Why I'm Here and What the Hell is Going On
My crazy undertaking and how you can help
I’m currently on the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland doing research. I’m not even sure if research is the right word as it is utterly unlike any research I’ve done before. While this trip has been years in the making, I’ve been fairly mum on the details.
That’s because it feels insane.
1.
Stories started appearing to me fully formed a year ago. This was not like any other writing that I’d experienced. While I’ve had the experience of having a story or poem drop onto the page as though it fell out of the sky like a cosmic gift, they were first drafts. They, like any other hard-won piece of writing, underwent shaping, drafting, massaging and revision. I could—and did/do—manipulate characters and plot lines like a master puppeteer.
These stories are feral and wild. They don’t just resist shaping and manipulation; they guard against it with teeth and claws bared. They show up with warnings and conditions. They are not interested in my opinion or my expertise. They want to take command, to wrestle the steering wheel from me and fully drive the car. I’ve agreed to share the driver’s seat, to relinquish some control. I think my duty is to share these stories with as much fire in my eyes as they have, to negotiate the words and descriptions with them, just like a good editor would, but to relinquish my creative license to them.
The storytellers have taken drastic measures to get my attention.
This all started with Resmaa Manakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands. He suggests that in order for white people to truly make strides in becoming antiracist, we have to get acquainted with our own ancestral trauma; we must meet the ways in which we endured and inflicted pain in generations past to see the repercussions on our current status1 . He shares a short meditation in which the reader opens themselves up to meeting an ancestor. Don’t worry if it takes a few tries for an ancestor to come forward, he says. Stay open and eventually one will appear.
Good student that I am, I made my way to my meditation cushion, set my timer for the suggested 10 minutes and closed my eyes. In a matter of seconds, there she was, my foremother, a bedraggled, curly haired maiden with goats and a small farm. A scene began unfolding before me like a movie. It was the story of a woman subjugated and stripped of humanity. As it unfurled before me, I felt what she felt, all the rage, grief, and sorrow. When the timer went off and I slowly rejoined the world I was amazed and a bit overwhelmed.
An hour later, I went to take a shower and as I was soaping up, I found a walnut-sized lump in my left breast. It was painful to the touch, and I knew it hadn’t been there the last time I’d showered. I knew enough to know that what I was experiencing wasn’t a cancerous situation, but it was alarming nonetheless2.
I called my doctor and the clinic got me in right away. I had a mammogram (despite having just had one a few months prior) and an ultrasound. The ultrasound tech stared at me from across the room and said “Jesus, that must be painful. I can see the lump from over here.”
Super, I thought3.
It turned out to be a cyst. The doctor offered to drain it with a super unfriendly looking needle, cautioning me that it might return despite this procedure.
“Will it go away on its own? Could it be hormonal?” I asked.4
She shrugged. “Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. We aren’t really sure if they’re related to hormones. Not really much rhyme or reason to it.”
I decided to take my chances on my own and declined the procedure. I went home that afternoon after an exhausting day of running from clinic to hospital to clinic. I walked the dog and the thought that had been lurking at the edges of my consciousness returned. I’d noticed the lump right after I meditated and learned my foremother’s story. What if the two things were connected? I couldn’t say how, but the events felt too coincidental. I went home, sat on my porch and closed my eyes.
I think you want my attention, I said in my head. You have it.
She reappeared. Indeed, she had more to say. The meditation timer had cut off her story before the most important part. And so, I sat and watched the rest of the story unfold to it’s bitter conclusion. I promised her I’d write it down.
Within a week, the cyst was gone. It’s never returned. That was exactly one year ago yesterday.
After this incident, the stories began to present themselves in the strangest ways. I got a blister on my hand working in the garden, and a woman appeared in my meditation the next day. I had menstrual cramps (which I rarely get, thankfully) and another woman appeared. They often came to me in meditation, I think because they had a captive audience that way. The rest of my life was chaotic. Around the same time, my dad was deciding to enter hospice after battling a recurrence of cancer for several years. I was in the throes of supporting my grieving family and balancing my work.
With some assistance, I decided I needed to enter into negotiations with these women. When I dropped into an intentional meditative space, there were flocks of them crowding the space. I needed to find a way to hold space for them while also maintaining my sanity.
