This is an experiment of more-than-human imagination and a different kind of nature writing, steeped in the mythical realm. You will also find photos I have taken during my time in Glen Affric, next to the river and its tributary streams and lakes. Enjoy!

I have several mothers. They are my springs and headwaters. They are freshwater tears, rolling through the ancient passes.

I am birthed in silence, in wind, in rain that returns me to my naval points. Out of the wombs of the Earth.

Water – pure and exchangeable in the human body. Our lîsso, streams roll, and as they roll they sing and speak. And as they speak, they divine the future, for those who inquire long enough.

The daughters of women have brought us food, brought us milk and cheese, and drops of honey, and wild hawthorn petals sent downstream.

We receive their offerings. We bring our old dreams, and our old dreams become their future. Here, it is all inscribed, recorded. Waters return to their sources, daughters return to theirs. Seers of all times know that divination is a spiral, just like a whirlpool in the cascading water.

My mother sources are as old as the last ice age. Nothing was moving within the ice, only the slow meltwater eating out the channels beneath the sheets. As if the land fell asleep for tens of thousands of years. If you sleep that long, how long does it take to wake up? What does the land dream? And who can you tell of your dreams in the coming of years?

My mothers say that their dreams are received by those who chance upon them, who gather their bodies around the headwaters, who sing and come with longings and desires to know. They receive guidance when they ask questions. Human mothers, human daughters, with their foods offered to the running waters. They have loved us for all the years of living here. For we bring water that has not been seen by the sun. For we bring the water out of dark mineral soil into the light – to glimmer and enchant the living beings – pine martens, red deer, ospreys, boars, robins – for they too are made of an animate mineral water. Springs are the places of joy and abundance.

My waters run through an old landscape. One of the ancient mountain ranges of the Earth crests and wrinkles itself away from the origin, the Pangean range. This separation happened millions of years ago. I am too young to remember, but every hundred years I receive a word about this division from the elder hills and glens. I am piecing the story together with each word. I write it under my waters, on the pebbles, and large slabs. It’s a slow work. I will receive the next word in 48 years.

Now this land is called Alba, Caledonia – Scotland. The ice melted leaving freshly scoured groves and gorges. Openness so vast, the first ones that came were pines. Caledonian ancient forest rooted here between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. Scots pine, rowan, alder, birch, willow and aspen. Most of them were felled during 17th-19th centuries. Humans needed homes, fuel, ships. They needed to go elsewhere. They needed to build, to fight, to protect, and exploit. They needed energy – solar power captured by trees. They needed to warm themselves, to survive the drenching winters, to be carried to far-way lands.

As the old giants fell, predatory animals were hunted out or had their home destroyed. I saw the last wolf in 1743. She loved watching her own reflection in my waters. During harsh winters, her breath would condense above the running water. She was all alone. They say she attacked two human children and a woman, but nothing says more about grief than this last leap of pain. A last cry and viscous begging to stop.

The wolf travelled north after displacement by a forest fire on the banks of the River Dulnain – just a Loch Ness and two glens away from me. Outraged, Laird MacIntosh brought a tainchel, a gathering of all hunters in the area, to discuss the hunt of the animal in the earliest time possible. On the hunting day, all men arrived early. Only MacIntosh arrived late. By hounds at his heel, he lifted up his plaid, and there it was – the head of the wolf he hunted down himself, before everyone else. With repulsive self-contentment, he threw her head on the ground. The whole ground reverberated and could have swallowed him alive.

Sky cried all day and all night. All rivers wept. Madyo, the bursting of the river banks. Tears flooded the fields. The wailing rang between glens, in caves, and beneath crags. Nothing was left unmourned. We knew what was to come was the time of the wet desert. Without the equilibrium-keepers, over the years, the red deer and sheep grazed off every young rowan, every blaeberry, and sapling. Teeth like razors. Endless stomachs left the land barren, rocky, and exposed. No trees to lock in the minerals and hold erosion. Nothing grew here anymore, no young shrubs to root with clumsiness and hold the riverbanks.

Only a few grandmother pines, less than 100 years old, protected themselves. Perhaps, by being curvy and unsuitable for logging. Or perhaps, someone cloaked them from the ghoulish eyes of greed and irreverence. Was it that the offerings that daughters left to feed the spirits still guard us?

But around fifty years ago, when I received my latest word from my elders, everything started to change. The word was belyo, tree, in the language of the elders. I remember people waded and waded around me.

They circled the hills in spirals. And then, they started planting trees, viciously. They’ve put up the temporary fences so that red deer and sheep could spare the saplings. Year by year, birches, rowans, and pines became bigger and stronger. They shaded and cooled the ground. Shaded my waters, and cooled my streams. Brown trout and salmon returned. In my glen and beyond, in the past 40 years, they have planted over 1,5 million young trees. Children had a chance to grow up. I can feel them pulse, tap, and scout for the waters of life.

They drink the tears from the underground streams. Trees are readying to be home to wolves and lynx, who one day will walk on this land again. I saw this forest in full thriving, the roots were tangled underneath the soil. Woven like an invisible tapestry. Everyone had its place, and life turned and tumbled with the winds and sleet, sunshine and warmth. Everything takes forever until it happens. The roots shared memory through water.

If you’ve been wanting to write in community, to deepen your writing and capacity express, unburdened from inner critic and other inernal pressure, this is for you.

Headwaters 8-week writing course begins on April 22nd (in 4 days)! We will work through creative blocks, clear the creative life-force river, and dive into soul-led writing in a supportive community. (If you have any questions, you can reply to this email or simply writ to me, to see if the course is the right fit for you.) You can find all the information about the course below. 𖦹

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On the thousandth day of war, the healing arts are calling you. You’ve heard that soft tug in your chest. A warm opening, a melting, an immediacy and clarity like no other.

What are the healing arts?

Anything that creates genuine betterment for another being (human or non-human). Regeneration is a healing art. Mothering is a healing art. Writing is a healing art. Painting, drawing, and illustrating are healing arts. Creating a business that liberates your time and focus is a healing art. Growing a garden is a healing art. Telling stories of hope and truth is a healing art. Nourishing yourself and your community is a healing art. I could go on and on.

This time is known in your soul, and mine.

We were born into the great turning.

To witness it with our eyes, what it means to go through a rebirth on a planetary scale.

For every serpent to shed its skin at once, to emerge anew, alive.

And yet, not only to witness, but to participate with the gifts we were granted upon our birth, and skills, blessings, hardships we collected and alchemized along the way.

If not now, then when? When are we to start? Truly.

Waiting to begin creating is a luxury we don’t have anymore.

We have been delayed. By the stories told to us, by the shiny objects, by the cool careers, by doubts, by duties, and necessities. That is okay.

However.

There is no better time to create than now.

There is no better time to write than now.

If you were thinking of shrinking yourself and your desires to create, while the world is unravelling in front of our eyes, I ask you to think again.

If medicine folk were to return to their hermitages, never to be seen during times of war and plague, we wouldn’t even be here to begin with.

We are saved by collective making, we are saved by open hearts, we are saved by sharing our medicine with each other: a poem, an essay, a photograph, a business, an offer, a capacity to build, a possibility to listen deeply, an otherworldly sensitivity, a word bundle travelling to reach you at your lowest.

Continue.

Times we are in call for a specific kind of immediacy, one anchored in slow groundedness that can carry us from one moment to another. The past weeks have been difficult on a personal and collective level. The heaviness we are handed down can feel like a pressure that’s very hard to stabilize and create movement from.

There’s a week left until the Headwaters writing course begins, I have family visiting over from Scotland, and there are dozens of things still to resolve in my day-to-day life that compound the feeling of overwhelm.

My nervous system is asking to narrow down my focus and to create pockets of stability (and sanity). To focus on things I can control and put into motion. To get clearer on my message and what I want to share with you, at this moment.

However, as much as this immediacy can feel paralyzing and freezing (some of us respond in frozenness, some of us spring into frantic action), it can also create a momentum that propels deeply intentional creation.

Rivers and water have been the most nourishing allies in re-awakening aliveness with softness and power, when the human world is closing in on itself. Sitting next to and spending time with rivers is something that I long for daily. And yet, as much as we have met rivers themselves, rarely do we meet their birthplaces, their points of arrival onto the surface of the earth — springs and headwaters — where life truly comes to be.

For the creative clarity to come in the deep throws, we must dive towards the calm waters at the bottom of the sea, and stride towards places of springs and headwaters.

To steep in moments of cooling darkness. To find an energetic cave that shields us from erratic thoughts and actions. To find grounding that’s not a surface-level distraction or momentary dissociation, but something that provides a deeper reassurance that this moment is safe to be in. And the next one, and the next one.

As a daughter of an evolutionary astrologer, I will be taking deep, broad steps into anchoring myself further to stabilize parts of me that are spinning out in all directions.

This means being intentional with what I consume, what I watch, and listen to, the foods I eat (there will be a lot of beans and nettle infusions to nourish the minerals and the gut!). Connection with loved ones and intentional time with the living world around me.

Aries energy (known for its warlike action-taking capacities) asks us to begin, but like no other time, the beginning must be consolidated into intention:

Again and again, how does my soul ask me to live?

What is the medicine that has been brewing within me, ready to be delivered in these times?

We begin in 7 days

If you are called to write at this time, if you feel that it is your medicine to share and you need support, as well as community to finally begin (or begin again), you’re invited to join Headwaters: 8-week writing and creative liberation course, designed to dissolve creative blocks, nurture the inner writer, regulate nervous system, help you create your writing a structure for clarity of your message. All done within an intimate writing community.

We begin on April 22nd. You can learn about the course here:

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You can also book a free clarity call with me, to see if Headwaters is right for you: https://calendly.com/ruta-zem/1-1-with-ruta

Much love,
Rūta

Headwaters 8-week writing course begins on April 22nd! We will work through creative blocks, clear the creative life-force river, and dive into soul-led writing in a supportive community. (You can book a free clarity call with me, to see if the course is the right fit for you.)You can find all the information about the course below. 𖦹

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After winter comes longing.

Longing of time nested in between linden blossoms, tall, giant oaks, and moss-laden stones by the riverine passage of sacred waters. It’s the longing I feel that awakens every summer. It’s stretched into long days of mirth and solitude, silence and symphonic presence of more-than-human lives around. The origins of this longing, I can trace to my childhood. But I doubt it started there.

Growing up, I loved (still do) gloomy spring and summer days. There was a sense of strange possibility I would never feel on a sunny day. During afternoons of rain and thunder, full drops would begin marking the asphalt, announcing the arrival of a quiet time. It felt as if a portal had opened up and created a secondary time-space in which I could exist.

It’s as if the warmth of the rain fed everything in existence, to grow lusher and more alive, including me. Later in life, my time in Scotland fully solidified this feeling.

In the final years of my bachelor studies, I lived in a Scottish Victorian spa town called Bridge of Allan. The town itself was built into a cascading hill, outpouring with old, secretive houses, and a combination of native and exotic trees growing tall behind the garden walls. Summers here were wrapped in spacious solitude. Behind the last streets of the town stood a small wood, extending upstream the Allan Water river. I spent countless days walking the riverine path, up the hills and through the Mine Wood, stones overgrown with moss and small bracken.

My longing extends to how my mind felt during my time in Bridge of Allan. And the only word I can find is enchanted. As if it was not yet fragmented by technology yet to come. Days were simple, yet dynamic, by the design of the wind and the elements around. I still remember the sound of wood pigeons, beating their heavy wings, pushing off from water-laden branches. Everything was covered in water — abundant and lush.

Recently, from a 1945 map, I discovered that behind the woods, atop the hill of Bridge of Allan, there is a small hillock called Fairy Knowe Cairn. Occluded from my vision by the slanted hill, I passed this cairn hundreds of times unbeknownst to me on these walks. The Fairy Cairn was believed to be a burial mound of the Picts. Excavated by Sir J.E. Alexander and his team in 1868, the burial was previously thought to be a sacred place for Druidic worship, selected to oversee the Dumyat hill and the beginnings of the highlands (pictured above).

“After considering the whole circumstances of the case, we are inclined to believe this grave or sepulchral mound to have been of great antiquity. The absence of metal implements of any kind, bronze or iron, shows that it belongs to the Stone Age, par excellence, probably long anterior to the Roman invasion. The supposed fragment of a spear-bead, and of a spear-shaft, with the arrow-heads, indicate that a warrior slept below. The two urns were probably filled with the ashes of members of bis family, and might have been placed in the mound long after his interment,” writes Sir J.E. Alexander.

I remember walking the paths within the hills and feeling so deeply inspired, nourished in spirit. I joked to myself that my runs above Bridge of Allan were spiritual, but now I see how magnetic the land was with so much magical history above and beneath the Earth’s surface.

Looking back at that specific time, when my university time was ending, and a new, unknown time was beginning, I long for that spring and summer, of pure connection to the elemental spirits that lived there way before the town was even built.

I long for the sense of possibility, for hills, for stones, for tree roots holding secrets.

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And so, longing begins with absence. Absence of love, of connection, of beauty, of peace, of nourishment, of adventure, of awe, of the living world, of the past or future, of time spent differently.

Not having is the prerequisite for that aching feeling in your chest.

Do you have what you want?

No? Then, you qualify to long.

My longings started early. I grew up in a Soviet-era neighbourhood. The architecture rose out of necessity to house the increasing number of people, after war-devastated city areas. (The Soviet government at the time was giving these flats for free, but you would have to sign up and wait. That’s how my grandmother got it.)

As a child, I didn’t question why our homes, all the neighbourhoods as far as the eye could see, were built like this. It was normal and expected. This is what fascinates me about childhood: we can be born into the strangest environment, and we will accept it and absorb it as the norm. Only later on do we begin to question.

Of course, these buildings from the 60’s still stand today and house many people. But we have lost the necessity for beauty somewhere along the way. Whimsy became a castaway thing for stories, myths, and tales.

The harder the deprivation, the stronger the imagination.

I have to admit, as a child, I wasn’t a reader. I found it hard to focus, and I would rather have watched a film. But then, at a ripe age of 12, a friend introduced me to a story that would change my life forever.

It was The Lord of the Rings.

For the first time, I felt seen by a narrative.

The contrast between here, the real world, and there, the imagined world, was painful. Perhaps, I felt like I didn’t really belong in the time of modernity and everyday reality (like many of us). During that time, my family was going through a lot of dramatic changes, we moved a lot, and I had changed schools. It was stressful and alienating at times.

But this story was a life raft. It showed me that humans are still capable of beauty and reverence. It grew my desire for big trees, forests, rivers, for ornamental patterns and cozy nooks at home, for lineage, for friendship, and fine hobbit waistcoats. (I must admit, I wanted to be an elf.)

Certain stories nurture our longings; they open the passage to a secret garden, which, from then on, leads us to a world that we will go on missing and wish we could return to again and again. Stories bring us closer to the desires they themselves created.

Around 18 (during my move to Scotland), I read a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, where I learned about his hatred towards modernity, the industrial age, war, and technological advancements.

Was it a shock? No. Was it deeply comforting? Yes.

Knowing it, I felt that there were people, just like me, who didn’t fully feel at home. That there was perhaps a different time, or a different way to be in relationship with this planet, that I had not seen modelled before. Tolkien shared his own longing, and as a consequence, unleashed the collective longing for generations to come.

My time in Bridge of Allan and Stirling fed into the yearning for ancient, old time.

I was aching for time before all of us could remember. Time, lost with each coming generation, songs and tales forgotten. Ruins and stones, inscribed with labyrinthine circles and ornate scripts of magic. Only brought to memory through our bodies, resonant with places we have never visited in this lifetime, ancestral memories of melting with the land and the spirits of it. They run in our blood. Undying minerals in the waters carry these memories forward. The future reaches us through our yearning.

I pushed away this longing as I moved to Germany. Here, the land feels different. Spirits of the place don’t whisper to me. The wind doesn’t comb my hair. The rivers lay stagnant; they don’t dance, nor jump over the passage of rocks and pebbles. Only the old oaks lean their branches to soothe my heart that feels out of place.

But over the years, Scotland began calling me back. I returned, and returned again, feeling a strange melancholy and a deep nostalgia, growing inside me.

Last year, my partner and I attended a beautiful retreat called Song of the Seasons, lead by Emergence Magazine in Devon, South of England. We stayed in Sharpham Estate, an 18th-century villa, overlooking beautiful pastoral land and the River Dart. Someone mentioned that this place looked like from the Pride & Prejudice (2005 version, of course). I agreed. My 15 y/o self rejoiced. Someone like Elisabeth must have walked these meadows, riverbanks, and hills.

Our days were filled with workshops, meditations, walking, nourishing food, connection with other participants, and land-connection practices. Surrounded by ancient Yews and Oaks, by the rolling hills and meadows of wildflowers, I spent several days in a dream state.

It’s as if my longing was met: you get to live in this old castle, walk as much as your heart desires, sit with profound questions of life, and bow in humility to all of the growing, ancient beauty around you.

And yet, the desire deepened.

During one of the afternoons, in my journal, I wrote:

“I feel a longing that cannot be satisfied.

I am down by the riverside of Dart. Below the Sharpham house. Longing to live on the landscape so vast, time unfragmented. Of sisterhood and friendship. Of communing with the spirit. I cannot contain this longing, and so it leaps out of me in a form of tears. My soul misses such vastness, and oldness, and beauty.

