dancing with defeat

'dancing with defeat,' a collage for the ancestors, made with love by Emma

The soft tears of defeat flowed themselves down my cheeks this morning as I dropped into ancestral healing space with a friend. The tears were a quiet surprise, I’ve been feeling well and full - although I woke up with our country’s needless support of gen-0-cides at large. There is lots of loss around, too, but that’s mainly giving rise to abundance and gratitude for two mightily well lived lives. Maybe that’s why defeat’s tears flow, amid poignant abundance and at this full time of the year. Here we are, poised on tip toes, standing at autumn’s rusty gate, slightly ajar, amidst overgrown hedgerows filled with finally plumping up berries.

There’s a mighty outbreath as the rain returns, dryness gives way to moisture. Tiny green blades break through the still rock-like soil, colouring in the small patch of parched, pale-yellow grass of the back garden. Maybe in this returning fullness defeat is more able to show up, with space to be met kindly, held, given time, and turned over in the palm of my hand, a marvelled-at jewel from Earth’s deep crust? Sometimes it seems to work that way, with what is expected and seemingly unexpected.

My ancestors pitch in and illuminate beautifully, as they do, how defeat nowadays lives in them as a corrective, and as a healing gift. My father’s people are upstanding folk of honour; sacred pilgrims, these ritualists turned warriors show again their brutal defeat at the hands of invaders, and how they eventually became relentlessly stuck. (What a relentlessly stuck land this is. And a beautiful one). The forefolks’ inability and unwillingness to feel defeat fuelled their unquestioned and unquestionable addiction to warring, at home and away. They were sensitively and aesthetically wired, too, these ones, despite their hefty chainmail and swords. They still are.

They love adventuring and they love being home – still do. For a long while they were lost in the in-between of putting their heads down and driving forwards, everyday heroes ripped from their roots. Quests which no longer grew from sacred, slowly embroidered, sacred foundations. Today the embroidery on their ornate ceremonial costumes is tattered. It is buried and long gone, but the trace echo remains of hands that are eternally and quietly sewing beauty, truth, kindness, and liberation into the fabric which is the best of all our cultures across this precious and crazed world. Today pausing to feel defeat is its own gift.

This gift of defeat slows me down and opens a space, inviting a pause. Relief flows on in. The relief in not having to repeat the same auto pilot action or well grooved habits, without checking the terrain afresh. It is a nearly a new season, after all. Not content with simply feeling the feeling and what the ancestors taught (and still here, questing with words) I google ‘defeat.’ It comes, apparently, from the French ‘defeter,’ which comes from ‘desait’ in old French, the past participle of ‘desfaire,’ meaning ‘to undo’ or ‘to destroy.’ This journeys back further to Latin and ‘diffacere,’ made up of dis- (‘un-, not’) and facere (‘to do, perform’), from the Proto-Indo-European root dhe-, meaning ‘to set, to put.’

Undone, yes, usefully undone in this moment, yet not destructively so, no destructive energy in these receptive tears. Instead, what starts as the uncertain stab of undoing becomes a slow, crushing wave. I slow my breath and notice the familiar desire to weave a story before I’ve even felt the feeling, managing to breathe and slow a little more. The pause opens a refreshing breather between well-worn habits and fake yet comfortingly familiar narratives.

I resonate with the words of not doing and not performing in this state of refreshing defeat. The slate feels clear, my face is washed by the tears, my hands are busy doing nothing.

Ancestrally I have caught up a notch with my beloved patrilineal lineage in this precious hour. I clock afresh how different these ones are to my matrilineal lineage, another thing that still slightly takes my breath away. The fiery, elemental grandmaas of South Asia, colonised and undefeated dance before my eyes, reminding me of those words again; the ‘not’ in front of ‘do’ and ‘perform’ holding my gaze. The nuance in knowing why I do what I do. And the how of how I do things. And when. All the while, the backdrop of the sometimes-alluring, sometimes repulsive pull of a performance-filled world. And how the suffering of a world literally on fire and deluged in flood water necessarily creates a crushing urgency.

How do I – we - respond to this urgency spaciously? How do I act without being in autopilot, adding to the melee, rather than easing suffering? These are the koans I shall be chewing on and practising with as I welcome the lengthening nights. I’ll act whilst not doing, not performing, either. Ritual, in all its manifestations, and warriorship were two aspects of life so beloved to my father’s people. My mother’s line, too, in a very different expression. Ritual and warriorship can so easily become performative or repetitive without fresh eyes, an engaged heart and in good company. In this potent cusp between seasons, I pause more and continue to listen up to what defeat has to say, giving thanks for its watery appearance.