Woven in Crimson
- Enna Razal
- Apr 19
- 8 min read
This blurb is written in an ink the colour of crimson. The fabric of blood weaves through the sentences and my words are needles that stitch together a deeply personal, a deeply ancestral story. Join me in my preparations to walk up to the blood tree by the cliff, and find out how I am learning to connect to a (my) bleeding body.
A poem to start with - travelling to Kurawaka, a place where the Earth is red.
Crimson blood.
Spread to the roots of a pine tree.
To birth from the world. Back out into the world.
Blossoms of life.
Soil and land – this gift is yours.
Red Earth at Kurawaka.
The divine river.
To and from the Moon it flows.
Meanders of interstellar intelligence. A rhythmic dance.
Cosmic pendulum swings. Of balance and connection.
Once. Were.
Crimson blood.
Spiritual force. Embraced by life. Embraced by death.
The divine river surges. Forcefully.
Inside. Of me.
But depletion prevails. Not nourishment.
The blood. For twenty-two years. A herald of sorrows.
Thus. By the pine tree. I stand.
As red fluid infiltrates. Into the Earth. Runs through the soil.
Where. It binds together. The strings of ancestry.
Crimson blood.
With the intention. Of a Ritual. I come.
To set free. To release. To give away.
What was never supposed. To be carried across.
Darkness and pain. Emotions and feelings.
Of my fore-mothers and -fathers.
Those. Who did not dare travel to Kurawaka.
Those. Who judged and feared. The divine river.
Therefore, by the tree I stand. And I ask.
To follow the flow of crimson. To be taken to the place of Kurawaka.
To read about my story. In the books of blood.
The actual story:
With ink, the colour of crimson, I write these words. The fabric of blood is what weaves through my sentences. Red threads of storyline twist and intertwine, are of different hues and shades like arteries and veins in the body. The pattern is an intricate one. Difficult to disentangle. Yet, to unravel the pattern is what I have been trying to do for the past days. It is the weaving of my blood story that I like to understand – I wish to read the full text, not just gather clots.
160 millilitres.
This is the volume of fluids and nutrients that my body expels when it menstruates. Three periodic cycles ago, I quantified the amount for medical purposes but also the topic had glued itself to my consciousness. Because there are questions that ask to be explored. These question marks have been growing as the years passed by. It strikes me to realise that for the first 21 years of my menstruating life, I have not paid attention to the subtleties of the pattern. Why was the clothing of my bloodline woven under such pressure and performance? Why were the threads of ignorance if not carelessness rather than love for a bleeding body? Why had the crimson been spilt all over? Recalling the details causes me to shudder. And likewise, writing about my blood story does not come naturally to me. Finding suitable words and knitting them into sentences of a new pattern feels stagnated somehow. My poetic voice cramps and my belly has hardened. My breath is shallower than before and my mind filled with a surge of rageous energy. Sitting with these mind-body sensations is confusing me like it so often does when I discover an experience not to originate from my lifetime but to be much older. An energy of a different era, a different generation, a different life. Rooted in the emotional world of the people who came before me. In the case of unravelling my blood story, this relates, first and foremost, to the woman who has delivered me – my genetic mother.
Her fears are alive inside of me. Her dislikes dwell in the caves and caverns of my primal brain. Her emotions manifested in my neurology, are unconscious energies that may govern my behaviour. For most of my life, I believed each of these energies, no matter if emotion, feeling, like or dislike, to be mine. To be what I was. For example, never did I enjoy being touched on my belly skin. This particular area of my body has been tabu. Only now, as I learn to question my Self it is that I identify many of my (former) preferences as ancestral residue. The distinction between the parts of I versus the parts of other is not exactly an easy one and far from straightforward. The same applies to the reconstruction of the ancestral storyline, tracing the methodology with which the pattern of my story was woven.
About the life chronology of my mother, I know very little, and even less when it comes to topics like pregnancy, femininity, and love relationships. Given that pre- and perinatal experiences cause such deep imprints in the lives of both mother and baby, I am especially interested in reconstructing what happened to the woman who delivered me during this time. But I hardly can: neither are there photographs showing my mother being pregnant. Nor do I recall a single story, a single tale being told about her experiences of becoming a mother. There are not any memories of her talking with pride or joy or excitement or fascination about pregnancies – of which she has experienced five. The same applies to other such female things. If it was sexuality, intimacy, contraception, menstruation, love… there is nothing. Sharing her personal experiences with me was seemingly as taboo as was for my partners to touch the skin of my belly.