The oak trees older than 4 generations of human ancestry. A place where I cannot see modernity, and its vile treatment of the Earth. I don’t want to return to the city.

The river is on a low tide, and the mud with seashells and seaweed are exposed. The river slowly returns to its full width, expanding like the heart.”

At that moment, I realized that places like these empty us of toxins of the mental technological age, at least for a couple of days. They reset the sense of time, even for a short while.

In all of my searches to trace down the roots of my longing, I realized one thing: we miss time, time that we have lost as a Western society. Time, untouched by the constant fragmentation of the mind.

I remembered Tolkien and his lifelong effort to bring this world closer. Teaching us to desire a different kind of existence, and then deepen it through intricate details.

Proust has encapsulated this sense so well:

My humble list of longings

As I round up this piece, I am sharing what is sitting within my heart. I am planting it. I invite you to leave your longings in the comments, to plant them, so we can yearn together.

I long for a time with women, a stone circle, a lively ancient river running by. To feel deeply nourished by the friendships, time together in magic, and a sacred passage of time.

I long to trace and know my maternal line.

I long for ritual and ceremony.

I long for nourishment on deep layers of my body and soul.

I long for unfragmented time.

I long to be in Scotland again.

I long to write my book one day and to publish it.

I long for minimal technological exposure and my focus and attention being my own again.

I long for deep reverence for Earth’s beauty on a mass scale.

I long to live in a land-based community of like-hearted humans and more-than-human beings, that holds the ancient wisdoms.

I long for growing nourishing vegetables and a big, beautiful, old garden of flowers and trees.

I long for ease, for days in the mountains, for meadows, for scale that brings me awe.

I long for softness and kindness in this world.

With love,
Rūta

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!

If you long to write, then join us in Headwaters 8-week writing course. We will begin on April 22nd! We will work through creative blocks, clear the creative life-force river, and dive into soul-led writing in a supportive community. (You can book a free clarity call with me, to see if the course is the right fit for you.)You can find all the information about the course below. 𖦹

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"One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey to sources is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable."

— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

I want to tell you of a place I know. My favourite place to be and receive nourishment from the depths of the Earth. I have found it, in the opening of a labyrinthine forest.

It is a place of spring, often called headwaters.

Headwater is the source of a river. The underground water surfaces, small streams meet into one. It’s where life force energy steps over the threshold and makes itself visible in the world.

In writing and creative work, headwaters is a place where you create your most authentic, enlivening work. This is where you and your soul are nourished from the depths. The river, from then on, continues its course, and nourishment multiplies into your communities and ecosystems.

In a world of pollution and dams being built daily to corrupt our sacred streams, those who are called must gather to clear the life-giving waters.

I invite you to join me to purify your own creative life force river with me, and to write in a deeply nourishing 8-week container.

In Hadwaters, my number one goal is to bring you closer to your creative essence and allow yourself to fully embrace it and express it — especially in writing.

We will work with the true, vulnerable, authentic, essential parts of the self that are the most foundational to the writing process.

Because the most interesting, alive, invigorating writing comes from the place of inner truth. Which is where we're going to journey.

Your writing "level" doesn't matter here. You might be just starting, or you might be writing for years. We welcome all.

We begin on April 22nd and will journey for 8 weeks together.

The 8-week container is designed to transform your relationship with writing and self-expression. You will learn how to prioritize your writing and communicate your high creative value to the world by integrating the inner creator. The work that your soul has been asking you to create starts here.

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How will our 8 weeks together look like?

Here’s a small overview of our time together. You can find a more detailed schedule here.

Week 1 — Descent to Headwaters: Meeting Your Personal Creative Essence

At the beginning, we will be connecting with your authentic, creative self essence so you know what it feels like to write from an authentic, soul-aligned place. Here we will meet your personal Headwaters, a place of deep inner nourishment. A sacred place of the spring, where we gather to drink, get inspired, and begin to create.

Week 2 — Clearing the River: Unblocking Limiting Beliefs, Doubts, and Inner Critic & Inner Rejector

In this week, we will work on unblocking your deeply rooted limiting beliefs that hold back your creative potential, your writing, and your authentic creative self, so you don’t waste any more time second-guessing your creative self-worth in the world.

We will predominantly work with the inner critic and inner rejector. Understanding these parts will lead us into a deeper sense of freedom when it comes to expressing ourselves with truth. This is the clearing of the river.

Week 3 — Facing the Fear of Being Seen (Workshop - Sharing your work)

This is a new beautiful addition! This week, we will spend a good amount of time training and expanding our capacity to be seen in our creative work and writing. This practice has been deeply medicinal for past participants.

Here we will further integrate the previous two weeks and make space for words that are already coming through.

Week 4 — Somatic Writing: Body Writes the Score

Learning to write from the body, so you can be attuned to the subtlety of the inner sense of truth when telling a story. We will uncover your personal voice and learn to discern what makes good writing that your readers want to come back to.

Week 5 — Animus that Heals: Discipline, Structure, Focus, & Putting Your Work into the World

Creating a positive relationship with creative writing systems, structure, standards, and discipline. Knowing how to resolve resistance is the most crucial part of the creative workflow. I will share my systems, structure, and how to work with a part of us that helps to materialize our creative vision.

Week 6 — Idea Synthesis: How to Never Run Out of Ideas

Becoming an Idea Synthesizer, someone who can integrate differing topics into each other, so you can build a diverse audience at the hearth of your deep, authentic expression. We will build out your own personal niche, pillars of writing, so you always know how to move forward in your practice.

Week 7 — Assume Form: Mythologizing the Self

Two final weeks are twined. We will be integrating the identity of a writer, understanding your personal myth, and most importantly—integrating the identity of a deeply deserving creative. Lasting change happens when we shift our identities. Identities shift when we are brave enough to connect with the truth of our being AND when we practice being in that identity long enough.

Week 8 Integrating the Writer’s Archetype (Workshop - Sharing your work)

An additional week to help us absorb better everything we have learned so far, share our writing, and deepen our new neural pathways of a new relationship with writing in our lives. Celebrating the transformative journey we have gone on.

Extra focused writing sessions

During the 8 weeks, we will have additional calls to sit down and focus on our writing. These sessions usually last 90 minutes. Here we come together without distractions and get straight into the zone. These sessions might be used for journaling and working through course materials, or just writing and experimenting.

I am very excited to be alongside you and begin this journey of writing, healing in community, dreaming, imagining, and transforming from within.

Much love,
Rūta

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Happy International Women’s Day!

This short piece is about everything that feasts on women.

Personally, I am tired of seeing women and girls being feasted on. I am tired of seeing women and girls being subjected to mental, emotional, energetic, physical, sexual, and financial exploitation. I am tired of letting my energy to an invisible force that feeds upon human life force, without my knowing. This essay is for those who are done being feasted on, and those who wish to draw the line in the sand.

This essay is an energetic antidote.

Blood, vitality, and a woman’s right to live fully

There’s nothing like a health crisis to inspire an essay.

I’ve given my blood for a check-up, for the second time in the past few months. The first time around, I went to the doctor to understand my never-ending hair shedding cycle that’s lasted for over 7 months. I wanted to know what’s wrong (again) with my body, and why I am having such symptoms. First time results came back with low ferritin, iron storage protein (mine was 34.7 - healthy hair range starts from 70 onwards), D, and B12.

Second time around, after taking iron for 2,5 months, my ferritin has dropped by almost 8 points. The news took me off guard, as I expected an improvement, even a slight one, and definitely not a loss.

The emotion that I felt underneath was a sense of anger, perhaps an inner rage.

Why is my blood getting worse?

The vitality of it, the capacity of it to carry oxygen and distribute all the life force through my body, is diminished. I feel it in my dizziness, in my heart palpitations, in my short attention span, in my cold feet and hands, in my thinning hair.

In that moment of the blood results, I felt like I was suddenly giving my vitality away to something invisible. It’s been happening for a while.

I don’t know what it is, I can’t point a finger to it, but I can feel it.

Perhaps it’s the thousands of years of patriarchy dancing on our bones, trampling our skulls, and crushing our hips. It’s a spiritual warfare against life and those who bring life onto the planet.

Can you handle your vitality smoothly draining into the abyss of nothingness? Into the black hole of the alorythmic time destruction? I no longer can. The feasting on women is so deep in human history, so ingrained into our imagery and collective unconscious, that it’s hard to detect it.

In a world that is built on top of women, aren’t we the ones feeding the system with our bodies, our money, our emotional and mental work, our energetic currency? We were educated out of our boundaries, our magick-making, out of desires, purged out of self-serving intent.

Everything and everyone wants this power of the creatrix. And if they can’t have it, they will make sure you don’t have it either. The history is riddled with women’s lack of vitality being a desirous ideal.

The Victorian era alone left us with such gems as the romanticization of the wasting disease (tuberculosis). Translucent skin, sunken bright eyes, rosy cheeks and lips, and a slender body were highly desired, often mimicking the physical wasting caused by TB. The wasting disease was associated with, and thought to represent, intense passion, artistic streak, creativity, and spiritual sensitivity — individual qualities that were brought onto the sick person by their own predisposition, lifestyle habits, and even their personal striving for the beauty ideals of frailness. The compsumtive chic, coined by Carolyn A Day, is having a return in its current incarnation of the heroine chic.

Sometimes society sacrifices women through sheer ignorance, and then there is a very premeditated, direct, and active role. Today, we are in the era of both.

The sacrifice of the virgin young woman is as old as history. But to whom were all these women and girls sacrificed? I want to see the gods that devoured them, I want to see what gods the sacrificers wanted to appease. Through thousands of years of this dark magic, what beast have we fed, and are still feeding today?

It’s strange how the ‘general population’ in the West has been exorcised out of magic, out of relational practices with the land and the ancestors, that any sort of magical, animistic perspective is thought to be crazy, while those who actually ‘lead’ the world are in full-time occult practices (since the beginning of dawn).

It’s the same with women’s blood.

Woman’s monthly blood is one of the most powerful fluids on Earth. But through ages of shame, puritanism, and punishment, we have internalized the rejection of blood — and vitality that comes with it.

Menstrual blood was used to nourish the earth, plants, paid as an offering to ancestors. Today, in the Western overculture, our blood is discarded during each menstrual cycle, only seen as an unnecessary byproduct of the body’s rhythm. If you are in resistance to your own blood, you are in resistance to your own life force. The stagnation of this resistance corrupts your vitality.

Those who shamed us for our monthly, cyclical bleeding are those who create the biggest bloodshed on earth. Those who deny blood are the bloodthirsty.

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The dark things I don’t want to talk about, but I must

The world is built by men, for men. We’ve been in this dark patriarchal cycle for over 5000 years, perhaps longer.

But the past months have exposed some incredibly shocking revelations about girl (and in general child, and young women) trafficking, sexual, mental, and physical abuse. The ways of patriarchy have reached the inflection point.

Every time I would consume this kind of content, I felt a deep sense of emptiness. As if a real-life dementor has been sucking out my soul through even engaging in these kinds of stories.

I am tired of seeing human life being feasted on. This feast has been televised specifically since the Genocide in Gaza. All of us in the privileged, physical-war-free zones have become accustomed to seeing a ritualistic child sacrifice happening all around the world. In Palestine and other fertile crescent/West Asia countries, this public child sacrifice is called war and self-defence.

In the past months I’ve been in deep throws listeing to Predictive History classes. Professor Jiang explains how the zionist cult actually performs these ritualistic mass child and woman sacrifices as part of their larger strategy. They want the world to hate them, to unite against them. So they can fulfil their ultimate religious war. A similar thing is now happening with Iran.

I am tired of seeing girls, women, men, children, all people being feasted upon.

Poet Tom Hirons outpours this rage towards this kind of devourer in his poem Molok.

This chronic exposure to shocking images and news has induced an effect of hypernormalisation on the collective nervous system. The nervous system is so accustomed to darkness and sickness that it accepts it as a normal state of affairs. In a way, this acceptance is needed to finally reach disillusionment with the power dynamics of the global ‘elites’. We need to be shocked out of complacency and blind belief. On the other hand, acceptance alone will not lead us to change. Chronic exposure and acceptance only take us to learnt helplessness, incapacitation, and resignation.

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Magic, boundaries, and vitality as an antidote

If the magic was taken away, we must return it home. We must cleanse our doorways with smoke and pour salt on each side of the entry. We must light up a bundle of dried herbs that our grandmothers’ grandmothers would have burnt around the windows. We must hide bay leaves in the four corners of our beds. We must lather a fresh piece of bread with honey and offer that on the altar for our ancestors, and ask for protection. We must invite the magic back in, as our vitality practice.

If they are feasting on you (whoever they are), say no. Open the claw-trap that your hand got stuck in and heal your wounds in relation to those who truly see you.

Sometimes, we are the ones who sacrifice ourselves at the altar. We neglect our own needs. We overstep our own boundaries. We subconsciously make a pact with the one who takes our energy for something in return. We invite the feasters to the table of our flesh. We sacrifice ourselves for our relationships, families, jobs, and friends. For what? We trade soul desires for false closeness, for a sense of significance, for perceived goodness. We pour the spring water into the dam, we pour our life force into a poisoned well.

All you are being asked for is to draw a line in the soil. To say: no. No longer can I be drawn upon. No pathogens, no parasites, no one who I didn’t give my consent to can take from me. Unless it is a gift or a reciprocal relation.

Say no to that project, that task, that dinner or coffee date, that trip, that business idea, that client — anything that drains your precious juices, life-giving waters. Unsubscribe, de-commit, delete, block, and close the curtains on those that feast on you. Dare to look selfish and crazy.

Behind a No to everything that drains your life-force, rests an awakened vitality that can be re-invested back into you: your home, your creative project, your book, your garden, your children, your business, your relationship with your soul.

I want to dare to be selfish. I want to dare to care about myself enough to build a business and write my book. I want to care so hard that I can shut down every single distraction and lock in. I don’t want to be feasted upon. I want the vitality of my blood to support this vision. I want the heat and aliveness of my cells rejoicing in life.

Underneath every pull into distraction is a fear of facing oneself and one’s own potential. “Not yet. I can’t handle this much focus on my own dreams yet”, is a sentence underneath the energy of witholding form your life.

I know, it’s scary to be fully alive, boundaried, healthy, full of vitality in this world. Everyone will want a piece of that. But we are no longer in a time where we lay our vitality, our blood on the sacrificial stone for gods other than our own soul.

We cannot dim our light because someone else will feel blinded by it.

Protect your attention, your imagination, your energy. Nourish your body, come out into the sun, speak to your ancestors, listen to the birdsong, hug your friends and loved ones, and most importantly, create — whatever small or big you can. May it be planting seeds in your balcony, a poem, an essay, a photograph, a song, a meal to nourish your beautiful body.

Antidote to war and bloodshed is creation.

Much love,
Rūta

Headwaters 8-week writing course begins soon! We will work through creative blocks and dive into authentic writing. You can find all the information about the course here. 𖦹

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If invoking ghosts, demons, spirits, gods, demigods, nymphs or hobgoblins helps us write, then we should banish the superstition about not being superstitious and invoke them without embarrassment or hesitation. ‘All deities reside in human breast.’
— Philip Pullman

Headwaters 8-week long writing course begins soon (April 2026)! We will work through creative blocks and dive into authentic writing. You can find all the information about the course here. 𖦹

Daimon in Antiquity

Dæmon or daimon in our history goes back to the time of Socrates.

Daimon is the innermost guiding principle within you, the most concerned with truth and alignment with authenticity, and even perhaps your pre-birth intention.

For Socrates, his daimon was a guiding voice that would usually appear when he was about to make a wrong decision, protecting him from the consequences. Socrates interpreted his daimon’s silence as the absence of objection, and so the choice he was about to make was right for him. He recounted his daimon’s presence from early childhood.

Socrates’ daimonion (δαιμόνιον) was the earliest Western description of an inner psychic guide, describing the agency and activity of daimonic energies within humans. Primarily, providing guidance, inner instinct, intervention.

In Greek mythology, daimons were creatures occupying the realm between mortal humans and the gods. They were messengers and guides, not specific or named, but coercing the supernatural into the places of need. I like that these beings, or forces of the supernatural, were not specifically identified or named by the lore. It allows a deeper personal experience, and perhaps, a relationship of one’s own with a deity that resides so closely within one’s breast.

In pre-Christian times, daimons were allowed goodness as much as evil. They were agentic beings. Later on, daimons were divided into the guardian angels and demons we know today: ill-intended, life-consuming entities, with whom a person can enter into a contract or agreement of mutual benefit.

Witch and Her Familiar

Something that deeply reminds me of the concept of daimon is a witch’s familiars. These were the beings who assisted witches and cunning-folk (healers) in their healing practice, divination, spell making and casting, and so on. Familiars were spirits in animal form, creating a lateral bond with their human counterpart, albeit serving as protectors and amplifiers of their powers. They could have been dogs, cats, rabbits, toads, or birds. In Christian times, familiars were seen as demons, malevolent and presented by the devil, but that perception later on shifted, and familiars were associated with fairies.

In our animate human history, our ancestors held a tight relationship with more-than-human beings. This relationship extended into the exchange of bodies. Zoomorphic figurines from the Neolithic period point us towards a much more intimate bond between what we call human and what we call animal. From bird-women and fish-women, to minotaurs, to skin-shedding selkies, to shamans transfiguring into the wild ones with fur and claws, we walked the animal form as much as the animal walked the human.

