The Other Side of the River: Stories of Women, Water and the World

Praise for

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER

Evocative and beautifully written.

Craig Chalquist, author Terrapsychology and Professor in Ecopsychology

This book is an instant classic for the new paradigm.

Lucia Chivola Birnbaum, award-winning author and Professor Emeritus in Women’s Spirituality

Beautiful, important, wise work! This is fluid writing ... Eila deftly transitions between matters of family, culture, race, geography, mind and body. The river is a wonderful metaphor.

Carolyn Cooke, author Amor and Psycho

Eila’s words flow as water, and these stories quench the thirsty soul like a much-needed walk to the river.

Viviane Dzyak, PhD,

Professor in Women’s Spirituality

What you hold in your hands is not just a book, but a mytho-poetic portal. A portal into the humble truths and sacred ecstasies of one woman’s journey into the elemental, eternal and everyday mysteries of Life. It is also a vast and wise articulation of all of humanity’s great work in this raw and potent time on the Earth.

We are living in a crucial epoch, a time of radical culture change and evolution. We need to prioritize the feminine values of poetry and beauty, of magic and soul. Eila’s book shows us the way, her words weaving a watery and wonderful spell. Her affinity for water as the great primal connector and conductor of life force seeps out of every page and you will find yourself remembering ancient truths of belonging and destiny.

If you are one who has come to re-imagine and create the world anew, you will find your own journey and soul illuminated and inspired with each page you turn. The world is aching for a new paradigm and this book is a delicious, intelligent and elegant feast for our hungering hearts.

Holly Hamilton, PhD, Teacher, Priestess, Founder, Awakening Avalon School of Earth Wisdom

Also from Womancraft Publishing

The Heart of the Labyrinth—Nicole Schwab

Moods of Motherhood: the inner journey of mothering—Lucy H. Pearce

Moon Time: harness the ever-changing energy of your menstrual cycle—Lucy H. Pearce

Reaching for the Moon—Lucy H. Pearce

The Other Side of the River

Stories of Women,

Water and the World

Eila Kundrie Carrico

The Other Side of the River

© Eila Kundrie Carrico 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover art © Leah Dorion

Cover design by LucentWord.com

Extended quotations used with the express permission of their authors. If you feel a permission has not been sought, we will be happy to rectify this.

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Published by Womancraft Publishing, 2015

www.womancraftpublishing.com

ISBN: 978-1910559-185 Smashwords Edition

A percentage of Womancraft Publishing profits are invested back into the environment reforesting the tropics (via TreeSisters) and forward into the community: providing books for girls in developing countries, and affordable libraries for red tents and women’s groups around the world.

Womancraft Publishing is committed to sharing powerful new women’s voices, through a collaborative publishing process. We are proud to midwife this work, however the story, the experiences and the words are the author’s alone.

For the fresh waters of the world: that every spring, creek, marsh, pond, lake and river may flow freely in abundance and grace.

For my mother, who gifted me with her love of stories, her devotion to truth, and the unwavering heart of a mystic.

Acknowledgements

My first thank you is for my family. This book is meant to bring healing to my mom, dad, sister and brother—each of whom have taught me the many shapes and colors of love. I humbly ask again and again for their grace in lending themselves as characters so I can tell a story larger than ourselves. Thank you. I want to express deep gratitude to my beloved, my husband—thank you for your patience, your inspiration, and your warmth. To our little son: thank you for teaching me from the inside out about weaving spirit into matter—I would not have written this book without you.

I want to express endless gratitude and love for my heart teacher, Holly Hamilton, whose words and wisdom have inspired and echoed so many of the themes that follow. And I want to say thank you for the many, many blessings Sianna Sherman’s teachings and storytelling talents have brought to my life. Thank you sisters!

I have a grand thank you for Pireeni Sundaralingam, whose thoughtful editing helped guide a trickling stream of untamed poetry into a full flowing prose manuscript. So much gratitude for your countless readings, invaluable guidance and constant support from the very start. Thank you to Susan Griffin, who read a very early version of this story and inspired me with the courage to take the space I needed in order to tell the whole tale. I also want to say thank you to Carolyn Cooke, who helped at a crucial point in the manuscript to bring some much-needed, stronger banks to this wild river of a book. Thank you!

I want to offer gratitude and appreciation for the women of the California Institute of Integral Studies’ Women’s Spirituality program who bring strength, presence and grace to difficult questions. I am especially blessed to have learned from Alka Arora, Mara Keller, Lucia Chivola Birnbaum and Arisika Razak. Thank you all for your work in the world. And thank you Lucia Chivola Birnbaum for your scholarship, support and encouragement with this project in particular.