Two years ago, amid my health crisis, I started to investigate. One late afternoon it then was that I discovered medical files about my mother´s pregnancies. The documents were three inconspicuously looking booklets hiding in a sideboard drawer next to the TV. I had discovered a part of my blood story. Black on white notes, and what evidence they were: Two miscarriages, bacterial infections, early deliveries, abortus imminens (near death of the embryo) twice ... The numbers read much scientifically, yet as real-life pregnancy experiences they must have been terrifying to go through for a young woman in the late 80ties/early 90ties. I am not aware of if my mother had psychological support. Her silence does not indicate so. In a conflict, she once shared in agony that with each pregnancy her health would have degraded – further and further. Pregnancy seemed to equate for her to discomfort only: another allergy, another food intolerance, and another whatever-else-complication with her or the babies. Her words were harsh. I remember her words to include an accusing tone. As if the embryos had been responsible for her misery and intentionally decided to complicate her life.
Unveiling my mother´s medical files was simple compared to the challenge that lay ahead: matching and processing the information. Make sense of the imprint, all those bodily sensations and reoccurring emotions that had been lingering in my system for years. Disintegrating the pattern comes with a feeling of sadness. As I pick it apart and observe each unravelling thread falling to the ground, I can but only admit that fostering a nurturing, loving, and caring relationship with myself is nothing I have learnt from my primal caregivers. Likewise, embodying femininity has long been a foreign concept to me. Nearly as foreign actually as the female body that I inhabit. Cultural and societal influences of the Western world did not help, of course; but here I exclusively relate to the ties of my ancestral bonds. The tie between mother and daughter, and their mothers. The connection that was meant to exist in my female lineage. The joy and the warmth that I was meant to feel, to be provided with simply because I existed. The comfort and the security that was meant to be shared with me. And not last: The transgenerational wisdom that was meant to be passed on from my mother to her daughter.
To me.
In the loom of transgenerational pain, it was that the fabric of my blood story was woven. It has taken me three years to realise so and yet to this very day, I am seeking, I am craving, I am questing for someone to show me the other side. Someone who knows how to undo the ambivalent pattern or, at least, add on to the old cloth something anew: transgenerational wisdom. I wish to outgrow what my ancestors were not able to deal with. The rageous emotions. All their unprocessed feelings. To invite aliveness rather than stagnation, vividness rather than darkness into my life. To prove to myself (and them) that there is another way. I am not afraid (anymore) of my family´s secrets and shadows. If only the process of resolving the ambivalence was a lucid one and the ball of wool had not been entangled. Its threads are so thick and so red, deeply do they reach into the fabric. The pattern of my blood story has been sewn for generations – I am the first one to pick up a needle and try to change the design. By hand.
I should not be surprised that this is exceptionally difficult and a challenge I rather wish to put aside and forget about. But I cannot. I cannot ignore the things I have had to learn the hard way and so I try to stitch a new design, and add a new chapter to the tale. Will I be able to transform the discomfort? Set free inter-generational rage in non-destructible ways. Invite peace and calmness into my body´s womb area. And what about the heavy menstrual bleeding: may the blood loss decrease when my organism has reached an enhanced state of homeostasis and well-being? I wish to find out even if I have to leave my rational mindset and venture out into a mystical void. A sphere of knowledge much larger and more holistic than what one may find in the world of academia. To step away from the latter, poses a challenge for me. To only immerse in the former is not something I wish to (and can) do and thus, I practise a middle way. That is I invite openness into my psyche instead of rejection. I read about science and in the same instant reality allow myself to visit the blood tree, my sacred place.
There is a pine tree residing on the hill behind the house. It overlooks the valley in which I am living and majestically sits on a cliff face seat. Half of the tree roots face south where they cling to the last crumbles of limestone rock above an 80 metres abyss. The other half points north and holds on to shallow calcareous soil. The grassy meadow by the cliff is where butterflies dance. A lynx may pass by at night. At dawn, the Eurasian eagle owl claims her territory by voice that echoes from the ash trees into the woods below. It is an extraordinary place; nothing but a personification of nature´s regenerative power. At the pine tree it is, where I give my monthly lifeblood back to the Earth. This giving has become a personal ritual which I am repetitively celebrating around the days of syzygy. And the moon's face is waning again. My next periodic cycle is about to conclude. Soon, I will be walking up to the pine tree and practise to be with my bleeding body. The next visit is going to be special in that I aim to connect with my ancestral lineage and feel into whatever experience may come up. If possible, I will try to travel to
Kurawaka.
Kurawaka is a place where the Earth is red and at this exact place, it is where I intend to untie the thick red treads and stitch a new pattern. I wonder if this may be all that is required: To let the fabric of blood glide through the flesh of my hands. To work with it and to feel its intertwining pattern.
Simply, to acknowledge the old and the new threads - woven in crimson blood.
Mai-i-Kurawaka is the long version of the Te Reo word Ikura which means: from the red earth at Kurawaka, Kurawaka here being the pubic area of Papatūānuku, Earth Mother. The Māori language knows quite a few words when referring to menstruation. Like te awa atua - the divine river - for example. See: https://www.nzaee.org.nz/professional-learning/going-with-the-flow-pld
For neuroscience about transgenerational inheritance and how to break the cycle of transgenerational trauma: https://www.drmarielbuque.com/breakthecycle The work of Mariel Buque is quite fascinating. She too shares Indigenous roots.
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