Ever wonder why it was perfectly normal (event expectant) for animals and trees to speak in human tongues in our books, TV shows, and old tales? We are born with consciousness that expects animacy, because it’s our natural, primordial state.

As I was writing this part of the newsletter, my partner came into my room to let me know that a blue tit bird had crashed into our balcony’s window! We’ve put it safely into a carton box with towels, to recover in warmth. [Update: The bird has warmed up, and as I was lifting up the cover of the box, she immediately flew towards the window. I scooped her up and let her out. What a precious little thing. We have tried out various bird-from-window repellents, but if you have any tips that work, please leave them in the comments.]

I digress.

Pullman’s Daimon

After being entrenched in the world of William Blake, Philip Pullman crystallized axioms we can use while creating and writing. This is one of my favourites:

Axiom number five: we should use what works. And if invoking ghosts, demons, spirits, gods, demigods, nymphs or hobgoblins help us write, then we should banish the superstition about not being superstitious and invoke them without embarrassment or hesitation. ‘All deities reside in human breast.’

What a wonderful way to put it.

Philip Pullman took the idea of Socrates' daimon and transformed it further. Here (in His Dark Materials trilogy), the daimon lives in a non-human form, yet with a human voice, fully visible, and most importantly, individual to a person. The daimon can morph and shapeshift into various creatures (mostly animals) until the end of childhood and start of puberty, around 11-12 years old. After that, daimon takes its final shape and remains in that form until death.

I felt very intrigued when I learnt that in Pullman’s system, it physically hurts to stay far away from your daimon. Severing the human from their daimon would cause unbearable pain to both, and eventually death.

Was Pullman tugging at something much larger than a cute animal companion?

He certainly was.

Daimon, in Pullman’s eyes, was a personified version of soul, intuition, and conscience. The final shape of the daimon reflected who the person was at the core, their true interior character. It also reflected their true feelings, emotions, reactions, and thoughts, much more easily expressed through the animal form than the sometimes constricted human expression. An exchange between the two was always happening, a dynamic dialogue, a nonverbal cue of understanding.

But, what if we have lost our relationship with our daimon? What if the soul is asking us to make different decisions, what if it’s asking us to create, and we are deaf to its signals?

In writing practice, that translates into creating what we think might please the readers. Or freezing completely, and having no idea where to start or what to even write about. It’s a sense of being out of touch with those inner currents that are full of life, and creativity, and ideas, and discipline to materialize them.

Your daimon asks you to return home, to return to the spirit taking flight.

It makes complete sense that it hurts to be away from your soul. The further away we wander, the more suffering and pain we feel. Sometimes (most of times) this happens through traumatic events and ongoing traumatic experiences. It breaks, or at least chips away at the human bond with their innermost essence.

Through life experiences, we adapt to that pain of separation, we mask it in various addictions, numbing, dissociation, apathy.

How do we reconnect with the Daimon?

If your daimon is the portal to the ineffable, then we must find words to express the journey there.

If you were to have a daimon, what shape would it take? What would be its character, its desires, its way of moving?

The best way to reconnect with your daimon is to go on a date with it.

You must treat it as a relationship, and some courting need be involved.

As Martin Shaw says, to court your wild twin. That which was exiled through tribulations, that which was silenced, yet that which has the most to say about the truth of you.

So if we were to go on a date with daimon (the soul self), how would that look like?

For me, that is allowing myself to write whatever I actually want to write, releasing all the internalized pressure. To go down the research rabbit hole and connect ideas that don’t seem to be related on the surface. To have a walk by myself and converse with various voices in my head, knowing one of them will be the voice of my daimon.

Through creation, we are able to enter this conversation; through regular devotion that isn’t conditional or demanding.

Your creativity depends on attuning so well and so deeply to this daimon that the rest of the noise falls away, and all you are left with is clarity and creation.

Community of Practice — Date with your Daimon

If you’d like to develop a regular and ongoing relationship with this part of you and your writing:

I invite you to join the waitlist for my writers’ community. This is for those who want to write from the heart, the soul, in deep connection to the deities that reside in the human breast. This is for all of you who want to make it regular and prioritize your writing.

The community is in the process of being built, and here you can express your desires if you were to be a part of it.

Here you can join the waitlist to hear about it when it launches.

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On the Sacred Day of Snakes (Kirmių diena, Lith.) I am sharing an edited essay I wrote a while ago for Advaya. This is what Marija Gimbutas writes about this day:

“The Sacred Day of Snakes was celebrated around the 25th of January, when snakes [serpents/grass snakes] symbolically awakened and abandoned the forests for the houses [Lithuanians kept grass snakes as pets for good luck, prosperity, fortune. The sacred serpents were fed milk and lived among humans.] This special day marked the beginning of everything, the awakening of nature. On this day, farmers shook apple trees so that they would bear fruit, and knocked on beehives to awaken the bees.

During the Neolithic, portrayals of the snake goddess consistently featured crownlike headpiece. This feature lives on in Baltic and other European folklore in the belief that some snakes will appear crowned; these crowns are the symbol of wisdom and wealth. Folktales narrate that a person who struggles with a huge white snake will acquire the crown. The crown enables one to know all, to see hidden treasures, and to understand the language of animals. The crowned snake is the queen; fairy tales recorded a hundred years ago recount the meetings of hundreds of snakes ruled by the crowned snake.“

The sun rose over the Lucerne Valley, Nevada’s desert. Every rock, pebble, and red grain of sand absorbed it with each passing minute, getting ready to radiate this heat into the air and sustain the harsh elemental life in the red desert.

In such a place, Marija Gimbutas, a pioneering anthropologist and archaeo-mythologist, had her second home (first, in Topanga Canyon), planted a garden. She surrounded her cabin with various native trees, including stone fruits such as white peach. However, there was one tree that did not fully belong in her garden — the apple tree, connecting Gimbutas to her homeland, Lithuania. Apple tree, a primordial being housing tiny seeds of ancestral information around its fleshy body.

Here, Gimbutas wanted to build a Baltic pagan temple, a sanctuary in the arid landscape for the gods and goddesses who had never seen a desert.

I see Marija as my heretic grandmother; she passed away the year I was born. Just like her, I too longed for a “Lithuanian” kind of apple during my 10th year of living outside my homeland. Two summers ago, I visited a Lithuanian village during my trip back home and stumbled upon a sensuous memory. One that can only be revived in a place from which the sense originates: a paper apple, plentiful in my grandmother’s garden. I picked up a couple of beaten fruits lying beneath abandoned trees in someone’s front yard. I chewed up the apple with an open mouth, devoured it, carefully wrapped the seeds, and placed them in my pocket. With the hope of one day planting these seeds on my own patch of land.

Marija Gimbutas was the Lithuanian apple tree in the desert — rooting in new soil, using the unfamiliar mineral compositions (even toxins) beneath her to bring new work to life. She blossomed in a foreign land and in a misogynistic, male-dominated archaeology climate. And as the myth goes, she bore a fruit. Once bitten and digested, the fruit would shake the somatic memories of the Great Goddess and expel the accumulation of 5000 years of patriarchy within the body. The apple of her knowledge was Regeneratrix.

For the final book, Civilization of the Goddess, Marija spent 17 years researching and excavating, reading over 3000 papers, and always encouraging everyone to read the primary sources, as she did.

Apart from wielding a deep and prolific knowledge of archaeology, Marija also had the mind of a poet. Poets are prophets, able to access universal truth, one that collapses past, present, and future. They synthesize the invisible, they translate truth into tangible. Using the language of symbols and abstraction, Marija has built a door into the prehistoric civilizations where thousands of people would walk through, incorporating her archaeological findings as well as theories into second-wave feminism.

But most of all, Gimbutas justified the longing so many women felt for hundreds of years. Longing that whispers before it wails: there’s more to life than this. The society that you live in today, daughter, was not built for you. It was built atop you, and then against you. This society will ultimately collapse, because it hurts its most valuable being: the creatrix.

Marija Gimbutas affirmed that our ancestors, for most of our known human history, lived in reverence to the Great Goddess. Five thousand years of patriarchy against hundreds of thousands of years of Her.

I can feel her heart beating in mine as she sets the rhythm. The blood is hers, perhaps, lacking iron in my modern diet. My hair is hers too, long, wavy, brittle under the hard water of Berlin. It’s her skin that expands and contracts. The rush of a kiss. The longing for another culture where women are not below men, and animals and plants are not below humans.

Life in the hands of the goddess became a sacred path of devotion. She lead us with her visions, she walked thousands of paths through caves and mountains passes, through bogs and dense forests, through snow and desert dunes ahead with her strong legs, her belly swinging, her breasts giving moistures of life, her wings lifting her up above the fields, rivers, forests, she transformed once again into the cuckoo and landing upon the linden tree. Life in the hands of the goddess allowed us to affirm the eternal cycle of love, expressed in the regenerative cycle of life.

Knowing Death Early

Marija Asleikaitė (later Gimbutienė → Gimbutas) was born in Lithuania in 1921, during the interwar period. From an early age, her personality was shaped by songs, folklore, arts, and crafts, as well as nature and sacred places, water bodies, and stones that survived the turmoils of the occupations (German, Polish, and later, Russian). All of them wove deeply into her memory, feeding the luster, curiosity, creativity, and a desire to bring back the sacred culture to the modern psyche. She not only studied archeology but also folklore and mythology, the Lithuanian language, and comparative linguistics. She was a folkloric collector and before emigrating to Germany and later the US (Boston and Los Angeles), Marija traveled across Lithuania to write down disappearing songs and stories from small villages.

“When I’m asked why it’s me who deciphered the messages from the past and read the symbols”, she said “I inherited it in my childhood, from my special home in Lithuania. During the years of my childhood, there were still sacred rivers flowing, and sacred stones standing.

<..>

I grew up in Polish-occupied Vilnius. However, I still felt a strong connection to Lithuanian origins since I was 2, 3, 4 years old. Childhood is a vital, extremely important period, perhaps for everyone. But to me, this is the ultimate foundation, and without it, I cannot stand.” —

— Marija Gimbutienė, (Lithuanian chronicle, 1993 - 16 (1674)).

The energy in Marija’s home was always steeped in culture and preservation of the ethnic depth. Her parents were doctors, founding and running the first hospital in Vilnius. Her father was also an editor of an independence-leaning cultural magazine, and her mother was the first woman doctor in Lithuania, gaining her doctorate in Berlin. Marija’s work ethic developed at home, where values were centered not on domestic matters, but culture and political milieu. The family was always surrounded by the intelligentsia of the time.

Marija’s father died when she was 15 years old. The threshold of her father’s passing turned the page of her childhood and ushered her straight into adulthood. This left her asking: What is life? What is death, and what happens after it?

The topic of human relationship to death captured Marija’s path. She started her studies by researching Lithuanian and pagan funerary rites and monuments. One of the first articles she wrote at age 19 was about her ancestors’ beliefs about the afterlife: what is soul and what is death. This was the formation of the intuitive capacity; to read the symbols and mostly — to feel the story and history that stands behind the physical form.

During the Second World War, she had to flee to Germany: with a baby in one hand and her PhD in the other. From there on in the 1950s, Marija, together with her family, immigrated to the US. There she worked for three years as an unpaid researcher at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum before accepting a professorship at UCLA, a position she kept until her retirement in 1989.

During her move to California, she and her husband separated. In this new era, Gimbutas and her work flourished. There she lived in Topanga Canyon. Although she travelled to Europe regularly for exhibitions, excavations, lectures, etc, Marija was not permitted to return to the Soviet occupied Lithuania.

In her later years, in the letters to her mother, she would mention being able to see beyond the veil: somewhat of clairsentience or claircognizance that Marija used for peering into the past. Intuitively synthesizing thousands of years’ histories into theories that would later be proven correct through aDNA testing and forever change the course of our known history. She knew, like other visionary prophetesses, that the world would sooner or later catch up, if not in this generation, then the next. She perceived time like an archaeologist does — truth resurfacing to the surface in its due time.

As much as Marija was a scientist and archaeo-mythologist, she was also an intuitive seer, a mediator between our ancestors and us, between the Great Goddess and the modern human psyche–not fully forgetting the reverence and worship of the regeneratrix. Her legacy is fully alive, pulsing, and living, the same way as the goddess, to whom Marija has devoted her life to truly understand and translate.

For my Lithuanian audience:

Thank you for reading. This was a small sliver from my research about Gimbutas’ life. She continues to inspire my work, and I cannot wait to share more.

Protect Her.
From the glow of the screen,
From voices, disembodied,
telling her how to live, think, look, eat.

Protect Her.
From disenchantment,
From losing connection to her foremothers,
From losing sight of another world possible.

Protect Her.
The imagination and the longing that live in her heart
are meant to expand and make the longing of others feel less isolating.

Disrupt her distractions,
her numbing tactics,
her following a stream of
another origin.

Protect her.
The spirit, the softness of the heart.
Her abundant laughter
and her more abundant tears.

Protect her.
From cold hands,
from hushed voices of shame.
From a sense that she might deserve to be and stay invisible.

Protect her.
The poems that she makes up for you at 6 AM.
The dances in the corridor with a broom.
The jumping from sofa to floor,
to sofa again, as the downstairs neighbor comes to complain.

Take her tiny, soft, squishy hand,
dance and swirl to her favorite song.
Then fall into the snow, after you both sled down the hill.
Patroned by pines.

Play, read, adventure, laugh, cry, sleep, eat, and listen, by the kitchen table, to the old radio show about astrology, after a long bath on Sunday evening.

Allow her life to retain
as much enchantment as possible.

It might save her.

Much love, Rūta xx

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Last week I returned from the Scottish highlands, where alongside my fiance I attended a rewilding course, lead by Alan Watson Featherstone and his partner Pupak Haghighi.

We lived in a bothy, situated at the top of Loch Affric, within one of the most beautiful glens in Scotland, Glen Affric.

We had no internet signal, nor running water. We had to fetch our water from the burn (river, stream). The water for drinking had to be boiled, then cooled, then distributed. We cooked communal dinners. We made a lot of fire. We got drenched during the day and dried clothes and boots over night in the drying room. Over a couple of days, everyone eased into their roles. I felt a sense of purpose specific to this tiny group. Even by the time we were running out of bread, I baked three sourdough loaves. The appreciation I received deeply touched my heart.

I didn’t need the phone signal. I didn’t want to know what was happening in the world. I have been craving time without knowing. I didn’t want to care about the strangers on the internet. All I was concerned about was the other 10 people in my simple home for that week. They were my immediate, physical, real community.

There was the immediacy of the roaring stags in the middle of the night up in the hills, the hooting tawny owls in the woods of the glen. A running stream next to the bothy. Wind running up and down the fireplace. Rowan trees planted out of the reach of the grazing animals. Cloud formations and ever-changing rain patterns.

During one of the days we went out on a vision quest into Gleann na Cìche, a tributary glen of Glen Affric. During my walk, I encountered a grove of elder birch trees, coiled and gnarled, overgrown with moss and lychen.

There was a particular birch that pulled me in. I sat down underneath her. The ground was was mossy and damp, I faced a lively river Allt na Cìche in front of me. Coiling and furling, jumping from the boulders and rocks. Carving a mossy corridor around itself. On my right — a rowan sapling next to a tiny stream merging into the river. This was my perfect place. I never wanted to move away.

Just as I sat there, sheltered under the birch, a poem came to me. In one go. About the people of the highlands, their mythical lives, their simple lives with the spirits and elementals of the glen, about the clearances and evictions. The birch was the writer, so as the river, and the rowan, and the moss, and the spreading cold humidity around me.

To write, I had to allow wildness to enter me. As if the civillization has made my words tamed, polished, agreeable. I needed to hear voices other than my own. I needed to hear the exoteric protagonists that were all around me, giving me clues and impulses. To rewild my own writing process, I had to let the otherness in. Sometimes, it’s not nature that needs to be rewilded, but a human heart.

4 Principles of Rewilding Your Writing

So let’s look at the ways the rewilding of planetary ecology can translate into the rewilding of the writing work, within the ecology of the psyche.

In the ecological rewilding process of land and wildlife, there are 4 C’s that help to restore the native ecosystems:

1. Cores: The protection of large, core areas of wildness to serve as the foundation for a functioning ecosystem.

2. Corridors: The establishment of connections or “corridors” between core areas to allow for the movement of wildlife and the genetic exchange between populations.

3. Carnivores: The protection and reintroduction of apex predators (like wolves or lynx) and other highly interactive species, which are crucial for maintaining a balanced food web and ecological processes.

4. Coexistence: The principle of finding a balance between human activities and the needs of nature, promoting a future where both people and the rest of the natural world can flourish together.

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How can all of these translate into our writing practice?

1. Cores

The cores of writing are things that matter to you the most, and consequently, things that your writing psyche is made of. It is an intrinsic foundation from which everything else grows. Here, your voice takes shape. In ecological rewilding, these are the places where growth is naturally occurring, which means that they are the most potent spots for restoration. This is where aliveness can magnetize other aliveness. Writing that comes from these places will be inevitably authentic because your natural sense of aliveness is found in these topics or passions that are an innate part of you.

2. Corridors

For Cores to connect, we need Corridors.

This is the process of idea synthesis (which I teach in week 5 of Headwaters). For writing to feel your own, we work to open up corridors and connect ideas that you are passionate about, but have never stitched them together before. This is a way of growing your personal niche. We need the seeds to be dispersed, shared, and planted in different places of the landscape.

