There is a memory that stands in front of many other memories that has— in it’s quiet way— shaped so much of my life. I am probably about 9 years old and I am standing by myself in the hidden room behind the alter in the small Baptist church where I grew up. I am looking at the warm pool where baptisms were performed. A baptism had just taken place that morning and there was still water in the pool. I’m not sure how I happened to be in there. I know I wasn’t supposed to be… I remember thinking how the water looked unreal because of the turquoise blue color that was painted on the sides of the pool. I remember it was dim and felt almost smoky in there. I remember how utterly, completely quiet it was with the sunlight barely slanting in through slats on the closed doors. The doors on that side would be opened during a Baptism to face the entire church congregation as they watched you devote your life to a few men’s idea of who God was.

Most importantly I remember being overwhelmed with sadness, that this place was supposed to wash away everything that I was. To this day I can feel the quickening of my heart as I realized that someday I was supposed to get into that pool which in itself would be an admission that there was something terribly, fundamentally wrong with me. That I was born into the world stained and sinful. It would be decades before I truly understood how wrong that was and finally began to peel back layer after layer, exposing many places needing my healing. But I believe some wild, wise, knowing part of me decided on that day that it simply could not be true, because nothing ever felt quite right after that.

In 2015, at 30 years old and after the birth of my second child, the Divine would decide that it was time to remind me who I was. Who we all are. That is, creatures born exactly as we were intended to be, full of immense love and inherent worthiness. It was not a gentle reminder, but it was a loving one. I would end up going through a painful divorce and jump into the beautiful, gritty mess of single motherhood. I would begin to unravel decades of beliefs, wounds, and forgotten places inside my heart. I would meet angels in the shape of people who showed me what it meant to open to grief and to love. I would dive into dozens of spiritual practices. I would journey. I would search desperately for my long-forsaken wildness.

“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

This is a journey that I am still on and my doors are many. My writing is a somewhat chaotic documentation of that journey. It is not meant to be neat or pretty. It is meant to be a reminder. To invoke the essence of the backside of your heart. A place that is too often left untouched, but holds all the dark, wild magic that makes you and I precious and oh-so-lovable.

xo-

Erin