I am so delighted and happy to have found Lucy Pearce and Womancraft Publishing. This is a powerful press with a beautiful mission. Thank you Lucy for getting this book, and for the rich language you use to help articulate its purpose. I am honored to be part of your community of women writers.

I have been continuously blessed by many extraordinary teachers over the years, thank you from the bottom of my heart to: Luisah Teish, Anna Dorian, Starhawk, Hareesh Wallis, Douglas Brooks, Jennifer Welwood, Don Humberto and Dona Elena, Ty and Sarah Powers, Thanissara and Kittissaro, Suzanne Marlow, the words of John O’Donohue, and the stories of Joan Didion—may the seeds of wisdom I’ve received from each of you continue to sprout in the world through these stories.

Story Water

A story is like water

that you heat for your bath.

It takes messages between the fire

and your skin.

The body itself is a screen

to shield and partially reveal

the light that’s blazing

inside your presence.

Beauty is everywhere,

but we usually need to be walking

in a garden to notice it.

Water, stories, the body,

all the things we do, are mediums

that hide and show what’s hidden.

Study them,

and enjoy this being washed

with a secret we sometimes know,

and then not.

Rumi

Swimming in the Dark

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing on the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we pursue our magic and make it realized.

Audre Lorde

Drops of water float suspended in the air. Mist forms a veil of hazy light and palpable shadow, and bubbles hurry from the depths to the surface.

I see my skin through the water, pale and naked as the day I was born. I am alone except for the thick green of the forest and the delicate clarity of the hot spring next to Mt. Kurama in Japan. A circle of ancient cedars surrounds me. They hold me in their passive gaze, and I stare back transfixed.

Today is the darkest day of 2012: the winter solstice. Earth has completed a massive exhale, ending an era, and she stays empty in this sacred pause before she inhales, beginning a new world era. I watch as a golden sun melts into the horizon, and darkness thickens. It’s been too long since I stopped moving long enough to feel this deeply. I too am emptied, washed clean. I am born again to myself.

I feel the age of the trees. Their strong, tangled roots exposed from centuries of erosion, like the finger bones on an old woman’s hands. I feel a profound steadiness, a basic acceptance, and a deep calm that moves from the bones of my pelvis to my low belly and warms my center. I remember that I am small, and my life is fleeting. As the water holds me, the constant droning fear that resides in my shoulders and lungs turns to a quiet curiosity. I wonder what of my character is strong enough to persist in one place as these trees have. I want to learn to endure, to put down roots, to belong somewhere. I realize I spend most of my time wishing I was elsewhere, feeling something different, resisting reality. It is exhausting. I let out a deep exhale and fill myself with mountain air—I am fully here. The faint aroma of an ancient promise rises like mist from the earth’s center, and I expand.

Life gifts us each with at least one moment when resistance is pointless. We spend years in comfort on the shore, fooling ourselves with elaborate illusions of control and consistency. We find routine and false security in jobs, sidewalks, air conditioning, bills, and bank accounts, and this life feels more real (and more convenient) than the wild of the rich green forest full of insects that bite, rolling thunderstorms that ruin our picnics, bitter cold nights that make us shiver, and prowling panthers that cause us to question our strength.

When the monotony of predictability penetrates all the way into our bones, we hear the wild calling, and we drive down to the ocean, but we sit in the car and watch the sun set through the windshield. We flock to the lake, but we sunbathe on a chair and cover our skin with sunscreen. We walk to the river, but we stay affixed to our smartphones to capture the memories.

We are called by the wild, but we resist full engagement.

We have an innate sense that the place where land meets water is a liminal space, a space with a personality and an agenda of her own. She acts as a gatekeeper between the surface layers of awareness and the less traversed depths of our individual psyches. It is she who chooses when and how and why to open that carefully guarded threshold. If we spend enough time at the edge of the water, she will consider this an invitation to splay open our souls, and we will eventually have to confront the unseen depths of our watery past.

There may be any number of strange, alien looking creatures down there in our subconscious, but how can we know what is there if we’ve never left the safety of the shore? We fool ourselves into believing the sand, the surface, and the sunshine are all there is, while hidden beliefs, lies we keep from ourselves, ancient memories of churning oceans, lightless caves and moonless skies are suppressed and pushed deeper and deeper into the subconscious.

But life promises this: that moment when resistance is futile will come. The fluid parts of our souls pull us into chaos, pushing us to look at all we’ve avoided, tossing us unwilling into waves of uncertainty and currents of dramatic change. Life keeps her promises. And when she calls you, you must learn to swim in the dark mystery of possibility.