However, we often forget that a corridor can be a niche in itself. A hedge, separating one field from the next, is a home for countless small mammals such as hedgehogs, mice, shrews, birds such as sparrows, robins, thrushes, kestrels, and even owls. Bats also use hedges as commuter routes. A hundred-meter hedgerow might host around 2000 species of plants, fungi, and animals.

3. Carnivores

Carnivore is a predatory force in your creative writing process. It prunes your ideas and makes them fitter and healthier. Just like a pack of wolves, the predatory instinct keeps your idea population (deer) moving within the landscape. This movement is essential if we don’t want the deer to overgraze the ecological sphere. Through his movement, the landscape gradually rests and regenerates from the grazing process.

However, the predatory force can also be directed at the writer herself. Which means that the aspect of the psyche that should be a constructive editor is directly affecting your capacity to create without fear.

In weeks 2 and 3 of the Headwaters, we meet the predator (inner critic and inner rejector) and transform them during week 3 into the aspect that protects our work and brings us closer to the truth and wildness in our creative process.

4. Coexistence

Coexistence shows us how much biodiversity exists within our work. It shows us that there will be various aspects of us that will write. It also invites us to open up to otherness: voices of the larger idea ecologies around us. (Just like the elder birch and the river). Coexistence affirms that you’re not writing by yourself. There is a multiplicity of beings who are co-authoring your work. Coexistence invites help and affirms that we are not writing about, we are writing with.

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In the time of wandering through the Gleann na Cìche, I wanted nothing more but to wander this glen for the rest of my days. My head turned towards the massif of shifting clouds, then to the wind pushing branches of Scots pines, rowans, and birches, then overgrown heather, and perfect moss, and rapid river stream where all life condensed. All I could think was: we have all of this, and we think sitting in front of a laptop every day is a great idea?

And yet, if we want my writing to reach you, over here, there is an exchange I must be willing to make. A time in front of the screen.

This experience in the highlands enriched my larger inquiry about unfragmented time and mind. Perhaps it’s the pre-Internet time that I long for. Perhaps, a time much farther away. Time spent in a way that nourishes soul, body, mind. I could feel this type of time deeply while learning about rewilding in a wild place. This is where I invite writing to come from.

What is the opposite of wildness, if not fragmentation of naturally existing connections, predating human interventions?

Writing is no different. Leaving information for another, frozen in space and time, has existed for thousands of years before writing was ever invented.

If you want to explore what it means to rewild your writing practice and relationship with writing, join me and a brilliant community of writers as we set out to find the Headwaters, a source of creative life force where the writing comes from your authentic truth.

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My previous essays on the topic of writing:

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It’s here. Headwaters Writing Course opens its doors for the third cohort!

(We start on October 30th and journey for 6 weeks.)

Headwater is the source of a river. It’s where life force energy steps over the threshold and makes itself visible in the world.

In writing and creative work, headwaters is a place where you create your most authentic, enlivening work.

This is where you and your soul are nourished from the depths.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to deny yourself creatively.

No one benefits from that.

In fact, I am convinced that the denial of our creative life force energy actually fuels planetary degeneration.

In Hadwaters, my number one goal is to bring you closer to your creative essence and allow yourself to fully embrace it and express it — especially in writing.

Which means that we will also work with the inner critic, as well as your authentic, essential self — your inner writer.

Working with the true, vulnerable, authentic, essential parts of the self is the most foundational part of the writing process.

Because the most interesting, alive, invigorating writing comes from the place of inner truth. Which is where we're going to journey.

Your writing "level" doesn't matter here. You might be just starting, or you might be writing for years. We welcome all.

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So, what will we be doing during the course?

1. Connecting with your authentic, creative self essence so you know what it feels like to write from an authentic, soul-aligned place.

2. Unblocking your deeply rooted limiting beliefs that hold back your creative potential, your writing, and your authentic creative self, so you don't waste any more time second-guessing your creative self-worth in the world.

3. Creating a positive relationship with creative writing systems, structure, standards, and discipline. Knowing how to resolve resistance is the most crucial part of the creative workflow. I will share my systems, structure, and how to work with a part of us that helps to materialize our creative vision.

4. Learning to write from the body, so you can be attuned to the subtlety of the inner sense of truth when telling a story. We will uncover your personal voice and learn to discern what makes good writing that your readers want to come back to.

5. Becoming an Idea Synthesizer, someone who can integrate differing topics into each other, so you can build a diverse audience at the hearth of your deep authentic expression.

6. Integrating the identity of a writer, understanding your personal myth, and most importantly—integrating the identity of a deeply deserving creative. Lasting change happens when we shift our identities. Identities shift when we are brave enough to connect with the truth of our being AND when we practice being in that identity long enough.

7. Writing together. Training our focus together without distractions. Publishing together. This will allow you to build a creative momentum that you can take way beyond the course.

I am very excited to be alongside you and begin this deep journey of writing, healing, dreaming, imagining, and transforming from within.

Join us!

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For those of you who would like to expand your own writing and reconnect with the inner writer, join my Headwaters 8-week online writing course, designed to deepen your writing practice and unblock your creative life force energy. Join the waitlist below:

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A couple of months ago, I had a dream.

My mother and I stood on a small hill, overlooking the sky and the plateau in front of us. I saw a large flock of migratory birds fly in the sky, forming a massive murmuration in the shape of a giant bird. The massive bird reshaped itself into the great goddess — she wore Lithuanian folk dress. I recognized her as Laima, the chief goddess in Baltic paganism, patron of life, fate, mothers, and newborns. The murmuration danced as one body of a woman; she was slowly spinning in the sky, swishing her massive skirt. I felt so small, so tiny. The goddess murmuration bent towards me and just like a dragon, unleashed her fire my way from her mouth.
I woke up.

I remember this dream a lot. It feels like a red thread of Areadne amongst all other dreams. It’s a dream I never want to forget. A gift in the form of a vision, pointing my way into the time when women were birds. When relationship with our maternal lines was alive and pulsing. When the only gods in the sky were feathered beings with wings.

I often wonder what it takes to live in that state of connection with my foremothers. I get ocasional glimpses, but it’s never a state of being I can fully embody. I miss their presence in my life, in all aspects. I miss their support. I offer some home baked sourdough and water on the altar, light a candle, and burn rue plant that is deeply rooted in Lithuanian folklore and mythology. I talk to them in my heart. But shortly, my modernized mind returns to the emptiness of linneage, and days go on.

As an imigrant, I spent the majority of my 20s rejecting my heritage, trying to assimilate into the dominant western culture. But the emptiness that this denial brought me was too vast to be filled in by any contemporary pleasure or distraction. I am convinced that this rejection of cultural heritage weakens us at our core. At some point individual healing journeys become much a larger project: healing the generational trauma and shame surrounding it, opens the door to the treasures our ancestors have left us. When we heal the shame, we get to choose which aspects of our cultures we want to inherit and allow them to strenghten us.

When I cannot recount all of the women in my line, I turn to the mythologies that held them, warned them, and protected them. I also turn to the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, whom I call my heretic grandmother.

So here are the mythologies that strenghten me.

According to Gimbutas, the old pagan Baltic culture inherited and contained the Old European civilization’s remains. Deities such as Laima, Ragana, and Žemyna were the ones who smirked at us through thousands of years, with the eyes of the Great Goddess. In Lithuanian and Latvian mythos, Laima was the goddess of happiness, pregnancy, mothers, and childbirth.

She was the spring, the most beautiful woman sitting by the sacred stream; she was the cuckoo, announcing and bringing regeneration on her winged arms. In the Baltic region, Laima was said to live in and transfigure into a linden tree. In Lithuania, we have many songs depicting a 9-branched linden with a cuckoo sitting at the top, divining the fate of all people. In fact, I have a vivid memory of my grandmother saying that you must have any tiny coin in your pocket at all times, as you never know when the cuckoo sings. If you have a coin, your year will be prosperous. If your pockets are empty, you will be poor. I still feel a flinch when I hear the cuckoo, and check my pockets each spring.

In the deep time, women would pray and bring offerings to the linden trees, asking for good fate, protection, and fertility for the land and themselves. Laima was also associated with a bear, which too was a symbol of a new mother. Laima was the Regeneratrix. One that births herself anew, and dies to herself. She who controls the rhythm of creation. The most powerful goddess in Baltic cosmology.

As the cycle continued, and the harvest ended, Laima, the most beautiful woman, turned into Ragana—The Witch Hag. She was Giltinė, the reaper, other side of the birth goddess. She was old and crippled. She was the winter and the death goddess. The cuckoo’s wings turned long and dark: she transfigured into a hawk, catching the last remnants of life on the fields and bringing them to an end. She was the winter, the blinding snowy hills. She lulled all life into a deep sleep. And once the winter passed, yet again she turned into Laima, bringing spring with the song of the cuckoo, and so, the cycle continued.

There is an old Lithuanian myth that encapsulates collective women’s grief, as the old Europe transitioned our of matristic societies, into patriarchal domination. This myth reaches us from the deep past. It was a warning to all of the women who were yet to experience loss of matristic power and grieve the separation from the regeneratrix herself. It is called Eglė, the Queen of Grass Snakes.

One warm summer day, Eglė, the youngest daughter of a local farmer, went bathing in the sea with her two sisters. Afterward, returning to the shore to get dressed, she found a serpent in her clothes. To her surprise, the serpent spoke to her in a man's voice and demanded that she promise to become his wife for the return of her clothes. Faced with an immediate need to get dressed and not thinking about possible future consequences, Eglė agreed.

Three days later a great number of serpents pulling a carriage showed up at Eglė's parents' farm to claim the bride. Eglė's family tried to trick the serpents by giving them one of their farm animals, but each time a cuckoo warned the serpents about the deception. Finally, wise to the trickery, serpents succeeded in taking Eglė with them to their master. At the seashore, they were met by Žilvinas, a handsome young man, the Serpent King, who took Eglė to a nearby island and then to his palace under the sea, where they wed. Eglė and Žilvinas lived together happily and had three sons, Ažuolas, Uosis, and Beržas, and a daughter, Drebulė, their youngest.

One day the children started asking about their mother's former home.

Eglė became homesick and asked Žilvinas to allow her and the children to visit her parents' farm. Žilvinas was against it and set a number of (what he thought) impossible conditions: to spin a never-diminishing amount of silk; to wear out a pair of iron clogs; and to bake a pie without kitchen utensils. Eglė, however, with the help of an old local sorceress, was able to accomplish them and Žilvinas had to let Eglė and the children go.

The reunion with the family was such a happy event that Eglė's family did not want to let them return to the sea and decided to kill Žilvinas. But first, they needed to know how to get Žilvinas to appear from the sea. Through torture, Eglė’s brothers hoped children would reveal the family secret. Sensing danger, the sons refused to comply, but the youngest daughter Drebulė was so frightened, that she revealed her father’s secret call. Eglė's twelve brothers rushed to the seashore, called Žilvinas, who appeared in serpent form and killed him with scythes.

Unaware of her husband's fate, Eglė returned to the seashore after the family visit, and called up Žilvinas. In reply, only a red bloody sea foam appeared.

In deep despair and grief, she realized that Žilvinas was dead. Eglė transformed her family into trees: her sons into an oak, ash, and birch, her daughter into a trembling aspen, and herself into a spruce.

Marija Gimbutas’ theory about the Old European civilization was a wide-tailed meteorite in the dark sky of our known human history.

Many archeologists have proposed competing theories about the arrival of Proto Indo-Europeans, but Gimbutas’ theory has proven to be the most historically accurate to date. She argued that the Kurgs, original Proto-Indo-Europeans, gradually conquered and usurped the Old European languages and culture from 4000 to 1000 BC. Gimbutas’ work found that war-like behaviors started only around the 4th millennium BC, with the invasion of Kurgs, weapons, warriors, god-in-the-sky-worshipping, and patriarchal domination. “Before that, we have no recorded evidence that Old Europeans would go against one another in this capacity,” — Marija shared.

But the native Old European civilization was centered around the worship of the Earth — the Regeneratrix. The Great Goddess imbued her life into all creatures, soils, water bodies, stones, and places. The Great Goddess worship was reflected in all of Gimbutas' excavations across Europe: hundreds of clay figurines, vessels, and tombs were found depicting the Goddess and human relationship with the life-death-life cycle.

The archeologists noticed that, the more archaic the civilization, the more femme figurines and symbols were found during the archeological research.

However, ridden with the Kurg dominion, the Old European culture did not disappear entirely. It retracted into the dark forest of the collective unconscious. It assimilated and hid itself in the folklore across the European continent. Remnants of it can still be found in symbols that survive to this day, in songs, archetypes, stories, and especially in myth. One such archaic myth is The Serpent Queen or The Queen of the Grass Snakes (Lith. “Elglė Žalčių Karalienė”). It is, perhaps, the most popular myth in Lithuania, and it can also be found incarnated through variations across Europe and beyond. This myth is believed to be the last remaining myth of the old European civilization, pointing us to the brutal dissemination of this culture and warning all women about the onset of a new, radically different paradigm — the patriarchy.

The crowned snake goddess lies at the core of the old European culture and mythology. Hundreds of snake figurines date back to around seven thousand years BC. The serpent (snake, and most especially the grass snake) was the animal that personified the regenerative Goddess of life. In old pagan Lithuania, the grass snake was revered and protected, seen as an animal in which the essence of the goddess lived. Grass snake, in some homes, had her particular corner in the house. It was fed milk and taken care of as a benevolent being-spirit of home.

Even the linguistics reveal this connection, snake — gyvatė comes from words gyvas, gyvata, gyvybė — which all mean alive, life in Lithuanian. Marija’s theory points out that right up until the Kurganization, the old European culture was matristic and matrilineal — everything was orbiting the mother or the grandmother, the woman, as she was the fractal image of the Great Goddess.

In the myth, the slithery grass snake turns into a handsome prince, and the unknown sea hides the lustrous palace. Eglė (name Elgė means spruce in Lithuania, also depicted as the tree of life in Baltic pagan culture) comes to know the ways of old Europe through marrying and entering into union with the grass snake—an incarnation of the Great Goddess. She meets an alien way of living and being, a different kind of culture, a different kind of civilization. This way of existing is incomprehensible to her family, judged, and condemned by her brothers and other men in her family.

The way this myth is told points us towards the way the Old Europeans saw the Great Goddess.

Through the lens of the narrator, we sympathize with the serpentine beast in the story, his life, and his death, rather than with humans. This myth works as a primordial pine sap that freezes the story of two civilizations—Old Europe and the Kurgan Proto-Indo-European. It depicts the bleak fate of women during the patriarchal overgrowth: the marriage with the regenerative life force was severed, and brutally killed.

Men in this story chop up the serpent/grass snake into pieces with scythes. Leaving Elgė in self-destructing heartbreak. At the end of the myth, Eglė transforms herself into a spruce tree; her three boys are turned into oak, ash, birch — and her daughter into an aspen, deemed to shiver forever in fear, for she was the one who betrayed her otherworldly father to her human uncles.

This is Eglė’s final act in the myth—returning herself and her descendants back into the life-death-life cycle. The Queen of Grass Snakes warns women about patriarchal death-hungry societies taking over life-revering regenerative essence. This stark transformation from matristic to patriarchal, from life-revering to death-worshiping civilizations that was happening from 4000 to 1000 BC, continues to define our Western world today. We still live in the reverberations of the serpent-hacking scythes.

“Once killed in the daylight of the human psyche, the Great Goddess scattered herself across our lands.”

She turned into myths, songs, and dreams that visit you once in a while. She still runs through every living creature and pulses through every immutable stone. She holds figurines made by her devotees in her large loam belly. And so, Marija Gimbutas unearthed The Regeneratrix and watered her with all of life’s waters. Gimbutas revived her presence in our collective conscious awareness, so we too can become psychic archeologists and remove the patriarchy’s scythes with precision. So we too can recognize the fractal of the Great Goddess inside our bodies. So we too, once in a while can dream of her, flying as motherline embodied in thousands of birds, above our heads.

Thank you for reading this essay. This is my personal attempt to reconnect with my deeper roots, those that reach all the way back to when we were in connection with our land and its guardians. A part of this text was originally published on Advaya.

For those of you who would like to expand your own writing and reconnect with the inner writer, you can now sign up for a waitlist to my Headwaters 6-week online writing course, designed to deepen your writing practice and unblock your creative life force energy. Starting November, 2025.

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If you want to delve further:

1. Lithuanian documentaries (with english subtitles) diving deep into serpent mythology and Marija Gimbutas’ work: https://www.gilu.media/produktai/senoji-europa/ (You can auto-translate the page into English)

2. Free Documentary about Marija Gimbutas - Signs out of Time:

“We can feel that our wisdom begins where the author’s ends, and we want him to give us answers when all he can do is give us desires. He awakens these desires in us only when he gets us to contemplate the supreme beauty which he cannot reach except through the utmost efforts of his art.

The end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own, so that at the moment when the book has told us everything it can, it gives rise to the feeling that it has told us nothing.”
— Marcel Proust

Another Headwaters writing course has ended, and summer has finally caught up with me. Green oak leaves fully shed their spring translucence; roses cannot hold their own weight, and I know it’s past mid-July.

Proust’s quote found me just at the right time.

In the end, after every course, every book, essay, poem, or song, we are only left with renewed desires. Truer, unburdened desires. As if we are granted permission to want different things. To discard what we had desired before, and allow ourselves renewal.