When I began to yield to the stories, the storytellers began to withdraw their claws. Their jaws let go of me without too much damage. They acquiesced to work with me, and to give me some say in the process, at least inasmuch as I was able to negotiate when and how they’d appear. I gave them some parameters: I will listen and document, but I need you to respect my time and space (i.e., please stop dropping into my meditations without warning, you need to make an appointment or something first).
And so, we have a relationship now, these storytellers and I. These women have been aching to be heard for so long and I’m listening. I am doing what I can to not let the part of me that desperately wants to rationalize this to ruin our relationship.
2.
Interestingly, in 2018 I struck upon this idea of engaging in a pilgrimage walk as a healing act. I’d read an article about a woman who’d walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain and the Coast to Coast walk in England and had a deeply spiritual experience. I want that, I thought.
I started noodling around on a project exploring the idea of placing our feet on the ground on the land of our ancestors and how that might provide some healing. I researched pilgrimage walks and the various ways in which the act of walking provides a meditative space. I began planning my own pilgrimage walk. I wrote a grant to fund this project, which didn’t get funded, but I was well on my way.
When my husband and I were in Scotland in 2019, we took a day hike on a portion of the Great Glen Way, a famous through-hike in the Scottish Highlands. I still struggle to put words to that simple hike—it struck something deep in me. A chord resonated that I hadn’t heard in quite some time. We returned home, the pandemic hit, my dad was re-diagnosed with cancer and my pilgrimage walks were firmly relegated to the back burner.
After I negotiated with these spectral women about when and how they could appear to me, they retreated a bit. I gave them a container and they are respectful of the boundaries. These days, they don’t come to me in meditation anymore. The stories don’t come to me as dreams. They only come in waking moments, and now that I’ve entered into an agreement with the storytellers, they most often appear to me when I’m in motion, walking, running, sometimes even driving.
I started plotting my trip to Mull just as these women were appearing. I was basing this trip on the teensy bit of research I’d done on how pilgrimage walks shift our consciousness. I was working on a gut instinct that walking in places in which I felt some ancestral connection would yield something new. I had no intention of doing genealogical or historical research, though both have occurred by virtue of my inquisitive nature. My research is somatic in nature; I move my body in a place that feels resonant and see what occurs.
3.
My logical, rational brain has been protesting vehemently for months. I’ve not shared this undertaking because it feels crazy, unbelievable, fantastical. And yet, my experience says otherwise. The project, these stories have moved in and taken over my creative brain. What’s more I love them; I no longer feel reluctant or afraid. I look forward to them the way I look forward to reading the next chapter in a book. These women’s stories are heartbreaking and grief-stricken and tragic, but I feel incredibly lucky to be able to tell them.
And yet, I have no idea how to fund what is beginning to feel like a potentially quite big, majorly consuming project—both in terms of time and resources. It’s hard to write a grant based on visions that appear to you. I sometimes think about writing a book proposal but am afraid I’ll get laughed out of a career. I can’t imagine telling an editor “I’d like to write these stories down, but I can’t commit to revising them, I’ll have to consult with my visions.” The premise of putting my feet on the ground where my ancestors have been is proving to be a spendy endeavor.
I have started to think outside the box about how to share them with the world. I feel a sense of obligation to these women to not keep them to myself. But while I’m feeling quite confident in the process of creating, I’m not sure what to do with the creation.
This all feels incredibly scary and vulnerable, to be quite frank. I share this all with you because it feels like the next step in the commitment to these women. I have followed my nose through this process so far—sometimes reluctantly so—and so I offer this to you, to my community, to the Universe. Maybe it’s time we make some magic together.
Are you interested in reading more? Would you be willing to support this project financially?5 Do you have an editor/publisher/agent contact that you think might be open to something this unconventional? Do you have other ideas? I’m all ears.
In the meantime, stay tuned as I keep following my nose. More to come.
I’m simplifying this concept here, you should read the book.
It was fucking scary is what it was. A walnut, you all. That’s big.
Things you do not need to hear from your ultrasound technican when examining your lumpy breasts.
I don’t love needles. I really don’t love them in my boobs.
Every bit of support helps. $5 or $500, it all makes this project more doable. I’m grateful for it. My venmo: SarahRatermannBeahan