“And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”
Maya Angelou
In the fall of 2022, about two years after my mom passed away, I created a series of collages and lyrical prose on my process of mourning, drawing from photo documentation, journal notes, and other experiential art I made in the first two years of grieving. Below is my ode to motherloss from that time, part 4, Pathless Path.
With care,
Erin
Pathless Path
The bowl, the cloth, the mother, the daughter.
Archetypes as old as our communal unconscious.
Shapes, sounds, waters, kinships.
We each hold the other together in a line of unending succession.
As above so below, as within, so without.
There is no other way but through.
I began this ritual by pausing on the shore of the river. Recalling a teaching from the Heart Sutra, gone gone, gone beyond, gone way beyond.
Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha.
I sang this to myself, waiting for the wind to arise inside of myself, the energy connected to the present moment.
I found two grey hairs, stuck to the bar of soap we bathed my Mom with, and ushered them down to the sea.
Bathing the dead has been a ritual in every culture on every continent since time immemorial. It is as old as water, because we are of water. When we release our preconceived, and enculturated ideas about death, dying, dead bodies, we will see that it is as natural as breathing to connect our living with our dying.
In this image I draw from the principle of the Mother, Maiden, Crone, a triad of becoming and letting go.
I see this path of birth, sickness, old age and death along a continuum that we all live in each of our moments.
We can see it most clear in the depths of winter, when everything is stripped bare, and yet the insulating qualities of snow bring us deep comfort and awareness in her silent spaces.