Are You Skipping the Saturday?

When we go from the tomb to the womb.

I’m doing a three-day online workshop/retreat with Carissa Schumacher from October 12-14 and this crew below to dive deep into On Our Best Behavior. (More on Carissa here.) In this online retreat, you’ll also hear from my good friends, Lauren Roxburgh and Andrea Bendewald (you can hear them both on recent episodes of the podcast: Lauren’s episode on fascia is here; Drea’s episode on circling is here), and human design guide / intuitive astrologer Nik McRae (more on Nik’s work here). And yes, it sounds like there will be a transmission. More information, including registration, is over here on Carissa’s site—proceeds will benefit several causes, including people and animals devastated by the Maui fires. I hope you can join us!

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Are You Skipping the Saturday?

I spent the end of last week at a Carissa retreat (see above about joining this crew online in October). These events have become critical moments for me to honestly….STFU. To sit in structured meditation, to listen, to be with friends and new friends, to do “homework” around what I’m forgetting (spaciousness, silence, stillness), and what I’d like to create (stability). The focus this past week was on commitments, which as a chronic over-committer, hit quite hard. More on this to come soon.

As part of the journey, Carissa built a wheel, which we walked until we found a place where it felt resonant to stand. Typically, I’ve located myself in the northeast, but for the first time I stood due west, in the void. Carissa structures hers so that the north represents spirit, intuition, and service; the east represents abundance, power, and creative expression; the south represents purity, innocence, and play; and the west represents death. Or, more specifically, the tomb into the womb.

Aerial view of Medicine Wheel National Monument, Wyoming, 2002: Caption: “This medicine wheel was constructed by Plains Indians several hundred years ago. The star alignments of the wheel are most accurate for about AD 1200. This wheel, a U.S. Park Service National Monument, is one of the largest and most well preserved in North America.”

In journeys past, Carissa has talked about Passover, specifically the Passover when Jesus was crucified. Per legend, he was crucified on the Friday, shortly before the Sabbath began. On Saturday, he was entombed, on Sunday (Easter Sunday) he resurrected.

First, a bit about Easter and its wide-reaching implications from philosopher Alan Watts (I so love his distinction between faith and belief). As Watts writes in the aptly titled Easter: Its Story and Meaning: “Not only is the very name ‘Easter’ the name of an ancient and non-Christian deity; the season itself has also, from time immemorial, been the occasion of rites and observances having to do with the mystery of death and resurrection among peoples differing widely in race and religion.”

People say many things about Jesus—one variation is that he died for our sins in an attempt to wipe the slate clean and save us all (he never said that)—but in Carissa’s POV, the cross is a symbol for an unbalanced medicine wheel that needed to be brought into balance. (In fact, anastasis, which came to represent resurrection, breaks down into “return to balance.”) Regardless of your personal beliefs, what’s clear is that Christ’s journey is hugely mythical and symbolic.

As Watts expounds:

“Obviously the death-and-resurrection theme, myth, or image, does not enter into man’s imagination as a baseless and meaningless fantasy. There must be something underneath it, some desire, some inner truth, for which it provides the material clothing. It has been suggested that it is really a story about the sun or the crops. The setting and rising of the sun, the sowing and sprouting of the corn, are dramatized as the actions of hero-gods—Christ, Osiris, Ra, Tammaz, and Adonis, all of whom undergo death and resurrection.”

Carissa talks about this three-day cycle as something that we all must contend with: Whether you buy into Christ’s specific symbolism, he blazed a trail the rest of must follow, from death, to descension, to ascension and resurrection. Rinse and repeat. Friday: Death —> Tomb; Saturday: Tomb —> Womb; Sunday: Womb —> Resurrection. While we’ll all encounter big-death someday, our lives are largely devoted to little deaths. What’s a little death? It’s when we die to our ego, or experience the loss or death of a relationship, job, or identity.

Our culture struggles with big death (this is the focus of the chapter on Sadness in On Our Best Behavior, and last week’s newsletter). And we also struggle with more quotidian, daily losses as well. Letting go is hard. As Carissa explains, our preference is to skip the Saturday, to jump from Friday to Sunday.

We do this when we go right into a new relationship after a break-up or divorce—sometimes, we even set the stage for a new relationship while we’re still in the old one. We do this when we jump from project to project with no time to mourn, celebrate, or mark the end of an experience and prepare the ground for the next. Saturday is when we are supposed to be fallow, when we decompose. Saturday is when the tomb transforms into the womb, the essential stage before we recompose.

We’d prepare to skip this liminal phase and get right to the resurrection. To the shiny new job, project, relationship, event.

Here’s Watts again:

“Before it can come to life as a plant, the seed must be buried in the earth. Before it can soar into the air upon brilliant wings, the caterpillar must enter the long sleep of its chrysalis tomb. Before the splendor of spring, all the earth is shrouded in the gray, cold death of winter. ‘Unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.’ In those words Christ summed up the strange truth that life is ever dependent upon death.”

I’ve felt semi-fallow for months now—stuck, but not letting myself be stuck. I’m still promoting On Our Best Behavior, doing podcasts and press, and I’m writing this weekly newsletter, and hosting Pulling the Thread. But it still feels like I’m neither here-nor-there, afloat. If I’m honest, I was hoping to lily pad my way to my next book proposal, but everything is disorganized in my mind. A muddle. This past week, I realized in order to bring it down and spill it into the horizontal—to pin this next phase down with words—I need to go into the tomb. I need to mourn the end of one process in order to prepare myself for the next. I don’t think I had been thinking about it quite that way, convinced that I could monkey bar my way through. But now, I recognize that I have to let go, to let myself drop, to let myself fall into the unknown, the void. To let myself feel unmoored, unfixed, unrealized.

I would be remiss in talking about Saturday, or the Sabbath, without mentioning Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s gorgeous book, The Sabbath, which I’ve written about before. As Heschel writes of this sacred, seventh day: “He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.”

Here’s the resacralizing the Saturday.

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