Graveyard

What a time September was. Stretching out on the grass in our garden and being ‘in’ nature as an escape from the two nonagenarians I was caring for, turned into simply being with nature for the company of all that’s there. My daily grounding practice is now fortified.

One morning, I spent several minutes watching a caterpillar inch its way across the garden. It navigated the tangle of grass, weed and rock with aplomb and I marveled at its tenacity. Rainy season is here and I’m noticing caterpillars all over the garden in varying states of life. Some don’t survive the dry patches of the day. Others do.

Some time later, I noticed a butterfly hovering just above the grass, flitting about in a dance of its own design, and it occurred to me that this butterfly was likely born in this very garden. Did it remember its days as a caterpillar? Did it hover just above the grass in remembrance of the days in which it toiled on tiny feet shimmying across the field? Was it looking down below, getting to know the garden with new eyes? Could it be looking up at the sky wondering how high it could fly? Or, perhaps, had the caterpillar forgotten its former life and was simply living anew without the baggage of the past?

It amazes me the places my thoughts go now that I’ve divested myself of social media and now that I’ve taken to simply being with my thoughts when my nose isn’t in a book. I wonder at times if I’m thinking too deeply about it all, but this moment of observation in the garden really struck me to my core and I’ve been turning it over in my mind ever since.

I am that butterfly, freshly born, still a bit sticky from the cocoon, checking out my new wings and experimenting with how far they can stretch. I’m unfamiliar with this new body, thankful for it, but grieving the death of my caterpillar self.

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There’s a fine line between wallowing and processing. It’s an even finer line given how slowly I process things in general. I am a cow—I do most things very slowly. So, I’m hyper aware that, in working on and telling the stories of the songs from early 2022, I might come across as wallowing. It’s 2024 now, get over it. Someone said as much to me some months ago.

The thing is, I wasn’t fully present in 2022. And now that I’m fully back in my body (it’s nice to be back but wow, the magnitude of feeling), moments from that era have been returning to visit with me. The way I’ve been dealing with it is by returning the songs I wrote in those days and working on them in their varying stages of production. It’s like traveling back in time—my older and wiser self looking on at my younger self, unable to change the course of events but watching on with compassion. I know how the story ends but I’m honoring my past self in her pain without overstaying my time. I’m continually letting go.

This is the sixth song that I’m sharing from the collection that I’ve dubbed ‘Under the Sacred Tree’ and I can genuinely say that there is much less left for me to let go from this era than I had at the beginning of this project.

** I’ve been having fun watching the adventures of Mr Caterpillar but I understand if you don’t like creepy crawlies

I wrote about the trauma of medical malpractice in my previous post. Now that that is a few years behind me, Now that I’ve done lots of therapy, Now that I’ve completed and released the album that helped me create space between myself and the traumatizing event, Now that I’ve been home in the Caribbean for 2 years now, I can finally look clearly and closely at those early days of injury and isolation. Now I can actually feel all of the feelings from that time. The immense sadness. And fear. And fatigue of just getting up in the morning, going to work, and then going to a doctor who, I had continuously hoped, would finally give me good news (they never did).

The thing is, I cried a LOT in those days so I was definitely feeling the feelings. But somehow, I wasn’t actually. I was just putting one foot in front of the other. I wrote and recorded this song, Graveyard, to get through those days of trudging. It is one of a batch of songs that I wrote on a full moon weekend in April 2022.

Similar to the other songs in this collection, this was created using loops that I found and blended together. The drums give me a dramatic, cinematic, fire and brimstone-y feeling which honors the imagery of a graveyard. My favorite part of the track is the vocal ad lib by Tamara Flerinskaia (known as Brightness), who I found in my hunt for loops. She’s packaged under the title “ethnic vocals”, which warrants a side eye, but was exactly what I was looking for.

Ostensibly, I remember writing Graveyard as a way to say goodbye to my 20s. With this song resurfacing in my psyche 2 years later, I’m thinking of what the song itself means for me now on the other side of healing from injury. The burial ground awaits my offering.

I’m saying goodbye to performing on stage and solo music projects. I’m saying hello to collaboration and moving into different modalities of creativity. I’m saying goodbye to living on a leaf floating in the wind and saying hello to more rootedness. I’m savoring living in the Caribbean and I’m taking steps to formalize living here. I’m allowing myself to be touched by my environment, which is very new for me (so new that I wrote a song about it (more on that later)).

my caterpillar neighbor hanging on after torrential rain

So, I find myself in a graveyard, my caterpillar-self honored and let go, and I once again marvel at the different stages of alchemy that music-making takes me through. The graveyard I visualized during songwriting differs from the graveyard from which I write this post, and yet the mantra is the same.

The chorus was written with the hope that I would one day find my feet and now I have, though the person who walks on them is now altered. I’m more and more okay with that. In acquiescence to the Life/Death/Life cycle taught by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run With the Wolves, I acknowledge that I’ll find myself coming back to this graveyard over and over again as the years go by, both figuratively and literally.

In my writing about walking the Camino de Santiago earlier this year, I neglected to mention that I viewed it as a funeral. Closure for everything. As a child growing up in Belize, when there would be a funeral, there used to be a procession of people walking from church to the cemetery. I used to live near a church so I’d see these all the time. Sometimes I’d even walk along with them for a block or two with the other neighborhood kids before scampering back home.

If walking the Camino was my funeral procession, finishing this song is the actual burial.

I’m feeling a little bit more in my peace about it all.

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Lyrics:

How long should I wait in this graveyard
of memory and dreams left over
from the ones down under?
Rivers will carry me away, far
if I’m not careful, rooted, understanding of myself

The stars will catch me, as I’m a cloud
The moon will hold me as I’m falling down
And I will save me; I’m upside down
I’ll find my feet when I’m on the ground

How much more time will I spend
digging bones in this graveyard
of memories and dreams that were never mine?
I’m my own river, I carry me away
I’m careful, rooted, and understanding of myself

The stars will catch me, as I’m a cloud
The moon will hold me as I’m falling down
And I will save me; I’m upside down
I’ll find my feet when I’m on the ground

I’m digging, digging, digging in this graveyard
Burying, burying what doesn’t serve me
Digging, digging, digging in this graveyard
Burying, burying the old me

The stars will catch me, as I’m a cloud
The moon will hold me as I’m falling down
And I will save me; I’m upside down
I’ll find my feet when I’m on the ground

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Fallen Leaves:

🌱this post is a continuation of my previous post about my song, Reverberate, which is behind a paywall for the sake of my sanity, as the story is very tender and delicate:

🌱just two songs left from this project to share and they are significantly less fire and brimstone-y. I haven’t yet decided if I want to publish these songs on streaming platforms…Spotify and its ilk are so accessible yet their payment model is extortionate. I’m truly enjoying the cocoon and sanctity of Substack. We’ll see.

🌱song I’m listening to on repeat:

🌱currently reading: The Significance of Copal to the Maya and Garifuna People of Belize by Mary Ellen McKee. Reading this is part of my inquiry into using sacred cleansing plants that are indigenous to my lineage.

🌱shout out to The River, a gorgeous online creative community which has been holding me in energetic creative support as life continues to do what life does. They offer a number of live Zoom gatherings each month to nurture our creative flow. I’m a big fan of the bi-monthly creative sangha. Here is the calendar of events for this month:

See you on the next full moon~

Feroza