The Stories We Tell Ourselves
What if our story is an ‘orphic egg’ whose gift cracks us open to a hidden reality? On mother wounds and feminine reclamation. Stories as Orphic Mysteries — Part 3.
“Our first identity marker is psycho-spiritual graffiti on the walls of our hearts. A story that says, ‘I am here.’” — Stories as Orphic Mysteries, Part 1
As I shared in The Song of the Human Heart, I feel like my whole life was a murder mystery, and I was the one who was killed. Within that lies a two-part unfolding discovery, which I continue in my upcoming second book, The Song of the Mystery.
First, why did it happen? What is it about the way our lives are mapped that makes it easy to suffocate life?
And second is an examination of that body. What is it telling us? Where is the mark of death? And which instrument was used to take that life?
The story arising from this discovery is about what happens when something else marks us, whether it's an ideology, a human behavior pattern, or a system. It all comes back to a story and an element of possession. When something else marks us, we lose the gift potential dormant within every struggle. We lose our ability to study our story, especially those sacred nooks and crannies that are the reservoirs of grief and loss.
Our story isn’t just what happens to us. It extends to what we see around us, and how that shapes who we become. As I’ve been developing The Song of the Mystery, I’ve wrestled with whether to tell the stories I see around me — stories about other people. Stories about loved ones. I wrestled with self-censorship. I questioned whether I dared to tell those stories and whether it could be done with dignity. And so I practiced a lesson that this entire book project has been teaching me: patience. Through trust in the fruits of patience while we sit by the wellspring of the human soul, the waters of grief eventually clear, and what is for us to know and possibly share eventually comes to the surface.
Growing up, I often heard my mother reading “Bibi Fatima ki Qahani,” a story about Prophet Muhammad’s daughter attending a wedding. She would read it over and over again… just like she told her own life story over and over again to any new listener.
When you’re born into a family, you don’t just inherit their ideas; you also inherit their stories. Those stories often become a part of us, informing us who we are and where we came from. In many ways, the stories become a kind of mantra or prayer as they’re repeated over and over again through the arc of our lives.
There was another story my mom would pull as part of her repertoire of recitals. It involved her time as a young bride. Newly married, she left her home country of Pakistan and joined my father in Afghanistan just before the coup and war broke out. The countries may be side by side, but they’re lightyears apart culturally. My mom found herself in an entirely new territory marked by a foreign language and social code she quickly had to learn to navigate. As a new wife in a somewhat arranged marriage, she had to adapt to a husband, the flood of in-laws they were living with, and the circle of guests they entertained almost every day.
That’s the background context of any stories about her time in Afghanistan. The story of the dog begins with how bored she used to get, unable to speak the language, and unable to move freely in society. To pass the time, she would visit a nearby caged dog and find new subtle ways to taunt it to get a reaction. When the dog finally attacked a family member out of the amassed frustrations, it earned a puzzled response from the family, who wondered why such a mild-mannered animal would turn on its owners. My mother stayed quiet, never sharing that she was the culprit behind the attack.
She tells the story with relish, blind to how the listener receives it, blind to how it doesn’t portray her in the best light, blind to what it says about her.
I’ve heard the story about her and the dog far more than I heard of the prophet’s daughter. If repetition signals hierarchy, that would put the dog's story above the prophet's. But was it really about the dog…or was it about something else entirely?
“Whatever bubble of reality we’re currently drifting in, we all remember the symbols in these shared stories, nestled like fossils in a primordial consciousness like a half-remembered dream. Other stories get stacked onto these, building the arcs and columns on a foundational symbolism. These stories call to us like siren songs whose signature locks into some part of ourselves. We carousel through stories we feel called to, but storytelling as a craft is something we grow into practicing as adults, even if all we have spun is a narrative about what we believe about our lives.”
— Stories as Psycho-Spiritual Graffiti (Stories as Orphic Mysteries, Part 1)
The story of the dog is one of the many Orphic eggs nested in my history that are finally beginning to crack. It’s her story, but it is also mine because she is my mother — a woman with whom I have a very complex and fraught personal relationship. A mother wound, they call it.
Or maybe this story of the dog finally cracked because I was tired of hearing it repeatedly painted in the same dull light. It needed to be buried in the Dark. It needed new life. And so I did. After decades, I pivoted the story and projected it into a new timeline, a new consciousness.
As I shared with her, the dog was a mirror for my mother. She, too, was caged, so to speak. She was caged by a custom that expected young women to marry when all she wanted to do was be a pilot and fly to America to see Elvis Presley. Caged by a new set of social customs. Caged by a language she didn’t know that locked her away from her beloved pastime of endless chatter. And finally, caged in a home she wasn’t allowed to leave by herself. I took a deadened story, flatlined by chronological linearity of “this happened then that happened,” and seeded it in new territory with rolling hills, arcs, and curves that give it dimension.