I realize I am allowed a different relationship with the self that writes. To want a different relationship with language. To want a change, and yet, feel utterly in the void about how to make that happen. I’ve sat in this void for a long time. I confront it every time I write. And every time I realize that the only way to make the way out is through.

And when the void feels utterly ungraspable, the Scottish Highlands are the answer.

Time of the Highlands

In May, I traveled to Scotland, where my family lives, where I lived for 6 years before moving to Berlin.

There is no other place like the Scottish Highlands. The perennial rain and the gloominess of a darkened sky create an aura of magic. A confronting elemental spirit that constantly pushes you to feel alive, to feel your own edges through wetness, cold, and wind.

After my plane landed, my mother took me for a walk beside a large lake. I noticed so much biodiversity just in the shrubs surrounding. A common comfrey grew in large chunks, with weighted, bell-shaped purple blossoms hanging down from their own weight. Native to Scotland and northern Europe, comfrey plays a big role in its ecosystem. It attracts wild pollinators, its root system is complex, deep, and extremely efficient in metabolizing heavy metals from the soil.

Comfrey was once considered an all-cure herb, helping with bone, skin, and lung injuries. The herb was also used for divination. The seers would interpret comfrey’s smoke shape to predict answers to their questions. It is well known that heat and smoke liberate the plant’s spirit, bringing a message.

We turned away from the lake and followed upstream, entering a woodland grove. My mother and I met hawthorn in full bloom, we met ferns, bluebells, willows, and giant moss-covered sycamores. The dampness of the air, mixed with the aroma of soil and blossoms, rejuvenated my body. The ancient energetic felt like a relief I had longed for the past months. The veil between realms seemed to be quite thin. Someone even crafted a tiny door and nested it into the tree trunk. These sycamores were spirit homes, an architecture to house the invisible beings we share our world with. We turned around at an old, now roofless grotto that once was built and belonged to the MacDowall family.

Her trail

The next day, we left for Glen Affric, looking ahead to a 5-hour drive up north. On our way up north, I have never seen so much sunshine in the highlands. As if coming through a zenith, the light was so blinding, so otherworldly, that it was almost unbearable. My eyes could hold onto every ridge on Glencoe’s surfaces, every shrub, every kind of green distributed across the landscape. Sharp shadows and drying patches of grass leaped into sight. By then, Scotland hadn’t seen rain for weeks. Pebbled stream trails, where once water moved with abundance, were halfway dried out.

This was my second time in Glen Affric. The first time was in October 2023. My mother and I spontaneously found a cottage in the middle of nowhere and drove through an orange warning storm just to spend two half days in the area. The rain became a flood that took over farm fields, roads, homes. Tree trunks were halfway submerged in muddy, rapid streams. Something runs in our family that is not sentimental about the distance or time (or even danger?) it takes to get to a place of meaning, connection, or beauty. It’s a very impractical trait.

And so we arrived, and immediately went on a short hike near Dog Falls. It followed River Affric’s gorge and the surrounding forest. The highest peak of the hike revealed the whole Glen, layered mountain peaks, Scots pines, wild blaeberries (blueberries), heather, rowan trees, and a shimmering lake beneath.

On our way back, we passed through a downward winding path of birches, old pines, ferns, and mosses. I stayed behind to record the sounds of River Affric and take analog photographs. I found a way to come closer to the fast stream, pushing its way through soft slabs of rock. I wanted to stay there for hours. River time expands, melts, runs somewhere, and never gets captured.

Being alone with the river fed me. I entered into a nonverbal conversation with her, communing our energy. Her presence felt as if someone was reflecting my own soul back to me. As if my soul met itself in another form.

Her strong, gracious movement in a place of calm turns into a spinning waterfall, bursting in sound and force. Water collapses onto itself. She knows her own weight. Splashes without self-tamed demeanour. Softens the hardness of the rock, who is a friend, who gives her a shape, a silhouette, and pace. The river glimmers. Just like glamouries, she reflects the radiance of light. Of golden sun, and greyness of clouds, and most especially, moonlight.

(I am currently writing an essay from the perspective of the river Affric for
. The more-than-human essay will be a part of the first print issue of the magazine.)

A glacial river I met in Switzerland last year had that very same effect upon me. I was stupefied, and I didn’t want to leave. Flowing water holds magic: it promises life, it promises connection, and renewal.

Glen Affric

Next morning we drank tea on our log cabin’s veranda and drew two spreads of the Sooth Cards (by and Rima Staines) — one for my mother and one for me. Ironically, we both pulled the same card but at opposite ends of the draw. This time, I could really tune into the deck and understand its ways. I felt as if it was created for moments like these, rather than quicker check-ins or sharp answers. Sylvia’s writing felt so primordial and mystical, yet direct. Rima’s paintings pointed where the words could no longer reach. We received a gift of poetry and soft prescience for a morning of rain in the highlands.

That day, we set out to hike around the Affric lake, which would be a 19 km hike. Surrounded by mountains on both sides, we started on the left side of the lake, partially covered with new growth birches, rowans. In hindsight, an effort of Trees for Life and other organisations that have fought to protect the land from over-grazing, so that saplings have a chance to grow into trees.

We passed flocks of Scots pines, scattered across the patchy landscape. Old trees shaped themselves with decades of wind in the open. They stood here for hundreds of years, surviving logging and deforestation.

For over the past thirty years, the Glen has been under a rewilding project that has set an example to many places around the world. In all the years I lived in Scotland, I never realized how deforested it was. Naked hills seemed to be just a consequence of rocky terrain and unforgivable weather. Scotland, after all, is known for its exposed and barren terrain. However, 4000-2000 years ago, the majority of Scotland was covered in thick forest. Severe logging began in the 17th century, and for several hundred years, the native Scots pines and other trees were felled for buildings, ships, and fuel.

And as history proves itself again and again, with ecological destruction comes cultural eradication. While native pine forests were being cleared, alongside them, Scottish people were forcedly displaced from their ancestral homes in the highlands and islands between 1750 and 1860, a brutal period of history better known as the Highland Clearances.

Today, deer and sheep continue to graze everything that comes in their way, and thus, every new tree sapling or shrub is immediately eaten. The ancient Caledonian forest only remains in a select few places in Scotland, and one of them is Glen Affric. Without human intervention to rewild, the Caledonian forest cannot regenerate by itself.

During the trip, I learned about the work of Alan Watson Featherstone, a pioneering ecologist, conservationist, and photographer. Almost 40 years ago, Alan founded an organisation called Trees for Life to address the severe deforestation and ecological degradation in the Scottish Highlands. The goal was to restore the ancient Caledonian Forest, as almost 99% of it had been lost due to centuries of logging, overgrazing by deer and sheep, and land mismanagement. Alan and volunteers have planted over 1,5 million trees in the Scottish Highlands. You can hear more about Alan’s story of rewilding the ancient Caledonian forest here.

In October, my partner and I will be joining Alan on a week-long rewilding training in Glen Affric, which I am deeply excited about. We will live in a bothy with no electricity, no running water, or phone signal. We will learn how to rewild and regenerate degraded land, as well as how to start a rewilding project of our own. I will certainly be writing about it.

Her offering

As we reached almost mid-point of the hike, my mother, my sister, and I climbed higher off the road. My brother chose to wait for us by the path. We climbed up a steep rock. Onto its sharp peak, we gathered our offerings for the glen’s faeries and spirits. We brought cottage cheese, medjool dates, and pecan nuts: some traditional, some exotic delicacies to this place. Then, three of us went into a short meditation.

I spoke to the spirit of the land. With a persistent desire in my heart to return here, reconnect with Scotland in a way I haven’t yet before. I felt a longing to return. A longing to be. To wander the glens, to spend time by the rivers, to listen for a very, very long time. As far as I know, my mother is the first in our family line to move to Scotland. And I feel that my increasing longing to be in Scotland is not accidental. It’s a strange, secondary motherland where I never truly belonged. But something continuously draws me back. Here, I got used to rainy, gloomy summers. To the lushness of a wet landscape. A dreamscape of potential. A longing for unfragmented time. Even if the landscape is scarred and wounded by modernity, by an internalized colonial stomp, even if the rain has no roots to nourish, the land dreams of healing and building a new home for all the wildlife and hungry spirits.

After our meditation, my mother explained that we should greet all four directions and beings that dwell in each direction. This was our first family ritual offering to the land.

We returned from the hike exhausted and weary. Everyone was in ache that only comes after beating your feet in a rhythm of walking for a very long time. Ache that delays your recognition of beauty around you. Or perhaps, only beauty saves you, because you refrain from the feeling of the body altogether. I made food, and we ate in silence. A deep sleep followed.

In the wake

As I predicted, the ache of walking from the day before dissolved, and only the memory of awe remained. To aid the recovery, the next day, we drove to Plodda Falls (in Gaelic Eas Ploda, meaning Ploda fish) — a cathedral of coniferous giants with a waterfall of 46 meters high. Non-native Douglas firs, redwoods, and larches were planted here in the 19th century by Lord Tweedmouth, the owner of the Guisachan estate.

The Highlands open up with silence. With an approach that is reverent, flying close to the ground. In our silence and openness, the land speaks to us. It guides us. Perhaps, it also works through us, regenerates itself through us. The ancient Caledonian forest could not come back if not through human love and devotion, as in the case of Alan’s work. It’s asking us to connect, not to extract. There is a different way to visit the Highlands.

To be with the mountains, not on top of them. To move into the land, not above it. To submerge your hands into the cold streams and find yourself on an October night, warm enough to sleep outside. To witness dawn mixed up with moonshine, and prove Nan Shepherd right, that indeed, the fusion of the inner self and outer realm in these week hours of the night “keeps the life from corruption”.

Thank you for reading this essay. Share it with those who might be inspired by it, feel affinity to Scotland, or rewilding projects! If you would like to deepen your writing, join my Headwaters 6-week writing course waitlist below. (Starting October 2025)

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One Saturday afternoon my partner pointed at a book “The Ways of Paradise”, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. ‘I think you might like this’, he said in a lowered tone. We were in Berlin’s largest bookstore. The book was a strange arrangement of research and 122 loose notes, a manuscript with no clear pattern, gathered by a Swedish researcher. I opened the book and the very first note said this:

Wait a minute, I thought to myself. First of all, I am buying this book. I love books that are weird, unexplained. Second of all, Jurgis Baltrušaitis was a Lithuanian poet, whose poetry book I happen to have at home. The mystery was piqued.

We came back home, I found a copy of the poetry book by Baltrušaitis on our shelf. Small, canvassed cover with a minimalist graphic design. I started reading the preface in Lithuanian, written around 1964. At the time Lithuania was still in the depths of the occupation by the SSSR. The government of the time was combing all the books for unnecessary patriotism, and this one somehow slipped through the cracks.

The way the introduction was written felt so alive, unobstructed, energetically rich. It was following the life of the poet, his self-created exile, his life in Moscow, Norway, and Paris, then war, and finally a return to his own roots. There was so much nuance and detail, and tacit information in the language. Reading Lithuanian in the pre-internet era, speaking about the poetic symbolist movement, metaphysics, and literary and political shifts of the time, created a very strange recipe for psychic food that I didn’t expect to receive. (Mind you, this was not even the poetry itself, but the introduction.)

It’s been a while since I read something like this. I wish I could translate it, but in actually, I don’t wish for that at all. The only beauty that we have left in this world is untranslatable, uncyphered. I am happy to be one of 8000 people who have this book, not more. I find strange reassurance, beautiful synchronicity through time when I find books referencing each other. My neurodivergent brain rejoices.

As I read the introduction, I felt a tectonic plate shift somewhere within me. Maybe I can call it a spiritual experience, a new energy downpour. It’s as if I was awoken from the dullness of language I am so used to these days — the internet language.

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I felt frustration, even anger. I’ve grown to read only English contemporary texts, palatable to a Westernized nervous system and worldview. Now, I am not saying internet writing is not interesting, or lacking depth, or insight. There are so many beautiful contemporary human experiences. What I am saying is that it’s sickening how fast we get used to a certain kind of literary diet.

Reading something that is solely born on the internet feels strangely isolated by a certain kind of self-referential banality. There is no feeling. I have become accustomed to not feeling much of the English language in general. Perhaps, because I was not born into it. I will never be. I am a silent observer, a borrower. There is a gap between me and this language, and it will never be closed.

(It’s not about those beautiful quirky digital gardens that we can find and confide in. Some writers still manage to arrange language in a way that still makes me feel certain tinge of aliveness, but it’s rare. If I find them, I want to hold onto them. Dearly.)

The language that we write with on the internet today appeals to the reptilian part of the brain, not the higher self, not the body, not the soul, not the mind that desires strange novelty. The text is chewed up for a certain relatability, lacking vitality or a reflection of life that feels deeply personal, human. The way we address each other, the way we address the reader are diluted in attention-seeking writing practices. It serves only the writer and their ego. Some writers (and publications) resist against this large current, but the majority reinforce the inertia. Seeing clickbait, even subconsciously, chips away at our capacity to think outside of this language frame, let alone write outside of it.

It would be hard to explain why this is all happening. But I might attempt, so I ask for your patience.

English is not my first language. I will never be able to write in full fluency as a mother tongue English writer. At some point, my expression is capped, because at the fundamental level of my neural architecture is the language that I spoke from birth. English cannot compete with it. (Niels, my fiance still makes fun of me for strange sentence structures and insufferable amount of commas.)

It’s as if Lithuanian has flooded the bottom floor of my subconscious, and whatever other language you may try to put down on the floor, the water will float it up. It sits deeper between the tissues, on a somewhat cellular, even atomic layer of my being. Poems that I read at 15, on a bench with old, peeling paint, by a shallow winding river, are still within me.

I can only explain that sudden awakening moment of lost my “lost” language (and my new disgust towards the use of language today) by looking back at of all that soaked up literature in the early years. Not that I read a lot as a teenager, but I managed to find work that really moved me. It’s as if a writer was a musician, who struck a violin, and the vibrations reached another violin’s body—reverberating it through the law of resonance. So did those texts in the early days affect me, resonate in me. It’s not even the words themselves, but the states of being that they were able to transfer, was the most important thing. Still is.

The language of the internet today fully taps into its scarcity, its hooks, its immediacy is derived from well-funded psychology labs and chewed up by the pop culture of self-help writers. It is engineered for a short attention span, for a person who has no time (by the design of the system), and will benefit from skimming the information. It has no lasting value. Unfortunately, we see how well it is performing, we absorb it, and the worst — we emulate it.

I don’t want to see another list. I don’t want a general introduction or a summary. I want a human (or a more-than-human) story that forces me to feel newness and obliterates any stagnation and inertia in my mind. I want to go on a journey, not knowing where it will lead me.

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The Problem of Relatability

In 1946 Orwell argued that the English language, especially prose and political language became devices of obscurity— ”[it] is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

I must admit, I do enjoy the brutality of Orwell’s approach to writing. I think it’s an essential read for everyone who wants to write better:

By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it.

I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern.

This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

The vague language of war politics is not gone, certainly not from the mainstream media.

However, the gift of free rein, free expression has swayed to another direction. Now everything is easy to understand, personal, and relatable. We’re all being exposed to this language all the time, we’ve all written in this way. But I don’t know if it benefits us. Every viral essay that I read says something that I might intrinsically know, but nothing changes, nothing is renewed in me, no new ideas spark. I feel silly for getting hooked on the algorithm’s bait.

On the one hand, Orwell got what he asked for: a simple, relatable, short language of the commons. But we swayed to another direction that feels just as bland and malnourishing: relatability.

Everyone has become relatable. You enter into a para-social relationship with everyone. This type of relationship is what the internet is built upon. Because a human being is an animal, it seeks relationality, connection, belonging, and affirmation that it’s not alone. But this desire to mimetically belong is weaponized by commerce, by media, and by mainstream stories. Those whom we repeatedly see on our screens, those whom we listen to and read, we internalize and create one-sided bonds with. We create a one-sided trust.

Relatability today is a short hot flash of dopamine. It’s a meme. It infinitely scales until it unites everyone who can relate. It doesn’t ask the creator/writer to do the work. The work I am talking about is the work of mining your psyche for a human story, not relatable in pure the aesthetic decree, not even a plot — but a pattern of feelings, thoughts, and relationship dynamics that externalize the dramatic nature of life. These run deeper than the appearance of things.

There is a big difference between viral relatability and a writer being able to excavate a piece of work that directly addresses parts of you that you didn’t even have courage to acknowledge.

I still think of Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin. Can I relate to the main protagonist being a tall black man, an envoy on a permanently frozen planet, involved in political manipulation, surrounded by a non-binary race of humans?

No. But what I could relate to is a tacit friendship that builds over hardship. I could relate to unspoken aspects of attraction between two strangers. The part of me that felt seen, was the part that valued friendship that belongs in a realm beyond words. Awkwardness, ambiguity, shyness, self-preservation, yet somewhat devotion and loyalty. This is the intricacy that is a very rare experience in reading.

I want to hold onto stories that have lasting value. I want to internalize them. I want to open myself further to allow them to affect me. But to do that, I cannot be open to stories and content that grab my attention and run in the opposite direction.

I long for language that can push and rearrange my imagination, that shows how wide my mind is. Almost a dream language, one that spews images and allows my brain to create some kind of sequential story from those images.

I also want language that I can still understand, that feels familiar, but not relatable to the shallow parts of my psyche.

Can you relate to this?

