Meet Anna

One expression I find for the twists and turns on this holistic journey is through developing a fictional character.

I learned on a writing course how healing it can be to create a person who copes with life in a way the writer perhaps strives to :) An alter ego perhaps. Try it, I'd love to read some.

My character, Anna, has been underground for many years, enclosed in a pod, kept alive by a series of lifelines fed by a central laboratory. I'm not so sure she is an alter ego at this stage, more of a vessel through which I express my human experience. i could use her to weave ahead of myself but only small portions of the story are clear at a time, it is unfolding as I unfold and so it becomes another slant on my lyrical commentary, a playful way to tease myself along in accepting my life path.

Anna has grown used to her incarcerated state, at peace with the walls around her, a burrow woven with tree roots and the occasional worm visitors.

Mother Earth has birthed her, pushed her out and up at a time of cataclysmic destruction on the surface. Anna's pod and those of other pod-dwellers contracted through earthquake, delivers her to a safe sheltered spot, a lean-to in a forest. She is alone and barely conscious as her system goes some way to assimilating the trauma of birth. During her first night in this makeshift healing space, a blanket is laid over her and clothes left by her. A thin soup, hearty and nutrient-rich is within distance of her nose and she awakes while it is still warm. She can not see, yet instinctively she grabs, drinks, absorbs this life-giving broth before sinking back into sleep.

Gradually her physical sense return. Each night she is visited and food is left for her. Her strength returns.

Anna is angry ~ sore with confusion about the trauma of her underground life, yet overcome with massive waves of trepidation as she processes the task ahead of her now. Giving some airtime to woeful distaste that she survived her birthing swiftly shows her it is not the way forward. One can try to rebury oneself only partially and eventually it is lonely and filthy work. No, outwards she must go, onwards she must go.

She practises her voice on days then the rain is pelting down around her. Keeping herself within the confines of her lean-to (itself a palace in comparison to her pod) she relishes the experience of her sounds being released. Walls they may be but so flimsy and full of holes, the song escapes to meet the cleansing raindrops. Vibrations of wellbeing as she learns to trust her sound, ripple through every cell of her physical form and wash delicately, resonately through her mental and emotional worlds. The gutteral calls ranging to effortless skylark notes an expression and balm in one act. The rain pounds, the girl sings and in those moments all is well and all is one, flesh, sight, sound, peace, home.