Later I would look back at my time with the cedar trees and say I was visited by the mythical crone—the old woman of the crossroads who allows travelers to ask her one question, which she is bound by the laws of nature to answer in truth. My question might well have been: where do I belong? And her answer, with a gesture to the wild forests, sprawling meadows and dark waters of the earth, would have been: here.

I’ve come to several crossroads in my life, and each time I have been blessed with a gentle nudge from the natural world that shows me the next direction. At the tail end of 2012, it was the old woman of the trees, but water has guided me through most other transitions. I wonder, what would it mean to follow the teachings of water?

While the trees are manifest, tangible and structured, water is pure fluid potential rising from the depths of the earth; water contains secrets from the dark unseen. One of the mysteries water holds is in her ability to connect seemingly disparate objects and invite them into relationship. My life, too, is full of disjointed moments that, in time, reveal an unexpected synchronicity—I excavate meaning from these moments like an archaeologist reassembling broken bits of ancient sculpture. Following this inquiry, I know there is an intangible, intuitive relationship between rivers and stories, which are two of my great fascinations.

Stories lay the outline for individual understanding, for human dynamics, and for culture to arise. We learn how to interact with one another through listening to and living these stories. We recognize ourselves and our relationships reflected in the situations of the story, and then we find a way to solve the problems that arise in our lives based on what the characters in our favorite stories have done. At our best, we learn to take different paths than those that cause imbalance and suffering because we learned to recognize these patterns in narrative.

But there’s more to story time than simple entertainment or morality: through the language of symbols it is possible to re-wire our physiology. Picture this: a tire forms a groove in a muddy road. The next car that comes down that path then falls into the same groove. This groove deepens each time a car’s tires pass through it. Similar to tires in a muddy road, the memory that is embedded in an energetic groove along our neurological pathways from past moments informs all future moments. In this way, we become what we repeatedly think and act on. We are fundamentally wired by the stories we tell ourselves.

Rivers remember in the same way. The water carves grooves in the landscape that show future water droplets where to descend and rise and splash back toward the sand, over rocks, eventually weaving a pattern that knows how to make its way to the ocean. A river creates her own patterns. She starts with a few drops of curiosity in one direction, followed by a trickle of play in another, and eventually the route is engraved for greater surges of creativity and streams of delight to follow. Serpents of currents form over the land in patterns that may seem random, but the currents follow the law of their own hidden memories. The river feels her way along the earth’s surface, finding the way of least resistance, of acquiescent texture, and in this way a river actualizes herself into the landscape as a sculptor, a painter, and a storyteller. The banks of a river provide a constant structure that allows water the freedom to flow and bounce and sparkle in a chaotic dance of balance and beauty.

In humans, it is partly our DNA that provides the structure of memory that acts as river banks. Each time our cells divide, they make a copy with instructions to help them keep to a roughly similar pattern of creation, over and over. But the cells do not always make an exact copy. Just as one cell begins to split into two there is a sacred pause, a moment pregnant with possibility, when the cell may choose to add a little play into the code. This is technically known as a mutation, but it is in effect a transformation that allows for adaptability, and it holds the key to all successful species’ survival on this planet.

Zooming out a bit, our friends, our families, and our own notions about ourselves also act as banks to the rivers of ourselves, providing a reliable structure that creates a pattern based on history. The people close to us continue to create us in roughly the same style and caricature as they knew us the moment before, for the most part: because of natural variations in memory and perception, we evolve ourselves, our stories, and our cultures. The stored memories and stories our village holds for us provide a guiding structure that shapes our lives.

This constant co-creation among our community is part of why travel is so exhilarating—no one knows our story in a foreign land, and so we are free to be more emergent (which may feel like an emergency.) We appear solid, but are in fact quite fluid. I am curious about those moments that steer us off structured courses into wild, fluid possibility.

A new feeling is born with each inhale and dies with each exhale. In this way, we may have several incarnations (as the one who is happy, the one who is mad, sad, tired, bored, etc.) before breakfast. If we are present to the moment at hand, and if we can only remember our simple, basic fluidity, we can re-create ourselves in any image with every breath. And that could cause a collective mutation that would radically change our world.