The only novel thing is timelessness.

Memes will disappear into oblivion. So will the immediate content, so will candid opinions will pop-culture pieces that seem to circle the 30 year period (from the 90s onwards). In the very near future, we will see that the insatiable hunger for relatability will be satiated, overflowing into the gutter. What will come, is the desire for unrelatable, unknown, alien, strange, distant, mystical, uncomfortable, ambiguous. I can hear that desire within me loud and clear.

A well-prepared, emptied mind will receive art and stories that are getting ready to materialize themselves on Earth. Inspiration or an idea, in a filled mind will not be noticed, will not be recognized as valid or valuable, and most sadly — will be mistaken for content that has already filled the mind.

Just as the immune system in the human body is able to detect a pathogen within and destroy it, we need to grow the immune system in our minds. We welcome foreign pathogens into our mental, emotional, energetic space all the time, but compared to body’s immune system, the elimination process is much harder. That’s why it’s so important to shield ourselves from entertainment that pollutes.

Our eyes need protection, our ears need protection, our minds need protection from the language of the internet.

Below I share my protocol for depth and vigour when writing and renewing the inner language sensorium.

Protocol of Depth and Vigour

If you made it this far, here is a reward. A small protocol for re-gaining the relationship with language that invigorates you, which I too, intend to follow in the coming weeks. I hope to report on the failure or the success of it. (Please comment if you have any other tips or texts that have reinvigorated you.)

Time to renew our writing sensorium.

1. I invite you to seek reading experiences that shake up your understanding of language and communication. This will change the way you think and write. Especially in your mother tongue language. Especially if you’re used to consuming everything in English.

   What happened to me with that little poetry book was something that I don’t think I can re-create in the English language (yet).

2. Go on a content diet. Don’t read that viral essay (ugh it’s so hard). Don’t click on the clickbait video. Allow your mind to take a break from conversational written English.

3. Practice writing in an unfamiliar way. In the essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell describes the writing process that can jolt a reader out of a dull disengaged state into a state of aliveness and alertness. I love it and I want to share it with you:

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When yo think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it.

When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally.

Much love,
Rūta

April 2026, we start an 8-week authentic writing course, Headwaters.

The eight weeks are designed to take you through an arc: tending and healing the parts of self that hold you back to writing and expressing yourself with authenticity, honesty, and depth.

We will connect to the writer within and will learn how to write from the place of truth. To learn more about the course and join the waitlist, click the button below.

Join Headwaters

Morning thoughts about authenticity, inner critic, and reestablishing your connection with your inner writer from my balcony in Berlin. (Trying something new) 🤍

Authenticity is a strange, but deeply magnetizing thing

Both of my teachers shared that his year is going to be a year of shedding. That which is no longer aligned with the authentic essence within our lives is going to be shaken up and banished. Life is not going to look the same at the end of the year, as we step into 2026, which 2025 prepares us for.

Essence and authenticity is that wild, undiluted nature of our being. It’s the instinctual, intuitive animal self that holds our deep core values and the ways we are here to show up in the world. It is the part of us that is the most vulnerable, open and the part of us that is not entangled in identities, expectations, or societal programming.

Writing from a place of inauthenticity is not going to work anymore. Writing from a place of ‘what will appease those that I look up to’ is not going to work. Why? Because we are experiencing the great quickening. The systems that are built on false narratives are breaking down on a collective level, they are also breaking down at the individual scale.

Perhaps a part of you whispers to you that it is tired of pretense — online and in real life. There is a particular kind of exhaustion and a feeling of dragging your feet within your writing, or any creative output or work when it’s not aligned with your essence and authentic values. What you used to write about might not feel enough, might not satisfy your deeper soul’s calling. (I share about my own process in the video above.)

This is why in week 1 of the Headwaters writing course, I ask my students to really tune into one question: how can your writing support the vision of the life that you truly want — and most importantly, your authentic essence?

But to write from the authentic place, we must be willing to face shame and our desire to hide ourselves away. Telling truth, healing our capacity for vulnerability, and practicing to show up from the essence is the work of a writer in 2025.(Performative authenticity or vulnerability-baiting is also not going to work.)

In writing, authenticity is the topics we choose to write about, it’s the language we use, it’s the energetic state in which we write and share. It’s the intention that stitches itself into every aspect of writing and publishing. It’s the truth we bring to every single sentence.

It’s what we come alive for to write, it’s the curiosities that we dare to investigate, risking to embrace things that gift us with more energy rather than staying with things that drain it. It’s choosing a risky state of being opened. It’s choosing the risk of demasking, and leaving the built-up persona behind. It’s choosing a creative, vital life that is written by our essence.

From what I know, when we mute ourselves creatively, we prolong the fast of the soul-driven life. When we amputate our sentences and stretch our words, so they can fit into the Procrustian bed of the critic within. A writer who gives into this twisting of the self is not writing for herself, she is writing for them, whoever they are.

As shares: we should be wary of sacrificing our excellence for the sake of fitting into a calcified language of the internet, easily relatable, understandable, pre-digested. Excellence is not relatable. It can’t be, and it shouldn’t be. Excellence emerges out of a deep commitment to our very personal authenticity and essence. It’s weird, and surprising, and eerie.

Following your excellence will scare you but in a vitalizing way. It’s where excitement mixes its fresh waters with the salt water of fear, call it a delta or an estuary of aliveness. That threshold is a prayer altar to a newness that is trying to be born into this world through you. It’s also a place where our ancestral lines rise to support us, and if our sensory capacity is attuned, we can recognize that it’s happening.

The choice to move into the space of truth and honesty condenses a magnetic field around us (and our work) and energetic momentum builds, inviting new people, new ideas, new ways of perceiving the self and our lives. A rate of synchronicity increases — this is the time of personal magic.

Training the Truth Sensorium Within the Body

If you are a writer your body is your instrument. If you are a creative or an artist, your body is your instrument. It will tell you everything you need to know about the work that you’re producing. It’s a place where your taste resides. It’s the place where you can re-sensitize to feeling Yes or No when you read a sentence you just wrote.

To move beyond inner critic, expectations, and inner and outer pressure to produce a certain piece of writing, we must re-sensitize our instrument.

To do that, you need to be very specific about what you let into your periphery, to go on a certain media-fast, where you don’t ingest information that dulls your own thinking and feeling. To only feed yourself psychically with sources that feel aligned with your current desire for an energetic state you want to encapsulate in your work. In a way we must become membranous—able to read what is in front of us, to let it in and be porous, or to strengthen our imperviousness.

It’s incredible how quickly the psyche soaks up everything it sees and hears, assimilating it, mutating it within.

To recognize what your body and your soul are asking you to write is to allow yourself to be in the darkened, unknown, undefined periods, where movement is not visible, but is felt and heard. Where a certain accumulation of energy condenses and makes itself known through whispers, curiosity attempts, dream time, or a certain feeling of aliveness.

In week 4 of the Headwaters writing course we will dive deep into the topic of how to write from the body. Attuning to your personal sensorium of communication can feel like coming home, it’s a process that we can initiate ourselves into, and the practice never ends, but gets better as we learn to translate the invisible into visible, felt into tangible.

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In April 2026, we start an 8-week authentic writing course, Headwaters. The six weeks are designed to take you through an arc: tending and healing the parts of self that hold you back to writing and expressing yourself with authenticity, honesty, and depth. Through the 8 weeks, we will connect to the writer within and will learn how to write from the place of truth. To learn more about the course and secure your spot, click the button below!

Join Headwaters

This essay could be a negligent “just learn to write better; or use a better hook; or use a tried and tested formula; or learn to work with algorithm”.

However, here I wanted to explore the wound of invisibility and silence that visits every writer.

I told everyone I knew that I was moving toward becoming a full-time poet. I wanted them to hear it and to hold me to what they had heard. Disbelief, silence, scorn, I didn't care. I was doing my damnedest to create a kind of gravitational field that would have me drawn increasingly into its center.

I had an intuition that when you really annunciate what you want in the world you will always be greeted, in the first place, with some species of silence. It may be that the silence is there so that you can hear exactly what you have asked for, and hear it more clearly so that you can get it right. If the goal is real and intensely personal, as it should be, others naturally should not be able to understand it the first time it finds its own voice. It means in a way, in a very difficult way, that you are on to something. —

Though daunting, at the beginning, silence is good, and silence is a testing fire. There are many kinds of silence to encounter in life, but there is a particular and delicious terror to the anticipatory silence that we create from actually following our heart's desires. It seems to inflame and halo every conversation and everything we see with a significance and import beyond the ordinary.

Whether we are poets or prosecutors, accountants or dot-com adventurers, surely what we desire from the best of our work is a bridge to the extraordinary and a pilgrim path to new worlds that reveals itself through a daily courageous conversation between our own powers and the powers of the world.

— David Whyte

The Delicious Terror Of Silence

There is a very specific time in a writer’s arc, which is silence.

Silence is the absence of any sort of recognition, any response that you have hoped to have after publishing your writing.

Silence can be jarring, almost repulsing you from your own work, from your keyboard, from your journal. Especially when you publish a piece that you worked on for a long time. You have revealed something personal or true. You exposed a new layer of yourself to the world, and articulated the minute, specific, the important, and tangential. You clipped all evidence together, and presented your readers with an idea that can very much be life-altering.

But all you hear is silence.

This reminds me of a very crucial point in children’s development, which is called mirroring. Newborns and toddlers don’t have a sense of self. Children are not able to understand their own emotions, to make sense of them, or to integrate experiences that are emotionally challenging by themselves. That is why they need mirroring, a reflection of their own emotions, thoughts, experiences, and feelings back at them.

Mirroring happens when the caretaker can reflect all of these experiences back to the child. (Eg. “I see that you are angry right now; I can feel that you are frustrated.”)

Mirroring creates somewhat of an amalgamation of how a person will perceive themselves later in life. Through this process children internalize a sense of self, which is the self they call I. Children also absorb a belief that it is safe to be seen, it’s safe to be me. At the very basic premise, the growing person gets to realize that they actually exist, through every interaction. In this way, our identities originate from relationships around us.

However, if a child is predominantly ignored or dismissed, they will develop a very porous self-concept. This later in life can lead to having a very difficult time of knowing what one feels, what one needs, and who one is. In more severe cases, it can also lead to depersonalization.

But the need to be seen and reflected back doesn’t really go away in adulthood. We crave to be in relationships, friendships that truly see us for who we are. We want to be recognized for our work, art, and creative output. Fundamentally, we want to know that we can touch someone else with our being. This is at the core of human existence.

Writer’s Initiation — Invisibility

For creatives and writers, there’s a similar pattern that can stunt a creative growth. When you’re not receiving feedback or any kind of response from your writing, it can feel like you don’t exist as a writer. That part of self is yet invisible, non-mirrored by the outer world.

But here’s a paradox: to write is to enter a relationship with silence. To be tempered by it, to be fermented in its juice, to build your nutritional foundation from which all words originate.

Writers’ work is the work of the invisible. It’s a work of a symbolic translator, synthesizer of ideas, states of being, characters, and stories into an experiential reality for someone else. It’s the work that happens from silence.

The work born in silence, will not be allergic to silence on the other side of its birth. This absence of sound is a primordial elemental matrix for sound and resonance.

The silence that you can experience after writing is an initiation experience. It asks you one fundamental question: why are you writing?

This is a very intimate conversation to have between yourself and the part of you that moves your hands and arranges words into matter — your authentic inner writer.

Once on a phone call my mother reminded me of a quote she heard somewhere:

It stupefied me for a second. It takes away the “maybe I should” or “it would be nice” from the work. “Why” becomes “because I need to; because I want to; because I cannot not write”.

I want to ask you, what is worse:

a) to write from the depth of your heart, to publish, and hear silence?

OR

b) to write from the shallows, to please the external expectation, to publish, and hear silence?

In all honesty, writing from your heart and hearing silence can be debilitating. But your work is already seen by that silent observer, the larger Self. Work that comes from that primordial place of depth, which is your heart, is going to be familiar with silence. (We can work with publicity, and metrics, and getting your work seen simultaneously.)

But, to write for acceptance, for fitting in — and still to be not seen — can create somewhat of a painfully liberatory ground. The real writer within you cannot be rejected as it is hiding beneath the words of someone else. So the only way to access it, is to sit with the discomfort of rejection of the inauthentic self.

That is why I ask you: in these tender moments, sit and steep in this feeling of abandonment. Become absolutely present with disappointment, shame, sadness, anger that comes from zero recognition. Do not turn away, do not shame yourself for writing poorly, not understanding how the algorithm works, or doing something wrong. This is the time to mirror back and validate the disappointment, for ourselves.

This is the time, where what you think you should be writing can burn off and be alchemized into something much more useful and soulful. This is the moment to renegotiate the inner dialogue. This is a moment of initiation. Burning away all the ways you think you ought to be in order to hear a response and recognition from the outside.

Silence will force you to meet yourself with so much gentleness and care, and also with renewed sense of vigour and aliveness. And you will see that response from your readers will be a confirmation of what you’ve felt within.

I don’t want to negate the preciousness of encouragement that we need from others. It can be very medicinal, and even healing to have our writing read and recognized by others.

For me, the external confirmation (over and over again) created a spark that I carry and resource from, it warms my heart and brings a sense of purposefulness because my writing has an impact. But this cannot be the only soul food that fuels us, otherwise we will become trapped by the expectations, and allow the false, pleasing writer to take the pen.

Forging new hands

Work that is steeped in this silence-initiation will have a new foundational formation. It reminds me of the Handless Maiden story. In the story, a young woman loses her hands because the devil threatens to burn everything she sees around, if her hands are not sacrificed. From the unbearable sorrow, she leaves everything she knows and finds her way into the wild. As the woman wanders into the forest, she becomes feral, soiled and peated. One night, she is guided to a luscious garden at night. A king to whom belongs the garden, falls in love with this woman and makes her new silver hands. Her hands become indestructible.

So it is with our hands that write, and write, and just can’t stop writing. Even if we lose our initial hands, the silence alchemizes our why into a much deeper commitment.

Embrace the silence, embrace the mirrorlessness. Because contrary to our childhoods, our work is originating from a place beyond the parent-child relationship. We are the ones that must recognize it, we are the ones who must be willing to see ourselves, fully. We are the ones that must emerge out of silence and mirror back to ourselves what we are seeking from others.

If you are not going to risk the silence, if you’re not publishing, you are safe. But the risk you take is never to be seen and read. This is the risk not taken that sooner or later turns into regret. And as David Whyte reminds us, the terror of silence is much more delicious.

Thank you for reading this short essay!

If you’re in the silence territory or still hesitant to publish your work, and don’t want to have to go through writing growing pains alone, join us on the Headwaters course. We will work with this silence alchemy and capacity for being seen much more in depth. Looking forwards to see you!

With much love,
Rūta X

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—The course was unique and different from any other writing course I had done. The elements weaved throughout around mythology, psychology and regeneration, created a different kind of space to explore my relationship to writing. It felt deeper and more holistic - not only focused on the craft and strategies of writing but on my own sense of self as writer.

As a result of the course I made some tangible changes to my life to create better spaces for my writing. I now give the best hours of the day to my writing practice and have created a sense of sacred ritual around it. It's been very helpful and empowering.

Lucy Hardy, writer of Tiny Teachings

There is a place, next to a winding river, where the waters of creation run.

Here, we meet by the thousand-year-old stones and sit in a circle around the fire.

The river knows all lives that have ever happened.

The river remembers all living, all dead, all yet-to-be-born.

Its eternal flow does not rush, it gathers everyone eventually and moves them downstream.

The secret place where the river is born is called the Headwaters.

From there we can gather the life-giving waters, bathe in it, drink it, listen to it sing.

By this spring we receive answers to our deepest longings.

And as they say, the only way to bring your creations to life is to bathe them in the pools of the Headwaters.

Creative Self-Worth

When I started writing and publishing, I didn’t know how to prioritize my creative work.

I didn’t know how to nurture it, value it, or how to give it space and time it deserves.

(It turns out that so much of writing work is not about writing at all.)

This kind of creative self-denial is almost an epidemic to many, many creative souls.

When we are conditioned to devalue our own creativity, energy, and potential, we unconsciously agree to that devaluation. We take upon roles, positions, and work that maintain us in that paradigm.

Many creative people (especially women) end up in roles that are supportive, rather than generative.

Building someone else’s product or dream.

Promoting someone else’s ideas, while your own heart desires for your own creative potential to materialize.

We devalue our creative energy because we have been socialized to devalue it.

And so, our ideas, our dreams, and our visions can't come through if we do not give them priority in our lives.

Our work is to remove the dams and clear the stream.

Our work is to return to the source of the river.

This is why I created Headwaters. It’s a 6-week Course on Writing and Regeneration of Your Creative Prowess. With a full heart, I invite you to join. I’ve put together everything I know about writing and creativity into this journey. Let’s take a look at what’s inside.

Headwaters: 6-week Course on Writing and Regeneration of Creative Prowess

On April 3rd we will start a 6-week journey into uncovering your creative self and learning to write from your true, authentic essence.

As much as we will write together, we will move through deeper layers of what it means to be a writer.

My number one goal is to bring you closer to your creative essence and allow yourself to fully embrace it and express it — especially in writing.

Which means that we will also work with the inner critic, as well as your authentic, essential self — your inner writer.

I believe that working with the true, vulnerable, authentic, essential parts of the self is the most foundational part of the writing process.

