The Root Mother's Journey
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The Root Mother's Journey
The first time that I read the fairytale Bluebeard I was probably about ten or eleven years old. I remember being so frightened; my heart racing and sweating a cold clammy sweat, I slammed the book shut and ran outside into the beautiful sunlight, and let the beautiful day calm my heart, mind and entire Being.
The medicinal art of storytelling is at the core of the most ancient healing and religious traditions in the world. This tradition is known still, as "The Medicine Wise Woman Tradition." At the core origins of the Root Mother Legacy, is the once considered, since time out of mind, holy practice of channeling story. In essence a storyteller is not “making up a story.” The Medicine Wise Woman and Healer would become a channel for Soul and Creator to convey deeper intra-psychic patterns within the individual and collective psyches. In the many times complex weavings of archetypal symbolism, they are applying deep and ancient medicine that supplies the human being as well as the collective societies with spiritual and psychological road-maps with all the elements needed to ultimately take ownership of their own lives; by reclaiming the fundamental, eternal territory that belongs to the Soul and its Creator.
After almost two decades since the fairytale Bluebeard informed and imprinted deeply in me as a child that there were necessary truths that needed tracking and uncovering to understand the devastation in my childhood; the story came to me again, and this time with a very powerful and simple message: “This time, we are getting to the bottom of this.”
In the original story of Bluebeard, the main male character in the story has a blue beard, that informs the innocent, young maiden that his charm is acting as a cover for something very off about him, and as we find out, actually something deeply evil.
As I began to realize that these sacred story medicines wanted to tell themselves through me, “Bluebeard” became “The Glass-Eyed Gentleman.” He anecdotally tells his romantic interests about how he lost his eye in a war. The romantic interests notice that the very unsettling reality is that his glass eye is almost undetectable, except that it’s the only eye of the two that carries any tiny sign of humanity. But they brush it off as perhaps their inability to “accept differences and diversity.” In my life experience and through the process of waking up, discerning, and finally tracking and rightfully accusing one one of the abusers and child molesters in my life; my grandfather; Bluebeard, channeled through my psyche and Being, naturally has a glass eye the way my grandfather did in his youth.
The Glass-Eyed Gentleman in the story gives his eventual, new young bride the many, many keys to his huge castle deep in the woods, now, their home. He tells her that she can open and enter any room except one, who’s key is a small, curious and distinctive one. Her glass-eyed groom then goes away for a while.
The young maiden, curious and full of a new sense of adventure, sets about opening and entering every room in the castle save for the forbidden room. When she finally has only the forbidden room and its corresponding key left to explore, her curiosity and sense of adventure at this point are pushing her to throw all caution to the wind; she unlocks and opens the forbidden chambers.
The sight that meets her is nothing short of horrifying: The room is filled with the blackened, bloody, decapitated bodies of the glass-eyed gentlemen’s former brides. The new bride speechless with horror slams the door shut and immediately tries to hide what she’s done. But the small key belonging to the murder chamber won’t stop bleeding. Try as she might, she can’t get any remedy, bandage, or desperate pleas or cries to get it to stop bleeding.
Eventually, her husband comes home and discovers her disobedience, and proceeds to drag her down to the chambers by the hair, making it clear it is her turn to die. But she’s able to trick him into buying more time. She goes to her bed-chambers and starts praying and crying out for her brothers. Her brothers appear on the horizon in a cloud of dust as they gallop to their sister’s rescue. Just as her glass-eyed husband screams that she’s out of time, and begins to ascend the spiraling steps to her bed chambers, her brothers come barreling in and proceed to slaughter the glass-eyed murderer, and in the process his glass-eye is dislodged from his skull socket and shatters on the stone floor of the castle into a million pieces.
This ancient, powerful folktale, carries the very essence of The Root Mother’s story, and therefore the story and journey of all women, her daughters, and with that the inevitable male journey, also from capture, a dance with the predator, and finally the journey back to the Soul and its Creator.
The Root Mother’s message and lessons at their most fundamental, start with: The reality of an ancient, intra-psychic predator makes it so the innocent and the holy will very early on experience capture and defilement. The bloody chambers are our collective, ancestral, as well as inevitably personal, wounds, secrets and traumatic undercurrents. The very act of the inter-psychic “marrying” of the Glass-Eyed Gentleman is, in this world, most times completely unavoidable. Since the The Root Mother, our First Mother was unable to avoid being tricked, and instead, as her ancient stories inform us, was forced, through her own naivete and in the end, choice, to take a bloody route in a captured dance with the predator on her way back to divinity and freedom; such is the reality of our human journey. The fact that the The Root Mother could be tricked; if such purity, of which our very beginnings and essence derive from, could fall victim to such a force, that isn’t Creator, yet seems to be able to wield some unseen power nonetheless; this informs us that absolutely anyone, through our free will, can knowingly or unknowingly choose this path. In other words, no one is special, we are one river, made up of divinely unique individuals, on our way back to True Love, The Original Heart, or in Korean we say “Shim Jeong,” together.
This deeply grooved pattern and path, has become both the poison and the cure. Like untangling a deeply tangled knot or removing a bullet from the wound; whether as a result of necessary or unnecessary pain and/or violence, the only path to healing is back through the same pathway or wound entry that created the emotional, spiritual and/or physical hemorrhaging in the first place.
Most of our lives tend to be a cyclical process, that if we strive to, of becoming more and more adept at re-entering wounds; personal ones, collective and ancestral ones. Walking with the Root Mother who knows this journey inside-out, back-to-front, above and below, is a journey encoded in our bones. Our only true chance of healing is if we awaken to it; that we dare to disobey the predator’s orders to essentially not awaken to reality and instead be compliant and remain un-initiated. We can potentially develop a skill set more precious than diamonds that can eventually spot right away, that the Glass-Eyed Gentleman’s glass eye is not a result of being a valiant soldier; but that when a glass eye has more humanity than his a real one, we recognize him for who he is, not who he skillfully pretends to be. In this way we not only free ourselves over and over from this existential pattern, but we pave the way for the many generations to come, and also free our ancestors and the past from perpetuating unresolved pain.
Our time is now, at any age, at any stage of life. It’s never too late to choose consciousness and awaken.