“May you rise like the phoenix from the ashes,
Reignite your precious embers,
Break from your constraints to dance on air,
Rise like the swelling tide, the harvest moon,
Rise like you will dare.
Rise like you’re awakened from a hundred year sleep.
Rise and keep on rising,
like a mountain heaving, growing, peaking,
endlessly replenishing from deep within.
Rise above the mist, to see the early morning sun.
Rise like tender seedlings bravely pierce the frost.
Rise and mend your heart
as your breath caressed becomes your words let loose.
Arise and say your piece, in truth.
Arise from fear to be here now, alive,
more alive than you have ever been.
Rise and you are seen. Rise and lift each other up.
Rise, for freedom.”
Janey Coulbourne 2020
This poem, theme for this week in my Earth Pathways diary captures something of the spirit of the phoenix after whom my business, Phoenix Bee Healing is named. Rising from the ashes is such an evocative image. And the bee from the name? A few years ago the eco-farm where my sweat lodges are held had a whole load of bee hives. Someone set fire to the hives, causing devastation and death to the bees. It was a shocking thing to happen, such wanton and nonsensical destruction. In time, the hives were rebuilt, the colonies of bees replaced. The bees rose from the ashes like a phoenix.
We too can rise in this way with the right help and support. Trauma can cause our lives to feel like ashes where everything is dust and nothing is living. With help that resonates with us individually we begin to nurture and feed the dormant and unseen life that dwells within those ashes. With warm sun and soft rain, green tips lift and fill. Life returns. As Horse says when he is asked “What is the bravest thing you have ever said?” in Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the mole, the fox and the horse- “Help.”
