Unforseen Enchantments

Visitations from the Sacred World

The life we choose and the life that chooses us are so tightly woven together, the strands feel primordially entangled, enmeshed. Who would dare to try and separate them? It feels like an impossible task from a fairy tale, like the maiden in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ whose king commanded her to spin straw into gold.

When it comes to these unchosen events, the experiences that feel like curses at the time, I had a very rough encounter with the influenza virus H1N1 a few weeks ago. I have never been this sick in my adult life; it felt like some brutal kind of initiation. A descent into deep helplessness, in which I had no capacity to care for myself at all. A radical relinquishment of ancient cellular ideas of autonomy and dignity, as I was dragged into embodying a whole new level of humility and receptivity to the help I could not have survived without. Exquisite, graceful, generous help, that was itself very strong medicine for my soul. I felt I had angelic beings at my side.

For many days during this journey with the virus, I was forced to abandon my membership in the group of self-grooming animals. Brushing my teeth was a momentous task, but when it came to my hair, that was another story.

Those of us who are curly haired creatures know that such hair requires a modicum of governing each day. My no-fuss routine takes about four minutes; I had no energy or will to perform such a ritual while I was under the spell of that virus. So I would stagger into the bathroom each morning and be confronted in the mirror by the image of someone who was a combination of Medusa, Baba Yaga and that divine hag, the Cailleach. The wildness of my appearance was a little short of frightening, but definitely disturbing. And I had no cognitive capacity available with which to soothe what felt like my “post colonial insecure jitters” (Joy Harjo, 'For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet.’)

Then one morning, brushing my teeth, I saw something moving in the wilderness of my untamed locks. I looked closer and saw a ladybug sliding slowly down a shaft of my hair. It's difficult to describe what happened to me in that moment, and how it took no time at all. No time at all for a radical shift of context to blossom, in which my whole being received a visceral blessing utterly unexpected, brimming with beauty and benevolence. There were no words, just a deep recognition in every cell of my body. My unkempt, undomesticated body.

If I attempt to link this experience to language, it might sound a bit like this: “Ah, little one, you are welcome here, in my hair, just as a bird is welcome in a tree, a fish in a stream, a drop of dew on a shaft of grass in the morning. We belong to each other, in this living breathing world, this ordinary everyday impossibly beautiful sacred world

Someone with a more conventional lens might call this visit from the ladybug a happy coincidence. It didn't feel like this to me at all. I felt as if I was participating in something the ancient Greeks called 'kairos,' which is often translated as sacred time. When I looked it up, I found kairos defined as “the right or critical moment.” How profoundly different this is from the sense of time we inhabit in our secular culture, an implicit collective frequency, a sense of time which was named 'chronos' by the ancient Greeks. AI has this to say about 'chronos':

The word “chronos” (you probably recognize this one as the root for the English words “chronological” and “chronicle”) refers to measured, ticking, quantitative time.

This was the deep current at the heart of my encounter with the ladybug: a whole-body knowing that she showed up in my hair at a critical moment. A moment outside of the ticking, linear, chronological time that most of us live inside of. A moment when the straw begins turning into gold.

One quality of these kairos-like moments is that they don't fade away, like so many of our experiences in the realm of chronos. These images are alive and potent, and they continue to water the heart and the soul in ways the mind cannot fathom. That little ladybug is still here, sliding down through my hair, transmitting something unspeakable, that I was finally ready to receive in that moment. When the earth herself reached out and touched me through that ladybug, with all her warmth, receptivity, and love. Inviting me to rest and be renewed in the sanctuary of the non-human world.

“We're the nervous ones.
If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn't hear
what singing completes us?”

~Li-Young Lee, 'Praise Them'

When I remember my little ladybug, I know that moment is remembering me, whispering to me. I hear myself singing her a new song, a prayer, a promise:

“Ladybug, ladybug,
Here is your home,
Your children are safe here,
They'll come to no harm.”

(If you enjoyed reading this, please pass it along to a friend or two. Thank you.)