Returning to the bone cave

Endings and beginnings

West Cork midsummer lushness, by Jody Day.

For the last few months, I’ve been sick: body sick, heart sick, soul sick. And I’ve resisted the fuck out of it. Yes, the shitstorm that is the fragmentation of industrialized modernity is part of it. But not all of it.

I was away travelling in Japan and Thailand for the first quarter of the year, a pilgrimage of sorts to honour the deaths of my mother, my partner’s mother, one of my therapy clients, a friend from my au-pairing days in Rome, and our old dog in the 18 months preceding it. We’ve been a long time in the deathfield, and in the cold, dark months of an Irish winter, you can feel the chill breath of death, squatting patiently nearby in her bone cave.

Coming back home just as the days started to lengthen at Spring Equinox, I was bursting with plans I’d been germinating: a garden to plant, a novel to finish, and projects to move forward in the world.

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At first, my illness felt like extended jetlag, or maybe a virus, but it didn’t shift. I’d planned to get up early each day to work on my novel, but found that my sleep, already a fickle night-time visitor, had shifted her pattern, and that I needed to rest longer than usual each morning. Unfortunately, the morning is also my best creative writing portal, as once the day gets going with its external demands and rhythms, I find it hard to get back into that place. Into my cave.

Ah, this’ll settle down, I thought, opening and closing again the door to the spare bedroom where my writing notes gathered dust. And yet the symptoms continue to blossom: weight gain, weakness, headaches, a change in appetite, in body odour, and a profound exhaustion that moved from my body to my soul. My mood crashed. Blood tests showed weird anomalies; the diagnosis remains as yet unclear, but probably something auto-immune. My body is under attack from herself.

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These last few weeks, I’ve had some painful encounters with other people’s expectations of me, as well as the socially acceptable lack of interest that the majority of mothers/grandmothers show towards non-mothers. It’s been a raw time and, perhaps because of how depleted I’m feeling, I’ve resisted capitulating to others’ needs, as is my usual pattern, and as is expected of me as a woman. And the disapproval has been fierce—both externally and internally.

On top of this, I’ve also had both my partner and a close girlfriend hold a mirror up to me about how something might be ‘off’ in my dedication to my work in the world these days. I’ve just completed my accounts for 2024, and my income barely covers my costs, which is a raw reminder of how leaky my life-bucket of energy is.

A few hours walking on the beach with that same anam cara (soul friend) a few days ago resulted in me feeling so wiped out that I had to cancel my plans for the next day and, yet again, go to bed in the early evening to rest. And for the first time, I found myself wondering if I might be dying. A reminder that the extraordinary gift of living in this human body is not mine to keep; it’s just on loan. Because of course I’m dying; we all are.

And then, filtering up from the well of the end-of-life work I’m engaged in with a childless client, and portaled through my lifelong affinity with thresholds, an insight wormed its way into my awareness—perhaps what my Irish foremothers would have called imbas. And, as in previous knowings like this, it was gnomically blunt and, once spoken by my soul, could not be unspoken.

Something in you needs to die.

My illness has shown me that I cannot keep trying to show up in the world the way I have for the last few years since I passed the stewardship of the Gateway Women online community onto the next generation. That, even though in a recent essay, I wrote of preparing to be forgotten, my ego isn’t fully on board with that. It’s still invested in being relevant, of remaining present to the childless community globally by answering emails, guesting on podcasts, being a spokeswoman, creating offerings to support childless people’s healing, and generally still showing up as the part of me I call ‘Red Jacket Jody’.

Red Jacket Jody in full flow, 2014, aged 50. Photo by Helen Louise Jones

And furthermore, that by investing my energy ‘there’, I’m robbing it from the part of my work that matters most to my soul—my creative writing and the novel that I’ve been working on for ten years. I’ve been like a hungry ghost, banquetting but never sated.

Writing my novel has proved so much more challenging than I’d anticipated; not getting the words onto the page—that’s been the easy part—and I have two drafts that, between them, come to almost half a million words! (Which by modern novel length standards, is enough for five books). But structuring and restructing that deluge of expression to become the most compelling, the most coherent, the most enchanting story I can reveal? It’s like trying to bottle the wind.

And isn’t that like life? The living part is what we instinctively do, every day we’re alive. But making sense of it, crafting a narrative arc and distilling it into meaning we can hold onto? That’s the challenge. That’s the art of living.

Something in you needs to die.

Yesterday, I offered a summer solstice ritual to thank the land, and all the human and more-than-human spirits around us, for their support. I ritually fed and watered the earth, without which nothing is possible.

And this morning, despite news of yet more horrific aggression on the world stage, I dusted off that table in the spare room and started back on my novel. I have a new idea for the deep construction of the narrative, a spiritual skeleton that can scaffold the story and give it the strength to bear its weight.

In this time of global unravelling, to choose to invest the little energy I have in bringing to fruition this story of a single, childless woman reclaiming her sovereignty might seem fruitless. But as a non-mother, I am already considered a fruitless woman by patriarchy, and nothing I can do will change that in a world structured by a cannibalistic belief system, even as it eats itself.

I cannot prove myself worthy to a world that is invested in my unworthiness. But ultimately, that doesn’t matter. The opinion of the world is not one I can live by; it has no space for me, nor for any of us women without children, unless we dedicate ourselves to extraordinary and selfless acts of service to the status quo. But all status is temporary, including motherhood.

Something in you needs to die.

Illness has been my teacher so many times in my life so far. My body is so much wiser than me, connected as she is to the deeper rhythms of an embodied human experience. To the cycles of arising and falling, of creation and decay and the necessary composting needed to begin again.

And so now, with Midsummer behind us, and as the sun begins his descent back towards the underworld, I settle myself down to weave my words again—thread by thread—allowing them to guide my life and my story back to the bone cave, where all stories end, and all begin.

Because when all is lost, maybe only the stories will remain.

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