One evening, about six months before I decided to say yes to a hysterectomy that had been recommended to me for some time (for constant, teeth grating, breath taking pain, collossal amounts of blood, bloating, pain during sex, & more), I got into bed beside my husband, we opened the laptop and we watched a documentary about an octopus. The film charted a relationship that unfolded between a small, common octopus and a man struggling to make sense of his life. Over the period of a year, the octopus and the man formed a remarkable bond with each other, deep down on the ocean floor in an underwater kelp forest. We got to know a mercurial creature who could grow horns, match colour, texture, pattern to her surroundings, shift from spiky to smooth, cover herself in armour, run, dart, dance like an old lady in a flamenco skirt. She did all of this in a heartbeat, with the swell of a wave, her body just knew. It was a beautiful, affecting film.
About two weeks later I was at the kitchen sink when I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. A flash that I nearly grasped and then it was gone. It was a slippery, seaweed like thing. This continued for days, a flash of something coming out of the dark, watching me, looking for my attention, but then it would disappear. It had the sense of something on the tip of my tongue.
And then one morning, as I reached down for a coffee mug in a drawer, this slippery shadow of a thought slid out of her den. I suddenly saw her whole form. I knew that it was her. The octopus. It had been her eye, peeking out of the darkness. It was her, a fluid, amorphous being, pouring out of her velvet cave-bed to say hello. I hovered with my hand on the mug in the drawer, afraid to move too much, to think too hard in case I scared this vision away.
As I hovered I knew on some cellular, primal level that this octopus was also my womb. Somehow this animal, this shape-shifting alien of the deep, was also my aching uterus. The map of me overlayed the map of her. I straightened up, coffee cup still in my hand, my pelvis settling over my legs. I suddenly understood why, in the endless meditations I had been doing, I had been unable to bring a blinding wash of bright into this bone bowl. I understood for the first time that this crucible needed to be dark – it needed to be murky and filled with wafts of kelp rising from cracks on the ocean floor. My womb-world was not, I saw, a bright, technicolour place, the lights did not need to be switched on. This was a dark, inky, velvet space. And it was a space that was, for the first time, alive. Pulsing. Undulating. It was a space from which this octopus, this octopus womb, had stretched out a tentacle and wanted to commune. She had things she wanted to say.
This experience made no logical sense to me, but it felt extraordinarily true. Jig-saw piece, Tetris-line true.
A few weeks later, I listened to a talk by parent educator and psychologist Steve Biddulph. He described an experience he had whilst grieving a pregnancy he and his wife had lost. He spoke about how he was unable to process the grief, even though, as a trained mental health professional, he ‘knew’ all about it. He described an experience he had one evening sitting out in a barn on his land. He picked up a guitar leaning against the wall and began to idly strum. The chords started to form a shape, create a pattern almost without his knowing; his fingers took on a life of their own. Gradually the chords began to sound familiar to him, a song he knew well for the last twenty years emerged. He began to cry for the first time since the loss of his child months before. His mind, allowed to wander and strum, arrived at a song and lyrics that allowed his stuck emotions to begin to move. Something was unlocked.
The way Biddulph described this experience was precisely how I experienced the octopus. This was something that felt both entirely created by my brain, it felt like she crawled out of my mind’s eye, and also one which felt more than, mystical, the octopus seemed also to swim towards me. And so I wrote to Biddulph to ask him to explain his experience a little more. I wanted, specifically, to know more about the neuroscience of it all, what might be happening in my brain. How it can overlap and overlay in this way.
He replied to explain that he saw it as being about how our right brain (in most people, sometimes its reversed) can do this big picture knowing, on a purely animal level. He wrote that the wild creature part of us is actually very complex, multi-dimensional, at ease with symbols, metaphors, and all the things that don’t fit easily into logical sense. (Which of course is most of the important things in life).
On Biddulph’s recommendation, I researched the work of psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist describes in remarkable detail the workings of the brain, outlining the necessary separation of the left and right hemispheres in almost all animals, right back to the Startlet Sea Anemone 700 million years ago. He describes how the right hemisphere’s view is inclusive, integrative. It is comfortable with ‘both/and’. It is at home with the and yet. The left hemisphere’s view is exclusive, analytic and fragmentary. It focuses on the ‘either/or’.
Both hemispheres are vital to our functioning in the world, but,it is Mc Gilchrist’s assertion that Western civilisation has grown to place far too much value and emphasis on the ways of the left hemisphere – needing always to be right, grasping for immediate solutions, casting aside anything that does not make logical sense, or that does not fit with what it thinks it knows. He proposes that our whole society has for thousands of years neglected the more synthetic, contradictory, nebulous ways of the right hemisphere.
Click, click, click, Tetris sense.
The wild creature side of me understood that the octopus was what I needed to decipher my womb, to come to terms with her removal. The wild creature side of me brought the octopus to the tip of my tongue, to the edges of my vision.
I’ve experienced this alchemy with my surroundings, or with something I’ve seen, in other ways too. My therapist works very somatically, and so when she notices that I have become activated by something I have said, she asks me often to look around the room until my eye settles on something that I am drawn to. I am always surprised what I settle on - in a very calm, tastefully decorated room, I’ve been drawn to a) a dirty plug socket b) an ugly clock c) how the lamp light fell on a corner of the ceiling. But each of these items, when I’ve spent some time describing them and considering why I’ve been drawn to them, has opened up something powerful and deeply supportive for me. The plug told me I needed simplicity, routine, domesticity while I worked my way through something, the ugly clock was shaped in such a way as to signal a holding whilst also a granting of space, the lamp light told me, somehow, that everything was not going to fall apart.
Intentional walks, known as Immram, that I have taken as part of my beautiful friend Mari Kennedy’s Next Stage Celtic Wheel have also shown me what I needed to know. Or maybe it is that I’ve allowed enough space for my subconscious, or perhaps my right brain’s wisdom, to surface. Walking once with the question of where I should go with my business, I came across a rotten tree stump, which had decomposed so that the upper half was ok, but the lower half was completely disintegrating, holding the rest up in an unsustainable, precarious way. Seeing that helped me register deep in my bones what I had known for some time, but had been avoiding - that the way I was working was neither sustainable, nor would it lead to true, luscious, healthy growth.
Each time this happens to me, it feels like magic, it feels like such a powerful form of alchemy. But actually, I’ve come to now think it is even more beautiful than this. It is having conversations with my environment in a pre (post?) cognitive, pre (post?) verbal way, it is stilling myself enough that truths I know already are animated in the landscape, and then refolded back into me.
I’ll write some more another time about what it was the octopus had to tell me.
Layla x
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