WILD HEART
  • Home
  • Join
  • Programs
    • Dirt Time (women's 8 day rite of passage) >
      • Dirt Time application
      • Dirt Time, your facilitators
    • Thrive Rewild Quest 8 day survival trip >
      • Thrive 2023 Quest application
    • Vision Quest - 4 day solo (8 day program) >
      • Vision Quest information
      • Vision Quest application
    • Vision Quest Protector >
      • Quest Protector application
    • Apocalypse Babes Mini Survival Quest >
      • Apocalypse Babes Mini Survival Quest application
    • Seven Levels of Quest
    • Powerful workshop Sydney
    • ManCraft Men's Retreat - 3 day
    • Women, Unchained
    • Archetypes of Power
    • Thrive 2020 Wandering Quest 8 day survival trip
    • Rapport Based Relating
    • Goodbye Good Girl- Hello Wild Woman
    • River of Grief
    • Wild Heart Gathering for adults
  • Gigi 5Rhythms
    • 5 Wounds of Connection 7 day retreat
    • Heart of the Huntress 2022 Australia
    • Archetypes of Power workshop
    • Pussy Says No - Australia 2020 with Catriona Mitchell and Gina Chick
    • Quest -Bali - 5Rhythms Waves Retreat with Evangelos Diavolitsis and Gina Chick
    • Dance of Transformation Ongoing
    • 5Rhythms workshop enrolment/ enquiry
    • Women, Unchained
    • Heart of the Huntress 2020 portugal
    • Powerful Retreat Belize 2020
    • 5Rhythms EnTrance monthly class
    • Heart of the Huntress Facebook discussion
  • Gina Chick / Gigi Blog
  • About
    • What is ReWilding?
    • Facilitators
    • Contact
    • Song of the Wild Heart
    • Songs from Gigi
    • Open Letter from Gina Chick
phone: +61412181943

gina chick / gigi amazonia Blog...

Welcome to the place where my heart haikus fly free. You'll find they are honest postcards from frontiers less travelled, unwrapping taboos about sex, life, drugs, dancing, grief, death and a world in transition. Each piece will take you on a journey. And each piece will deposit you safely back on the shore, I promise. 

You can support this process by commenting and sharing to your networks if a piece moves you. To share, simply click on the heading of the post, copy the url and paste to your network. Comments are gratefully received and add to the yummy conversation, helping us stay connected.
​
Thank you for helping this community grow. All my love, Gigi.
    Yes! I'd love to know when the next Gigi offering lands, and to hear when her novel She Wolf is published in 2023. (You can opt out at any time)
Submit

My beautiful ghost

6/10/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Eight years ago today, she flew. Every year at this time I feel the bittersweet kiss of Spring. Life explodes in clouds of feathers, fur and fang, and the pungent soundscapes of creatures in rut. Bulbs burst, flowers pulse, pollen wafts on warming breezes. Fledgelings wheeze, joeys scramble, young snakes eel like oil through the grass. Life puts on a show everywhere but where she should be: that scrap of life I called mine, grown from my cells, is gone. There is a hole cut out of the world, and with it a piece of my heart.

I climbed a mountain today, for her. Took myself up and up, off the path, up a sheer watercourse, scrambling over rocks and vines to the escarpment, thick heath scratching my legs to pieces, which I liked, the pain reminding me I am here, still alive to feel it. It stings even now, as I write. Good.

She would be eleven, long-limbed and lithe, titian curls cascading, or perhaps rebellious, shaved it off at a friend’s house, do you like it, mama?

I met a tiger snake on the steep forest path, we were polite to each other. I gave way, bare feet and all. It watched me with a bright eye, tongue flick-licking the taste of me from the air. Found a burrow of some creature, I hope it’s a quoll. There were wildflowers everywhere, pink and purple, her favourites. The sky was so huge I thought it would swallow me. Part of me wanted it to. She would have loved it all; snake, sky, scramble. I had to love it twice as much, for her. It wasn’t hard. Doing it without her was, though.

It was a hard climb today, steep in places, and still she would have been big enough to make it with me. Scampering ahead to explore, waiting for me to haul myself up the cliff. A couple of stretches I might have had to boost her up toothy rocks, but not many. I almost saw her a couple of times, my shadow playing tricks like she used to, hiding behind trees to jump out, surprise, did I scare you, mama?

Yes, love, you did. You can stop now. Joke’s over. Come out and let me see you.
My beautiful ghost, my one precious cub.

Eight years. What a marvel.

In the beginning, grief was bright as arterial blood, the pain so enormous there was no room for anything else, like an amputated finger, all the nerve endings howling with shocking intensity. Just grab the ragged stump and wait for the white hot wave to crest, to taper, please god, hanging on, barely, thrust utterly into the now of this breath and this one, stitching together a cloak of tears.

