I believe it is important to share our authentic stories.
“Story makes us smile or cry with recognition... wakes our remembrance that we are each other... Through our stories, we truly discover each other, and laugh and cry at our commonalities. And then we will not be so easily led to fight wars. We will not so unconsciously exploit each other’s lives in order to make our own lives more comfortable...” Christina Baldwin, Storycatcher.
Through our stories, we recognize our Oneness, million situations and conditions, yet somehow the same. Through the universality of our stories, we link our lives with each other; we come to this simple realization that another person is a variation of ourselves, a mirror of ourselves.
I was 14 years old when I saw the film Gandhi of late Richard Attenborough, a film that turned out to be for me a revelation. After those 3 hours spent spellbound in front of the screen, almost glued to it, I knew what I was going to do in life… I was going to go and live in India…
Ten years later, my teenage dream actually became true. Despite my father’s warnings about the folly of my decision, I left Belgium... sure that there could be no worse place, no bigger hell to be in than the Western world. In years following the film Gandhi, I had got involved in developmental NGOs and soon became a fierce detractor of the Western model of development… somewhere the expression of a deep seated anger I felt for what ‘science and technology’ had done to me, to my people, to my country, to the world in the name of development and progress… “poisoning our souls, building an enormous crematorium for the earth and its people.” E.G. Valliatos, Harvest of Devastation.
It is now more than 20 years that I have lived in India. I have been lucky to travel to almost every corner of the country. My work took me to remote villages of rural India where I discovered India’s fascinating ecological traditions. Everywhere I went I documented vernacular architecture, local cuisines, water harvesting structure, handloom traditions, forest management traditions… Every trip I made to the interiors held amazing discoveries. For me, those last few remote villages where gentle cultures, life-sustaining, and nurturing ways of life had survived, spared from the tentacles of development that were fast engulfing the whole world, were the remnants of the Paradise I had been searching for since my childhood.
But then life is never so simple. As Eckhart Tolle puts it, it is only when the characters get challenged that the plot becomes decidedly interesting. And so everything went wrong in my life and couldn’t have possibly gone more wrong. After going through a very traumatic divorce, I found myself without family, without my daughter, without money... all alone and completely lost on a Dark Night in a deep and dense Forest. This painful process of loss and the deep need to make sense of all the agony I felt took me on a fascinating journey through humanity’s timeline. Humanity had gone through the Trauma of the Great Separation, what Steve Taylor calls the Ego Explosion, what Daniel Quinn refers to as the Great Forgetting, what Eisenstein describes as the Ascent of Civilization. The rise of civilization had been a painful journey out of the soothing darkness of the forest womb; a journey of disconnection from Mother Earth; of repression of the Yin. With the rise of civilization, the Great Mother had been overthrown and we had all become orphans.
That is when I realized my own story was perfectly embedded into humanity’s story. I had had a particularly traumatic birth. Separated from my mother at birth, having missed the experience of safety and bonding, I grew up with deep feelings of emptiness, of abandonment and homelessness. Without realizing, my fascination for India had been an unconscious attempt to heal... to find roots... to find the lost Mother... to fill the black hole within the motherless child that I was...
Our roots represent where we come from: the earth, the Great Mother who gives birth to all creation out of the darkness of her womb.
Strange as it might be, but I really went in search of my roots in India’s remote tribal villages. And there in the forest I asked to accompany tribal women in their roots/ tubers harvesting expeditions. There was something in that experience of journeying to the forest to dig out roots that deeply fascinated me!! May be it was the unique opportunity of performing an act our ancestors had done for million years, an act that took us back to the beginning of times, to the era when the Great Mother was worshiped.
My connection to the forest didn’t stop there. As I started experimenting with soft pastels, I would paint only forest landscapes. I tried painting animals, butterflies, cottages… but every attempt ended up in the dustbin. To overcome this shortcoming, I decided I must join a class. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are few pastel artists in India and therefore not many teachers.
Hence, however monotonous it might sound, I decided to accept my limitation and continued painting those dark and impenetrable forest groves and woodlands where in the cool shadow of the evergreens my soul found peace. Surely, if I could only paint the forest, it was a sign. Every time I took my pastels and painted the forest, I knew the Universe was trying to tell me something. The universe was whispering something to me. And yes, step by step, painting by painting, the forest started revealing its myriad secrets to me.
The first life-changing teaching I received from the Forest was to transcend my fear of darkness and see how darkness could be beautiful and healing. There was no way I could paint a forest without darks, especially black. Without darks, colours were just a bright glare. Darks added the contrast so necessary to make a painting striking.
So strange that darks could add beauty! Black was the colour of death, of malevolent spirits, of evil, of sin, of punishment, of demonic forces, of abysm… How could black, the colour of gloom and suffering bring magnificence to anything? And yet it did.
Didn’t darkness bring magnificence in our own lives too if we dared trust?
Muriel facilitates Reconnection Circles in which through guided meditation, stories, rituals, art therapy exercises, we explore the healing qualities of nature the forest, ocean, desert and mountain archetypes. As our inner and outer nature evolved together, to reconnect to Earth’s great landscapes is to open up to deeper levels of our being so that we become more deeply rooted in ourselves.
Muriel is also author and illustrator of children books: Ecological Tales from India series and the Mystery of Blue. She regularly contributes to diverse magazines on environmental issues.