Petals all the Way Down
Thursday 16th of July 2020
Sometimes I hear a voice calling my name, mostly in the mornings. It wakes me up, calls me to attention. It’s usually a child’s voice, but sometimes an adults. The voice is always genderless and always serious, like it has a purpose.
This morning I actively listened, instead of passively overhearing. The voice cut in and out like radio static, some words lost, other garbled, but most of it pretty clear. It told me I’m not unmotivated to write, it’s the house, which sounds like an excuse to me, the house is full of stuck energies that need to be cleared away. So, I asked, how I was to go about doing this, and was actually given a recipe for a loose incense, but only for the living room. I quote, ‘to clear stuck male energy from the living room.’ But first I had to cleanse myself with a tea, and I was also given the recipe for that, which will remain mine, but you can have the recipe for the loose incense.
Palo Santo: To cleanse, heal, purify, protect, inspire, bring love and good fortune.
Dahlia: To inspire creativity, bring change and inner strength.
Dried Papaya: For good luck and happiness.
Dried Mango: For wealth, fertility and love.
Dried Green Chilli: For warmth, friendship, good luck and bountiful harvests.
Pretty straight forward, but I still wasn’t satisfied, so I asked why, why just the living room, why ‘stuck male energy’, why is it bad?
‘It’s not bad,’ came the answer, ‘it’s just stuck. It needs to be released. There should be a flow of energy. The energy is jammed. It’s the energy of every man that has been in that room. House hold…’
And I think about it. I’ve painted the walls and changed the furniture but by Grandfather is still sat on the dining chair because he hated soft sofas, still staring at the TV whilst I tried to speak to him, still ignoring me instead of listening and trying to understand. It’s still the room he slept in for over a year whilst telling me and my mother how worthless we were, how we wouldn’t exist without him, and how grateful we should be to him. It’s still the room where he longed for his real children to come and visit, but they were always too busy. It’s still the room he was confined to with his sick wife, where he had to be reliant on his stepdaughter to care for them whilst his biological children only visited once a week.
It’s still the room where my uncle slept on the sofa for almost a year, after he had had a fight with my grandparents and was disowned, after he was dumped, after his business fell through and he went bankrupt, only his car left to his name. It’s still the room where he plotted his next move, raged against his parents, his ex, the people who didn’t believe in him, his ideas, his genius.
It’s still the room where my dad sat, for less then six months, before bored of domesticity, he left.
‘This is the house of a woman, a sanctuary, your mother made it so. She bought this house, on her own, had no help to pay off the mortgage, raised two children by herself, made it clear she could only be reliant on herself. Male energy needs to feel needed, included, a part of, it finds no sanctuary here, only resistance. It can’t flow, it gets stuck, trapped and all the demons they carry get trapped in with it. Release it, let it flow.’
It doesn’t hurt to try.
