Through creating, I hope to explore the world around me - learning, seeing, thinking, feeling and expressing myself as I go along. 

Whenever I get caught up in worries or doubts about how well I am doing, or how a project is looking, I can return to my project compass and assess whether I am doing what I set out to do. If I am exploring, then I am on track.

What would be at the heart of your project compass?
What is the name of your north star?


Ingredient 3. Room for failure

This was the vital missing ingredient I needed to bring my creativity back to life.

Failure. Some may object to the word, wanting to reframe it, but I use it intentionally. I avoided failure for so gosh-darn long it became the death of my creativity. Now I choose to wholeheartedly embrace it. So, what is failure, and why is it so important?

You may have heard the adage about Thomas Edison and the invention of the lightbulb. It took Edison many attempts to find the right solution. “I have not failed,” he said, “I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” This is an encouraging thought. It is a reframing of failure as a stepping stone on the road to success. But look to the heart of this story, and you will find that failure, more so than success, is an integral part of creativity, curiosity and inventiveness. In fact, it could be said that these things cannot exist without failure. Failure is a necessary ingredient, and a desirable one. It is fundamental to the process of learning. 

Growing up, there was very little room for failure in my life. I expected a lot from myself, and I was terrified I would not meet those expectations. Afraid to get a bad grade. Afraid to look silly, or sound stupid, I tried to maintain an air of intelligence and natural talent. Years later, I learned about the archetype of the fool. The fool is an important character in the world of tarot reading, representing beginnings. He is the every-person, starting out on a journey of self discovery. He has much to learn, and is depicted as a young man, about to walk over the edge of a cliff. Embarrassing stuff. And yet, paradoxically, the fool has his own wisdom. He reminds us that we are all beginners at some point in our lives. In order to master anything, one must start as a beginner. 

This was the secret ingredient I had been missing for so long: room for failure. Because room for failure means room for growth. It means allowing oneself to be a beginner. It leaves space for the mistakes and silliness that inevitably result from walking a new path.

Make room for failure and you make room for creativity to occur.

. . .

So, here we are. Partway down a new path, with three special ingredients in my basket. I can see I have some great stuff already, and there is still so much more to discover. I feel a sense of excitement as I write this! Hope fills my chest. I did not get to develop healthy creative methods as a child, but now, as an adult, I get to choose my own way. Thank you for listening to my tale, fellow traveller. I must be off now, I am heading for the woods and those distant mountains. 


“We are the dreamers of dreams.”

~ Willy Wonka