Not Yet Speech Ripe

Storytelling when we feel grief for "the everything"

Laura from Alaska has goats living in her greenhouse.

And, she is also the greatest podcast editor and first listener of KnotWork Storytelling.

She sent me an email yesterday to let me know that the latest episode was ready, and she included a personal note.

“It felt like a story about grief was trying to surface, and got stuck… I just wanted to put it out there that something told me there is a complex knot of a story just waiting to be told.”

Whew.

Well, that’s true.

When you listen to this episode, you’ll hear a new fifteen minute introduction to a story of mine called The Last Sovereignty Goddess. I released the story last November, but I am returning to it now to honor the mythic character at the heart of that tale. 

When you listen to Remembering a Goddess Three years on, you’ll hear all about the Irish goddess Mongfind who is most often remembered as the evil stepmother in the story in Niall of the Nine Hostages tale.¹ And, you’ll hear about how she came to me on the Autumn Equinox of 2021, and became the matron goddess of the podcast when she named KnotWork and told me this work was my work to do.

What you won’t hear are the stories about grief that I am not ready to tell.

This summer, I offered you Moving Through Grief that Stops You In Your Tracks. I took you with me into a “breakdown to breakthrough” healing experience that enabled me to release tears for my mother, fourteen years after she was gone.

In so many ways, that’s an easy grief. The cries of the motherless daughter are piercing, but they’re simple enough to understand.

The grief over the… almost everything is harder to understand and express. 

And, it’s even harder to receive such grief in its inchoate, “not yet speech ripe” form.²

But that is what you’re getting in Season 5, Episode 13, recorded the week of the lunar eclipse and the autumn equinox shortly after I found out that an elementary school classmate had died after self-immolating in protest of the genocide in Gaza.

The episode title is about remembering a goddess, but it is just as much about remembering Matt Nelson.

When grief and joy constantly eclipse one another

My day-to-day life is marked by contentment, and even joy. Dog walks, tremendous conversations with my writing coaching clients, driving my talented kids to their various activities, and joking with my husband about how we only see each other for five minutes a day.

All the while, there’s a weight of grief for the everything outside our isolated family raft that stills my pen and snarls my stories. And my editor was present and compassionate enough to let me know that my audience will be able to tell, if they listen close enough.

And that’s… ok. 

More than ok, really. Laura from Alaska³ gave me a tremendous gift when she listened into the pauses and told me she could hear a story I wasn’t yet ready to tell. It’s a story I am not ready to tell myself.

But, I think it has a lot to do with something

Leila Madeline

posted on Instagram this week:

The system is broken and needs to be fixed.

The system is working as designed and needs to be dismantled.

Yes. That.

Fuck. It’s that.

My grief is for all the brokenness we feel when losing⁴ in a system that is designed for, as Riane Eisler says, domination, not partnership.

I have been afforded a deeply comfortable life by this system. A safe home full of love, complete with a well stocked pantry steps away from beautiful forests. Work that I adore and the means to buy all the books I could want. Access to health care and the means to pay the bills when our high deductible insurance plan will not. 

And yet, I feel the massive discomfort of living within this perpetually imbalanced design.

When you become just aware enough of that discomfort, it seems to emerge as grief.

That’s where I am right now. 

And, also, I am sharing a story of a goddess who is born from between the breasts of a magic mountain and who ages backwards and ensures the health of the land and its people through divine marriage.

All of this is true. Gorgeous, terrible, tangled, and designed. All of this is true.

1. You may simply know this as the story about kissing the hag at the well. Mari Kennedy offered us a brilliant version of what might be considered the “traditional” version of that myth.

2. I must thank colleague, friend, and former client Royce Fitts for this phrase. And I highly recommend his book about all that is, and is not, speech ripe, The Geography of the Soul: Dreams, Reality, and the Journey of a Lifetime.

3. Laura has a last name and everything, but all my podcast guests know her as “Laura from Alaska who will make us sound amazing” and I feel you should, too.

4. “Losing” was a typo, and I meant to say “living in a system,” but I think it’s way closer to what I am not yet brave enough to say.