I almost miss it. Those early days brought me into presence in a way I had never experienced. I was inescapably here, alive, every sense acute, there was no respite from the constant fiery shock of realising she was gone, and in that I found a rhythm. Grief became the dirt under my feet, the oxygen in my lungs, the water in my mouth. Whatever I thought life would hold for me, this was not it, but all the other doors slammed closed, all at once. Sometimes life is like that. It has immutable plans and now there are no do-overs, just pain, all of it, forever branding me a wanderer, without her.

Eight years later the blood isn’t bright any more, it’s dark as ink and sluggish and has soaked into bedrock, deep as the Australian desert, its heartbeat so slow and ancient you have to press your ear to the ground and go still as a stone to catch the vibration. Ba-boom.

Long grief is old and cold as iron and ice. It’s terraformed the mud and earth of me. There’s a bone weariness in me now. Carrying my bundle of stories like firewood for a bitter winter bends my back a little. Long grief wants to make an old woman of me, and although I refuse to let it, sometimes I just want to lie down and for it to be over. Eight years is a long time to be dancing. I am a little daunted by the idea of another eight, and eight more after that.

Long grief hides. It’s so embedded, whole villages and castles and cities have been built on the bones. Children play, unaware their playground is a skeleton of some creature vast and mythical, who once roamed these hills. Their laughter an echo of hers, and sometimes I still hear her on the wind.

‘Mama, I love you this much’, her arms open so wide she topples over and laughs with her whole body, head rocking with glee, whu-whu-whu.

I miss missing her. It’s true. Part of me always will, miss her, that is, but that part isn’t in my sight most of the time. Long grief is a bit cruel like that. It’s hidden her away from me. Except for these days; her birthday midwinter, this day in spring when the jasmine sings of hospitals and dread and the clocks leap forward an hour but not hers, hers wound down and no matter how hard I listen for the lightest tick-tick all I hear is my own shadow, faithful at my heels, reminding me that for every beam of light there is its opposite, and her gift lives not in her footprints but in mine, tracking her gifts further into the world she left behind.
​
So that’s all I can do today, really. Remember her as best I can and watch these grizzled bare feet carry me up a cliff to sit at the top of forever, gazing at clotted horizons and holding a ghost girl who loved life so much my heart aches with how much of it I still carry for her.
0 Comments

    Author

    Gina Chick (Gigi Amazonia) brings you miscellaneous musings on ReWilding, Grief, Love, Healing, World Consciousness, Transformation and a whole host of other juicy morsels. Grab a cuppa, put your feet up, and enjoy.

    Archives

    January 2022
    October 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    November 2017
    June 2016
    May 2016
    March 2016
    June 2015
    August 2014
    July 2014

    Categories

    All
    Blaise
    Death

    RSS Feed

    This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies.

    Opt Out of Cookies
  • Home
  • Join
  • Programs
    • Dirt Time (women's 8 day rite of passage) >
      • Dirt Time application
      • Dirt Time, your facilitators
    • Thrive Rewild Quest 8 day survival trip >
      • Thrive 2023 Quest application
    • Vision Quest - 4 day solo (8 day program) >
      • Vision Quest information
      • Vision Quest application
    • Vision Quest Protector >
      • Quest Protector application
    • Apocalypse Babes Mini Survival Quest >
      • Apocalypse Babes Mini Survival Quest application
    • Seven Levels of Quest
    • Powerful workshop Sydney
    • ManCraft Men's Retreat - 3 day
    • Women, Unchained
    • Archetypes of Power
    • Thrive 2020 Wandering Quest 8 day survival trip
    • Rapport Based Relating
    • Goodbye Good Girl- Hello Wild Woman
    • River of Grief
    • Wild Heart Gathering for adults
  • Gigi 5Rhythms
    • 5 Wounds of Connection 7 day retreat
    • Heart of the Huntress 2022 Australia
    • Archetypes of Power workshop
    • Pussy Says No - Australia 2020 with Catriona Mitchell and Gina Chick
    • Quest -Bali - 5Rhythms Waves Retreat with Evangelos Diavolitsis and Gina Chick
    • Dance of Transformation Ongoing
    • 5Rhythms workshop enrolment/ enquiry
    • Women, Unchained
    • Heart of the Huntress 2020 portugal
    • Powerful Retreat Belize 2020
    • 5Rhythms EnTrance monthly class
    • Heart of the Huntress Facebook discussion
  • Gina Chick / Gigi Blog
  • About
    • What is ReWilding?
    • Facilitators
    • Contact
    • Song of the Wild Heart
    • Songs from Gigi
    • Open Letter from Gina Chick