So many of these stories take the yolk of life and cement rich aspects of us into lifeless stone. That was the egg I had to break out of myself before I felt I had the right to continue telling the story of The Song of the Human Heart. I tried to break her out, too. Sometimes, I could. Most of the time, I failed. And in failing, I learned heartbreaking lessons: your wild eye is a gift, but many will see it as a disease they don’t want to contract.
I’m still learning and working my way through the mother wound. In the cavity of my own heart, I’m tending to the well of my own story, undoing the knots in this family line. I’m trying to understand why my mother held the same relish as the story of the dog, as when she told me years ago that I was too fat to buy a wedding dress. In writing this, I’m realizing that maybe, in some ways, I am a dog to also taunt. A wild thing trapped by the stories of the family — stories that will always see me as some unsightly beast. A disease to be avoided.
So be it.
Within my own heart, I have another secret vision of my mother. I dreamt of the end of the world, of the quiet that falls upon a dystopian landscape when the film ends, and the scene spans to a charred grey world marked by plumes of smoke. And through that, my mother came forward, oblivious to the world around her and lost in her mind to her own chatter. She carried a white satchel filled with apple seeds she tossed thoughtlessly to the ground — a Rhumphius-type character whose seeds grew in hyper-time into apple trees in full bloom, rich with tufts of white blossoms. My mother doesn’t understand me any more than she understood that dog, but her language is in that apple tree. Her language is seeding the ground wildly to see what will grow. It’s feeding people. It’s kindness to strangers. It’s being in service to those in need around her. She spreads that seed so freely to see what will bloom around her but cannot see what is trying to bloom within her.
She told me about a dream she had a few months ago, which I’m sharing with permission. In her dream, she carried a heavy weight she could no longer manage. The weight grew so burdensome that it became the only thing she could focus on despite her suffering — at which point my father (who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name) returned to her and took her by the hand. She dropped the weight and went with him to a garden of roses growing upon the water. They walked on water, surrounded by the flower he loved tending to most in his life: red roses.
I interpreted the dream for her. There are themes of indentured servitude, service into labor that is depleting. There are ancient Islamic motifs based on the Quran, which says that God’s throne is on water. The rose holds the mysteries of the sacred feminine.
“Ok, I have to vacuum!” she declared as she sprang from the chair like a hot popcorn kernel
“I didn’t just give you ten minutes,” I told her, feeling a little irritated but unsurprised at her slamming the door shut into her own heart. “I gave you twenty years and a week,” I added, tallying how long it took me to arrive where I could offer the gift of a wild eye.
I’ve been playing with the idea of time in my book series, being out of time, breaking time, cracking time as a sort of egg we’re in, opening into a new multidimensional reality… like a kaleidoscope. I’ve been playing with time as a rule we think we’re bound by. Changing how we think about time helped me shift how I feel about people and stories (especially the story of Islam) that, in one way or another, mark or possess all of us.
I think of time as a wild eye looking at everything in wonder through layers of perception. The lesson in the stories I inherited from my mother is what happens when we only see time chronologically; when we lose our wildness, we lose our range of vision. We become the pendulum that crashes against one side and another. The things that vex me about my mother all speak to that in some way: she crashed against things. The way she takes her thick tree stump of a forefinger and crushes it into an eyeshadow pan reminds me of how one puts out a cigarette. The way she wildly sweeps her arms against the wind chimes rattling musical rods as one rattles the bars of a prison. These are the deep, navel-gazing reflections I fall into when tending to the well of grief, a well that only through resonating periods of silence becomes a scrying mirror.
“Maybe she’s crashing against things for a reason. Maybe she’s trying to free herself. But from what?” I wonder.
“No wild eye,” my heart responds quietly.
I don’t fit in with my mother, no more than she fits in with her sisters — like a distorted nesting doll of the dispossessed.
Our yearning for wildness has something to do with it. We both yearn for something we don’t know — at least, I didn’t realize until I started writing The Song of the Human Heart series. Writing it allowed me to finally cut teeth, grow claws, learn to howl, and reclaim a primal language that Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes speaks of in Women Who Run with the Wolves. My mother hadn’t. And I could no more teach her than you can teach a domesticated wild thing kept in captivity to return to the wild. It must find its own way. It must want to leave the perimeter of society desperately enough. It must shed the old story of woe that comes with dispossession and see it as the critical dismantling of its cage. It must yearn for the frontier of wilderness as if it were its next breath. Nothing else will do, and I’ve learned that if you try to force what isn’t ready to be freed, it will bite you.
It will bite you.
The attempt to live a half-life, half-holy and half-civilized, creates an unnatural state … like a werewolf. A werewolf is neither fully wild nor fully human. In its attempt to hide its animal side, it becomes deranged under the whole light of a dark night, pushed into a possessed madness. It falls into a feeding frenzy with no discernment. That’s the mirror for our broken world — we have forgotten our wildness, falling into becoming monsters who feed on each other in blood lust.
To be continued in The Song of the Mystery: The Foundation for Human Belonging
Read Stories As Orphic Mysteries — Part 1: Stories as Psycho-Spiritual Graffiti
Read Stories As Orphic Mysteries — Part 2: To Devour is the Theme of the Hour