Because the most interesting, alive, invigorating writing comes from the place of inner truth. Which is where we're going to journey.

Your writing "level" doesn't matter here. You might be just starting, you might be writing for years. We welcome all.

Enrollment is now open and it closes on the April 3rd. Click below to learn more about the course and secure your place:

Join Headwaters

Headwaters is for you if you relate to at least one of these points:

1. You may or may not consider yourself a writer. Those who are only starting and those who’ve been in the game for a while — are all welcome to join.

2. You have a deep inner feeling asking you to write, tell your story, and elevate your creative work to a higher value. You also want to start or uplevel your publication, such as Substack.

3. You need a system, communal accountability, and structure that can help you gain momentum in writing and putting your work out there.

4. You have a strong inner critic that stops you before you begin. You have tried writing and/or publishing in the past, but it hasn't picked up, or you gave up, but you know you're meant to share your writing with the world.

5. You feel that everything gets in the way of your writing and creative self-expression. You tend to sacrifice your time and energy for others: work, friendships, relationships, family.

6. You are a creative, entrepreneur, (or looking to make the leap) and you want to build an audience that will later become your clients. OR you want to build a publication that allows you to connect with readers all over the world, and build a supportive audience for your potential product.

7. You are tired of having to hold only one identity: you have a mix of passions, ideas, and topics that you want to write about but you don't want to censor parts of you that need to be integrated into your self-expression.

Headwaters course will help you recover your authentic and creative essence, prioritize it, and help you to write and publish your most authentic writing to date.

We are going to do this by:

1. Connecting with your authentic creative self essence so you know what it feels like to write from an authentic, soul-aligned place.

2. Unblocking your deeply rooted limiting beliefs that hold back your creative potential, your writing, and your authentic creative self, so you don't waste any more time second-guessing your creative self-worth in the world.

3. Creating a positive relationship with creative writing systems, structure, standards, and discipline. Knowing how to resolve resistance is the most crucial part of the creative workflow. I will share my systems, structure, and how to work with a part of us that helps to materialize our creative vision.

4. Learning to write from the body and intuition, so you can be attuned to the subtlety of the inner sense of truth when telling a story. We will uncover your personal voice and learn to discern what makes good writing that your readers want to come back to.

5. Becoming an Idea Synthesizer, someone who can integrate differing topics into each other, so you can build a diverse audience at the hearth of your authentic expression.

6. Integrating the identity of a writer, and most importantly—integrating the identity of a deeply deserving creative. Lasting change happens when we shift our identities. Identities shift when we are brave enough to connect with the truth of our being AND when we practice being in that identity long enough. Which leads us to…

7. Writing together. Training our writing focus together without distractions. Publishing together. This will allow you to build a creative momentum that you can take way beyond the course.

We will meet every Thursday 6-8 PM CET, starting on the 3rd of April - 8th May.
You can check your timezone alignment here. Learn more about the course below:

Join Headwaters Course

I am looking forward to hosting an incredible group of people and going on a deeply transformative and creative journey together. (Last time we had 50 incredible humans joining the course!) 🤍

Much much love,
Rūta XX

P.S. If you have questions, or feel on the fence if Headwaters is for you, you can respond to this email or book a free clarity call with me here.

On the October 30th 2025, Headwaters 6-week long writing course begins! We will work through creative blocks and dive into authentic writing. You can find all the information about the course here. 𖦹

I must admit, writing about animus was challenging. There was a lot I wanted to synthesize. A lot of my own assumptions were debunked. It was hard to close some loops that I had opened. It felt like writing about my own back. I can’t see it, I only know that it’s there when I lean against a wall, if someone touches it, if it hurts, or if I see it in a double mirror. Elusive and contradictory.

As Jung himself admits to his own ignorance (bolded words by me):

“I have been asked to present the development of the animus in a similar way. You see, all these fragments of old philosophy— philosophy was then psychology have been made by men.

Chinese philosophy, for instance, which is really a sort of psychology, was an entirely masculine invention, because women at that time played no role in the world of men, excepting indirectly, by influence. In antiquity and in all primitive societies, "cherchez la femme" was an eternal truth, but [women] were not recognized, and when men set to work on psychological matters they overlooked the existent of women completely.

So no wonder that we have a classification of the development of the anima from a deeper source—it is more than two thousand years old and we know practically nothing about the animus, or even about the existence of an animus.

But one can speculate about the animus and really produce a similar scheme for it. Here again, however, it is a man who does it, so I beg your pardon—I mean of the female part of my audience—if I am intruding upon a field which is not entirely my own. You are quite free to suggest a different classification, so please do consider my point of view only as a proposition based upon a certain experience and spiced with more or less benevolence.”

With that in mind, let’s begin in an unexpected place.

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Sulfur and Alchemy

Like most of the afternoons, I walked my daily loop around the neighborhood and the surrounding nature reserve. An unusual day for February. Sun was breaking through air, casting itself upon every living creature, bark, branch, shrivelled leaf. The orange light latched upon the breast of a forest pigeon who was beating its path through the blue sky.

I walked towards the bog onto a path that turned into a long, low-hanging wooden bridge across the marsh. I stopped at my not-so-secret place on the wooden path. A few meters in front of me was a gas passageway, bubbling onto the surface out of the sedimental depths. This time it was frozen and large air pockets were stuck in the thin sheet of ice.

On my way back, I could smell sulfur. Cold air singled out the gas particles and froze them into suspension. My eyes locked into the black water on top of the black earth, mixed with branches, dead and living trees, broken grasses, and dozens of seasons of leaves. It all was being digested. It was all illuminated by the early setting of the wintry sun.

In the ancient study of Alchemy, sulfur was seen as one of the three primes, tria prima. Three primes have extended beyond alchemy. It was the holy trinity; the existential realm of body, mind, and spirit; the physical states of matter solid, liquid, gas. In alchemy, these were the three primes with their inherent qualities:

Sulfur – the fluid connecting the High and the Low. Sulfur was used to denote the expansive force, evaporation, and dissolution. Associated with soul (Psyche), the principle of combustibility 🜍.

Mercury — the omnipresent spirit of life. Mercury was believed to transcend the liquid and solid states. The belief carried over into other areas, as mercury was thought to transcend life/death and heaven/earth. Associated with spirit (Eros), the principle of fusibility and volatility ☿.

Salt — base matter. Salt represents the contractive force, condensation, and crystallization into form. Associated with the body, and the principles of non-combustibility and non-volatility 🜔.

Carl Jung spent the third majority of his life researching, analyzing, and synthesizing alchemical texts, looking for solace and integrations for his theories into much older works of humanity. Alchemy happened to reflect the archetypal images that Jung was postulating at the time. Barbara Hannah, Jung’s student paralleled sulfur to animus.

Animus and A Woman in a Man’s World

Animus is an archetypal energy within a woman that encompasses all impressions from male-associated actions, thoughts, opinions, ideas, etc. The very first energetic charge that animus receives is from the bond between the father (or if not present, another close male figure) and the daughter. Later on, animus absorbs positive and negative aspects of our brothers, uncles, grandfathers, friends, classmates, and whatever we ingest through media and larger over-culture.

As we grow, heal, integrate aspects of self, animus also grows, develops, and spreads its roots and branches throughout the whole map of the female psyche. Its roots reach into the darkest shadows, primordial ideas and instincts. Its branches strengthen our personal climb towards self-realization.

Animus is responsible for bringing our desires, dreams, ideas, art, and creations to life. Through the lowest roots within the subconscious, it moves the waters and psychic nutrition upwards into the conscious plane of the branches, to bear the fruits.

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However, if animus is left undetected, unrecognized, un-initiated into your personal psyche-land, it will run free setting fires in ancient mind-forests, disrupting delicate idea-ecosystems, tearing apart any confidence, self esteem, and action-taking capacity within.

Just like sulfur, animus can be corrosive and burning. It can either burn the house it lives in (the female psyche) or it can direct this fire towards protection and negative complex purification within a woman’s internal, as well as external existence. In alchemy, there is a distinction between contaminated sulfur, and true sulfur, which “can cleanse us from all these superfluous and destructive malformations and diseases.”

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, C.P. Estés writes about positive, healthy animus as the part of the female psyche that “knows the way of the land”. He is the messenger in between layers of our interior. He is the part of us that has an overview of our deeper desires, our ideas, our plans, our authentic truth. She expands:

Similarly, the alchemists even say that sulfur, in fact, knows everything, that it is the source of illumination and of all knowledge as it burns and corrodes what is untrue. True sulfur drives out the destructive superfluities.

“Absolute knowledge is considered to be a type of "knowledge" or "luminosity" inherent in the unconscious and accessible, for instance, through intuition, dreams, visions, foresight, and synchronistic phenomenon. It is not a knowledge mediated by the sense organs or by the ego, but rather a self-subsistent, inborn, “unconscious” knowledge <..>.”
— Barbara Hannah

Negative animus acts like a pollutant of any effort directed at making your life your own. A great way to detect negative animus is to look at the internalized aspects of patriarchy.

Are you made to desire things your soul doesn’t really want?

In my personal life, I believe my negative animus took over when I started believing that my true worth as a woman would be achieved when I could make it in a man’s world. I did not think about it consciously. But my action (animus) spoke loud and clear. I was very much passionate about humane technology and affective computing at the time, I wanted to become a designer or an engineer. I even applied to AI master’s program in Zürich (thank God I didn’t get in — my BSc was in Psychology and I didn’t have the maths — I wouldn’t have met the love of my life). I wanted to earn a lot, I wanted to be seen just as smart, I wanted to be part of that club of people who can create something valuable, interesting, needed, and most importantly, I wanted to be cool. Not to say that these ambitions are wrong. They just didn’t come from a place in which I felt at ease, or in my element. Thus, we arrive at this point:

The negative, unexamined animus will convince you that your innate qualities, desires, capabilities, and talents are worthless, and you should strive to be more like the guys (the only valued individuals in our society).

However, the paradox of the integrated animus is that it will support whatever authentic feminine expression exists within you. It will protect you from more predatory aspects of the psyche and internalized oppression, alerting and directing your attention to its negative counterparts. It’s part of the instinctual nature, observant, boundaried, and action-taking.

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Since my early years, I just loved writing and have been obsessed with psychology, spirituality, mysticism, art. I never fully rejected these aspects, but I never fully embraced them with confidence. I believe that’s the part that has slowed me down in my “career-seeking”. I had to re-examine the values that were not mine.

Many women are still dealing with this predicament. And I wonder how many more are awakening out of this bad dream we were worlded into. Unless our fathers, fully supported our mothers (and us), and our mothers truly did what they wanted to do with their unique essences, it’s pretty hard to understand our authentic desires.

This is why I see the work with our very personal animus so important.

After 5000 years of patriarchal domination in the West, we are still in the very thick of it. And as ancient as our psyches are, they are also adaptive. Each generation of the motherline carries new information about the times we are in. The animus, our inner guide in the outer world, shape-shifts along these times.

Something tells me that each of our animus, has been inherited through the motherline, getting a new upgrade with every prime paternal figure we meet as we emerge out of the womb. Animus learns about the plateaus of our cultures and adapts to them. Yet in its true nature, animus carries an undying desire to serve whatever authentic essence we have come with into this world.

Eros and Psyche

When I first started writing this essay, I thought that a good lens to look at the animus would be through the lens of Eros and Psyche.

However, very soon I realized that Eros is not a typical hero. In fact, he isn’t one. He is a winged, obscure and almost invisible being. Plato called animus a daimon, a creature not divine, nor human form. But, what confused me the most, is that in the myth, Eros in the myth is personified as a man.

In alchemy and in Jungian studies (much later than Greek era), Eros (as a concept, not as a mythic creature) is seen as a feminine archetype. Hence, Eros is in a way, an opposite to animus. In the Jungian view, it’s only the Eros that can actually unite the opposites, a force that is asking for integration of the opposites, a union, and psychic relatability. As his student, Barbara Hannah writes:

“We cannot unite the opposites without Eros, and moreover it is only she who can tame the wild beasts in us. As many of you know from experience, certainly for women, it is only love that can give us the incentive to tame our wild beasts, not only our personal rages and desires, but also the tendency to turn away from the light of the opposites in the individual and let ourselves be possessed by mass mindedness.”

This duality, this convergence of myth, and later symbolism of Eros might point us toward a non-dual nature of love (something worthwhile to ponder as we celebrate love this month).

In older mythology, Eros was also known as Phanes, a primordial god who emerged out of an Orphic egg, with a serpent coiled around it. Only in later years Eros was said to be a wistful son of Aphrodite (Venus) and Zeus.

The symbol of the serpent always points us to the Old Europe. In the Neolithic times, the serpent was revered as an embodiment of the Great Goddess. We can see that in one of the surviving myths about the Serpent Queen (Lithuanian), who falls in love with and marries a sea serpent, only for him to be scythed by her hateful brothers later.

But for the sake of this essay, I’d like to give myself permission and imagine the mythical Eros as animus.

In the myth of Psyche and Eros, Eros is ordered by his mother Aphrodite to make Psyche fall in love with a beast, as vengeance for Psyche being more beautiful and even more worshiped for her beauty than Aphrodite. But Eros himself falls in love with Psyche, and with a bit of oracular intervention, Psyche ends up being married to Eros, unaware of his true appearance, denied of seeing him in full light. Only at night, they can be near each other, sharing an invisible bond. However, Psyche is encouraged by her jealous sisters to reveal the true image of her lover. He might as well be a serpentine monster, as the oracle once saw in his visions, and Psyche, in her own right, should once and for all know that. One night, when Eros is plunged into a deep sleep, Psyche brings an oil lamp to illuminate him. What she saw was not a monster, but a handsome winged being. The regret and joy mixed in her chest and by an accident, she spilled a drop of oil onto Eros. He awoke in great derangement, wallowing Psyche’s broken promise to never reveal his true nature. He left her alone in their palace of invisible things, and fled where she could not find him. Through her sullen wanderings, Psyche reached Aphrodite herself, who presented four trials for Psyche, if she is ever to see Eros again.

The initiation that Psyche goes through reminds me of the initiation of Vasilisa, who has to separate poppy seeds, lentils, and corn in Baba Yaga’s hut. When Psyche is told to hold onto her piece of bread, she meets Cerberus, a three-headed dog. By giving the beast some bread, Psyche manages to come through into Hades’ realm. It reminds me of Inanna who must abandon all her Mes at each gate of the underworld.

But one of the tasks pulled my attention more than the others. The fourth trial asked Psyche to fetch the dark Stygian water from the river Styx, which emerged out of distant mountain tops, circling around Hade’s territories. In Greek mythology, Styx is a river and also a goddess of the underworld. It is the river, in which the dead are ferried across from one shore to another by the boatman (psychopomp) Charon. A mythological river between the living world, and the one of death carries throughout many world mythologies. Water is a portal, a purifier, an eternal carrier into and out of life.

“the famous cold water ... trickles down from a high and beetling rock. Far under the wide-pathed earth a branch of Oceanus flows through the dark night out of the holy stream, and a tenth part of his water is allotted to her.”

This song instantly comes to my mind when I read about Styx.

And so, Psyche is aided by the eagle of Zeus, an oracular spirit bird. The eagle remembers that he owes Eros a favor, so he dives in to grab the flask out of Psyche’s hands. He fetches the dark water from Styx, dodging the never sleeping dragons, ordained to protect the river.

“Do you really expect to be able to steal, or even touch, a single drop from that holiest— and cruelest — of springs? Even the gods and Jupiter himself are frightened of these Stygian waters. You must know that, at least by hearsay, and that, as you swear by the powers of the gods, so the gods always swear by the majesty of the Styx.”

I feel a wink incoming from . In her latest course When Women Were Land (Advaya), she explored ancient Minoan civilization, and its devotion to female-bird beings, in great detail. Perhaps, the eagle of Zeus was an echo from the bird goddesses. Perhaps, we can say that Psyche was helped by her foremothers, a matrilineal spirit taking flight, looking over with a vicious eye, predating the predators herself. She who has been close to the river, who has crossed the river of life and death, to and fro many times.

Even if at face value interpretation of this myth follows the integration of Psyche as Soul, Eros as Love, I believe that Psyche’s trials also point us towards Animus integration within the femme interior.

You can only have a relationship in darkness for so long. The desire to illuminate and see an aspect of yourself that belongs to your own primary soul’s color palette is deeply natural, even if encouraged by more shadowy aspects (sisters).

These trials mature Psyche into her capacity to meet her counterpart in full light, in an official union. But, she doesn’t get there alone. She is aided by the myriad of mythical creatures, instinctual helpers who understand each ecological region they inhabit.

For women, this means developing a healthy relationship with the part of us that can be truly helpful in the outward manifestation of our authentic life force, as well as our creative lives. This means our ancient souls can be resourced and supported by the animus, who knows how to navigate and find a way out of the contemporary patriarchal jungle while protecting the heart of our essence.

I hope you enjoyed this essay and I want to share so much more with you! If you are curious and would like to learn more about animus and how you can create a meaningful and transformative aspect of self, here are two ways to go deeper:

1. In October 30th, I’ll be opening doors to Headwaters 6-week writing course once again. If you feel called or just curious to learn more, head here and join the course. We have the whole week about animus integration there, where we cover discipline, structure, and putting out your writing into the world.