What is my story today? Hardly a year after I sat with the cedar trees in Japan, I find myself unexpectedly pregnant. I’m twenty-nine years old and about to be a mother. I stand at the end of life as I know it and look out into the vast night sky. I hold a heavy story in my heart and a great fear of what it means to be a mother. My great-grandmother Maria, known as the river gypsy, had seven children and then disappeared down the road she came from. I feel a cloying archetype trying to capture me, and the netting closes in around me. Is this how my great- grandmother felt before she disappeared? Trapped. Caged. Dammed. Was she also afraid of the rushing river moving through her? Did she experience the same lack of understanding in her culture and hide from her deepest nature until she felt so small she had no choice but to run?

I will not choose when or how; one day my body will decidedly flip the switch and begin the irreversible process of labor that will bring a new person into the world. I will have to learn to feel my way across a fluid and changing situation that I cannot plan or control, and that is foreign to me.

Maureen Murdock, author of The Heroine’s Journey, says that women find their way back to themselves differently than men do. Men move up and out into the lights of the world, but women’s challenge is to move down into the depths of their own ground of being. Water moves that way too, downhill and inward.

I move toward motherhood like a river runs toward the sea. I stand hesitantly on the shore of the known and unknown, seen and unseen. I am in between, and I wonder what on earth to do with myself while I’m here. I stand at the edge of the continent I’ve known and look across a dark purple, infinite ocean that merges into a blackening sky.

Berkeley, California. June 2014.

Stars hang low in the moonless sky. A river parts the tall, looming trees on either side of her wide banks. I stand at the edge and watch as the water laps gently closer to me, and then further from me, and back again. Without meaning to do so, my feet move into the surprisingly warm water. I relax. I walk in a straight line into the river until my feet no longer feel the safety of earth beneath them—I hesitate and resist floating before I swim.

I stop with my eyes just over the water line, like an alligator. From this perspective, the land appears to float like an island moving toward me. Water droplets decorate my lashes like jewels of light, and the water’s surface glistens like moonlight on an eerie luminous black snow. It is surreal; it is beautiful.

But the joy is short-lived as I feel the immensity of the liquid surround me. I clench my fists at the thought of the various vicious creatures that may lurk below. I feel a flash of a scaly tail brush past my calf beneath. I’m cold and tightening, but before I can turn back to the shore the water pulls me toward her center. My feet leave the sand, and I have to swim or drown. This is my death. I’m merging with a shapeless form of darkness.

As I prepare to meet my end, a panther appears in front of me. She looks back at me over her shoulder and swims ahead. I try to breathe and follow between the little waves she makes behind her, like lines on the edge of a page of parchment paper. The current resists me. I’m heavy and struggling, I lose sight of the panther and then find her again. Water jumps into my eyes and floods my nostrils, stinging. I look up and notice the stars dim as the sky lightens.

And then I am awake.

At home in the dry warmth of my bed, I consider this dream. It’s one I’ve had more than once, so it must be worth my attention. I have always had a curiously ambivalent attachment to water. I find sublime peace at the edges of land and water, but my only phobias as a little girl were bridges and boats. I used to crouch on the floor of the old Toyota van and cover my ears when we crossed bridges, and I refused to go aboard any boat bigger than a canoe.

I begin my morning yoga routine with the flavor of this dream saturating my psyche. I still feel partially under water. I think of the mythic Greek river, the Styx, that separates the world of the living from the world of spirits. Relatives of the deceased used to leave coins on the eyes of corpses, to pay the ferryman who would take their loved ones to the land of the dead. What is it about rivers that causes humans to associate them with death? Mara Freeman writes that: The crossing of water is an esoteric reference to the change of consciousness from the sensory world to the astral plane in which only the inner sense can be our guide. I have a felt sense of this shift, and I know my world is about to change beyond recognition.

I sit still, cross-legged on the floor and open my central channel from the crown of my head down to my perineum. I feel a gentle flow from top to bottom, like a sleepy creek reluctantly waking up at my center. I’m just a few weeks pregnant, and most people don’t even know yet. I’ve even questioned myself. Am I making this up? I have no evidence but my own knowing. I feel a new empathy for salmon; I am aware of a strong instinct that is something like I imagine a salmon might feel before she begins her long journey back to the place she was born in order to reproduce. I need to go back over the inner landscapes of home before I give birth.

I’ve spent a large portion of my life searching for a definitive home, a place I finally belong. I know that home is supposed to be a feeling of inner peace you carry around with you wherever you roam, but something compels my feet to physically travel over landscapes in order to gather information. This restlessness seems to be an as essential part of wrestling with my particularly windy kind of humanness. I have trouble separating myself from the landscapes that shape me—I love change and crave movement. I tried to get as far away from my childhood home in central Florida as possible, and eventually worked in Paris, Ghana, Thailand and India before I landed in Northern California, which is my current