2. and I am crafting the Animus Guide for Women Artists, Writers, and Creatives. This will be a self-paced, comprehensive, beautifully illustrated guide for those who want to transform their creative capacity and renegotiate the relationship with the animus in their soul’s work. We are still in the early creative process, but will keep everyone updated! Join the waitlist here.

Much love to you,
Rūta X

Headwaters 8-week long writing course begins soon (April 2026)! We will work through creative blocks and dive into authentic writing. You can find all the information about the course here. 𖦹

Grief

I spent the whole of January trying to understand my resistance towards writing, creating, and any work in general. After my first writing course had finished in late autumn, I knew I was toying on the edge of burnout. I needed to simplify. I needed to rest, but I didn’t know how.

With the capacity that I had left, during December I wrote two guest articles for Advaya, on the legacy of Marija Gimbutas, the pioneering archaeo-mythologist of our time. This woman, her life’s story, her love for the Earth and the people reached me through the strands of time, nurtured me during this period of loss and grief.

December was the month when I lost a childhood friend to a vicious, violent cancer. Her loss was so sudden, electrifying, shocking. Another precious woman in my life who got diagnosed too late. I didn’t know how to react. I could not believe it. I felt confusion, anger. But mostly, I felt sad. I could only look at our photos from the seaside together. With cute dresses posing in front of the Parnidis Dune; in waves in our bathing suits, holding hands. Tears would swell up at any moment of the day, without a notice.

Each early death that I witnessed in my life, felt so deeply unnatural. It violates the relationship with the denial of permanence. It’s a violent rupture in our routines, in our habitual capacity to take life for granted. It shakes us out of inertia, out of sleep. And yet, you get to live, a little bit or a lot longer. You get to forget that you are still alive. You get to wake up next to someone you love, slowly roll out of bed, make tea, make breakfast, and continue on with your day.

I started reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying while I travelled to Scotland, France, and Belgium to visit my friends and family during the Christmas season. My mother read this book when her mother died, also from cancer, almost 15 years ago.

I knew that the West was impoverished regarding death and its rituals. But not to that degree. We are as divorced from life, as we are divorced from death and the imminent awareness of it. We don’t know how to guide our loved ones through this transition. We are scared to touch it. It’s not even grief that tasks us. It’s shame. Shame and guilt to still be living, and forgetting that we truly are alive.

Marija Gimbutas lost her father when she was 15. The shockwaves of the loss fuelled Marija’s interest in death, and especially what happens afterwards. As young as 19 years old, she wrote her first article on Baltic Pagan burials and death rituals. Death propelled her early work. It architected her orientation by creating a large cavity in her heart.

(If you’d like to learn more about Marija Gimbutas early years and her archaeo-mythological legacy, you can read my essay on Advaya’s blog.)

But before I could create and write again, I had to embrace the totality of grief. I had to embrace parts of myself that were dissolving, refusing aliveness, refusing to create again.

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Love

At the end of December, I also turned 30 and on the same day, my partner proposed and we got engaged. Both of our families were there, witnessing the surprise, the joy, the tears. Time had stopped on that French seaside, pushed in by tall dunes and overgrown pine forest. Once again, I had no words. The emotional intensity of that day and the following week stupefied me. I’ve spent most of my birthdays in the solitary company of friends and loved ones who would still be around at the exhausting tail end of the year. But this time I had an incredible love surround me, being able to share this time and the engagement with family meant everything to me. Only when we arrived back in Berlin, could I understand what truly happened, and how lucky I am. Looking back at my whole 20s I spent in the trenches of healing the inner child to ever feel deserving of this much love.

Creative Resurgence

And so, January came, and I found myself in the presence of resistance. It seemed I’d forgotten what it feels like to be curious about the most random thing, to follow that stream of curiosity, and to develop a story around it.

Somehow, I forgot how creativity works. I felt too tired to even think about writing, creating, researching, thinking, and even dreaming.

In the past weeks, I’ve been threading through health issues, and a strange pain in my abdomen that I am still yet to figure out at the doctor’s. Every day I wake up hoping that the pain is something that will go away eventually, or perhaps, it is because of my sleeping position, or something that can be treated through the right diet. The gynecologist says it’s nothing related to my reproductive organs, but as we know, everything in a woman’s body is connected.

And if it’s a pain that stops me from feeling good in my body, then pain is related to my writing. If pain, grief, loss, halts your writing, then they are too, related to your writing. For years I felt weird for being so highly attuned to my body, that it somewhat distracted me from writing or doing work. I wouldn’t say it’s a lack of discipline, but attunement that I could not overstep. I could not escape a state of being, compartmentalize, move on, work, write, create outside of my watery, moon-like existence. I believe that many women if they are honest with themselves, cannot do that either.

For this reason, I have a deep admiration for a woman who writes, and in general, for a woman who dares to create in a man’s world.

You have to have the guts, first of all, to decide that you’re going to write, to create while your body continues to present ailments that ask for healing, emotions that need feeling, and thoughts that ask for resolution. Your work will be imbued by the body, you will not escape it. And secondly, there is the bravery of exposure for all of this, and the decision that you’re going to publish your work.

Within your writing there is life, there is the pleasure you allow and don’t allow yourself; there is a pain in your heart, in your body, in your loved ones, and the world around you.

But there is also aliveness that wants to be translated into words, through you. Because words are your medium. Even if you have found other mediums to create art through, words are still your medium. Words are my matter, as Ursula K. Le Guin says.

In a woman’s body, there is no separation between body and writing (or any creative work). This means that no other work will come through until I allow this passage of emotions, of stagnation, of physical time to move through me.

This past month, I tried writing other essays I thought I should write. I tried starting work pre-emptively, hurried by my thoughts. But none of it could be done until now — until I became honest with myself about how I really feel.

Inertia only happens when we deny truths of our bodies.

A Room of One’s Own

If you are a woman writer, I see you. You have started your publication. Perhaps, last week, last month, or a few years ago. Or maybe, you’re just planning to do so. I rejoyce because it’s a step towards self-expression that can truly be directed and steered only by you.

In the essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf speaks to the sheer lack of privilege women had at the beginning of the 20th century and beforehand. A woman, even having the heart of a writer, poet, or artist was not able to simply spend her time indulging in such things. The mother line, as opposed to the father line, did not pass down acquired wealth to support these sorts of pursuits. Nor was the paternal investment of time, education, and money in a woman’s destiny at the time.

To have a room of your own is not just to deeply inhabit a physical space. It’s to create time where you are unburdened from the weight of the world, your work, family, relationships, responsibilities.

Today, the room must also be established and made in one’s own psyche, in one’s own mind, and heart. Today, your room is intruded by the world, by faces of strangers you will never meet in real life. By information that does not need to be in your space, in your writing, in your body, in your mind. And this boundary you cannot buy.

To be a woman who writes is to draw an energetic boundary between yourself and the rest of the world demanding your care and attention.

To be a woman who writes is to allow yourself to include your body into the writing process. To be wallowed in an absolute drought of any creative idea. To intuit where the trickling of the spring begins. To trace the streams into larger pools and rivers. To swim in the river of healing creative resurgence, and to enter these life-death-life cycles with awareness.

We are asked to make a room of our own — to be nourished psychically in this dwelling, to not allow any emotional or mental bait to steal our creative capacity as we imbue our writing with the most precious life source — our attention.

I will leave you with an excerpt from my essay about Marija Gimbutas. She reminds us of the nature of the shapeshifting life-death-life goddess, so prevalent in Old Europe:

Perhaps, the most interesting theory of Gimbutas is that the goddess was herself a shapeshifter. Deities such as Laima, Ragana, and Žemyna were the ones that smirked at us through thousands of years with the eyes of the Great Goddess. In Lithuanian mythos, Laima was the goddess of happiness, pregnancy, mothers, and childbirth. She was the spring, the most beautiful woman by the sacred stream, she was the cuckoo — announcing and bringing regeneration on her winged arms.

As the cycle continued, and the harvest ended, Laima turned into Ragana—The Witch Hag. She was old and crippled. She was the winter and the death goddess. Her wings turned long and dark: she was the hawk, catching the last remaining life and bringing it to an end. And once the winter passed, yet again she turned into Laima, and so, the cycle continued.

Looking back at these two months of winter, I see those cycles within cycles. Grief and love are sisters, and in between there are plateaus and mountains of stillness and renewal. From Laima to Ragana, from Life to Death, and Life once again. Writing is no different.

Much love,
Rūta 🤍

P.S. In couple of months, I’ll be opening doors to Headwaters writing course once again. If you feel called or just curious to learn more, head here and join the waitlist.

Not gonna lie. It was hard.

The experience of building my own product, selling it, and running it on my own has been the Saturn Return initiation I did not expect to happen at all.

From August till the end of November, I was locked in.

I never felt so full-time focused for such a long period of time.

Perhaps that speaks to my attention capacity. Our attention capacity.

I am convinced. And now, I have tested this on myself — the biggest focus prod is work that you’re really meant to do.

Distracting technology is only half of the story. Another question is why do we seek distractions in the first place?

It’s because we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing (from the soul’s perspective).

I never felt like I could use all of my knowledge/gifts in one workplace/client work/product.

But this opportunity allowed me to do all of that because I was the one responsible for every single bit of it.

I had the freedom of complete responsibility.

It was on me if it would be a complete flop. Knowing that, I approached the design of this course as an experiment and intuitive way of working, similar to how I approach my writing itself.

Here’s what running a 6-week course taught me:

1. You have a right to take a risk and put all of your eggs into that one heirloom willow-woven basket.

When I started building this course, my freelance work with a major client had just finished. I knew that I could either start looking for new client work (in design space), or I could jump off the cliff and create something I always wanted — something of my own.

If you too have a deep dream of building a meaningful offering and starting your personal business, I want to cheer you on. This is the most radical, scary, transformative thing you can do.

I had nothing to lose, I was learning something new every day.

I felt so charged and alive. It was everything or nothing.

But, in order to take this risk in a well-calculated manner, you will have to be very much attuned to Nr. 5 of this list. Otherwise, we risk delusion that spins us out of reality, rather than into it.

Another thing that is very important at this point is to see that it’s possible to earn your living through your passion. Who else has done a similar thing you’re doing? And do you believe that it’s possible for you to do that as well? I did a lot of unblocking work prior to and during the building period. Meditation, journaling, inner child, and shadow work were all there.

2. Intuition is your roadmap. (But, allow yourself help and structured guidance.)

The course had 6 modules. I wanted to combine psychology, healing practices, mythology, mysticism, as well as very specific writing exercises. All of the modules felt like chapters within my own life, very personal lessons I’ve gone through. It felt like an intuitive path, a journey to go on, week by week.

I put together a course that I wish I had gone through several years ago. The creative self-worth struggle is a mythological creature every writer or creative will have to confront. It is an ongoing confrontation, and in my opinion, the most important one in the story. That’s why in the Headwaters course we’ve spent a lot of time unravelling and unblocking the damn thing.

But intuition wasn’t enough. I needed a good to-do list. Using tools that guided me through the structure and organic strategy for this work was paramount because I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.

If you’re building a product or crafting a service for the first time, I would highly recommend following tried and tested ways of building and launching as a structure. The transformative essence of the material should come from your personal first-hand experience.

This combination of intuition and proven + adapted-to-me strategy worked really well.

3. People who you teach have SO MUCH to teach you.

I fell in love with my students right away. What I quicky realized was that this group of people were here to also teach me. Their bravery to write their life stories, to write fiction, to write truth, and deeply heart-opening stories touched me so deeply. They were showing up for themselves, their craft, their art, their voice, sometimes against all odds.

In fact, fiction was something I’d been considering for a while but never dared to fully step into, and I saw my students just going all in (there was no prescription of what my students should write).

This is the part where you must swallow your own medicine in order to progress as a writer and as a human being.

At the very last session, I could barely keep my tears, as everyone shared their feedback and some read their final writings. I actually felt high in the best way possible.

4. Burnout is not sexy. Boundaries are.

Truth is, I could feel a sleuthy burnout coming along. As much as I loved full-time 100% focus, there were days when my body pulled me sideways like a horse refusing to follow the lead of its rider.

I had another kind of work going on, which I had to put a pause on or try to delegate, or ask for support. I don’t think I could have made it without my partner stepping up to help.

I learned that I can’t do it all. That I need a lot of rest. That one 30 min walk in 2 days is not a good measure of health. That I need to be able to focus on one thing and one thing only, to deliver it well. I learned that I thrive if my work consists of 1-2 (max) creative projects.

The most tiring thing in the past years was the amount of creative projects I either initiated or said yes to. Now that I had no other choice but to say no to everything else in my life. I felt so much better. My attention span healed.

Unified focus on one goal—nothing tastes better.
(Capricorn girl here.)

However, after the course finished I found myself fumbling back into a space of not wanting to do anything for a very long time. Not wanting to write. Not wanting to work.

This does smell like a burnout, or end-of-the-year energy altogether, but I made sure to allow myself to do nothing for a while. (I made a Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis test, and it did show that my adrenals and thyroid, glands responsible for energy and metabolism, were under optimal mineral range, signaling actual physical burnout.)

We cannot force our own reemergence and healing, but boredom and a need to create kicks in pretty soon, if we’ve given ourselves the spaciousness to start anew.

I’m still reemerging.

5. Nothing will test your ideas like the market. (Business talk)

Perhaps you have great ideas. Maybe you often change your mind: what to write, what to work on, what to build. Perhaps, you’ve already been a part of building something, part of a company, or a startup, or just doing your own thing (even your own business).

What will show you how good and relevant your product is, is the market.

This is the bitter orange rind we must work with.

This is the part that is very interesting to me, because all businesses stand on this ground.

Is something that you’re building relevant, needed, interesting, transformative, or experiential? Does it solve a particular problem, and ultimately, will it bring people closer to the version of themselves that the product promises to?

Over the years, I noticed that the biggest mistake that people make while launching a product is that they think it would be cool, but there is no real need for it.

I would urge you to first test out your waters with writing about the subject, and having calls with strangers who would be interested.

When crafting offerings, we need to work with truth and be obsessed with it.

It’s an integration work between finding out what is wanted and needed, and what authentically feels natural for you to create and share with the world, which is what makes the fruit of your labor very juicy.

Thank you for reading this newsletter, it’s a less serious version than what I usually write. I am curious if you are crafting an offer or a product and what your experiences have been!

Much love,
Rūta X

Post Scriptum (a note I wrote for instagram caption, encompassing the sum energy of the old year finishing, and the new one starting, as well as starting my 30s)

on the 29th of December, I turned 30 and these past months have felt like the peak of my Saturn Return. Through and through I am a winter baby. I was born in the darkest, most intense, and transitional time of the year. I love snow, everything to do with it. My heart breaks every year to see less and less of it.

This was a year of establishing a relationship with darkness. The shadows speak in more eloquent tongues. Waxed candlelight liberates bees’ flight across the wild meadow. Honey is sweeter in a herbal milk before sleep. Round churches, temples, and tombs made in the image of the dark femme. Ruins remind us of what’s yet to come. Wild animals wade through tall grasses while no one watches at night.

Regeneratrix returns through death, again and again, she returns us into the cycle of life. She washes our bodies in a starry river, and they are renewed for a new journey on this Earthen body.

From the darkest moments of my 20s were born desires of different life, different love, different way of being. Today, I thank every human, every guide, every ancestor, every being who helped me on this journey. There is so much love in my life right now, it barely fits in my heart.

It is a privilege to grow old on this wonderful Earth, in this vitriolic world. We are allowed grief, we are allowed joy.

May rue and agrimony protect your path this year. 🤍

Headwaters 8-week long writing course begins soon! We will work through creative blocks and dive into authentic writing. You can find all the information about the course here. 𖦹

How does she feel today? My body.

How does she feel? Tired, soft, easeful, tender. Doesn’t want to look at the screen. Can’t buy into a ‘writing strategy’ or structure that asks to introduce a brash energy that she cannot handle. Not today. Not today.

Softness, stillness, one storyline, one myth, a singular focus that nourishes the mind, and body — that’s what she wants.

Discipline bends into flexibility, not force.

When you write from your body, you translate states of being into words.

What feels true? Which words find resonance between your tissues?

It’s not what is popular, it’s not what you saw someone else write and ascend to stardom.

It’s what’s true to you, while knowing it most probably will be true for someone else.

This way we articulate and materialize states of being into a written form, translating and mirroring these unspoken ideas for those who need that articulation.

Let your body help articulate what mind cannot.

How does truth feel in the body?

Good writing will reflect in your nervous system. While reading, you will be able to focus, and ultimately, calm down. Some parts of you will be soothed, some—activated. And that particular sensation of soothing will come from reading some kind of truth.

Why does truth soothe? Ultimately, truth soothes because it is safe. And it is safe because it liberates. It liberates parts of us that seek reflection. We can finally know that someone else is there: experiencing what we are, feeling what we are, perceiving what we are. Truth heals isolation within parts of ourselves. It braids bridges in the interior of the psyche-body. Truth can be found in a fictional story, as much as in a fact. And many times, a story has a far more nuanced and better delivery track.

But rarely do we feel safe while telling the truth that comes from our bodies. Especially, when truth is not allowed in our families, households, work, schools, societies. Today, people get arrested, sentenced, and killed for telling, writing, and publishing truth. And with them, dies a larger body of humanity. There is no future without people who can tell truth.

To write is to acclimatize your body to a continuous sensation of truth and move deeper into it. It strengthens, it supports, it gusts flexibility. Something turns in your stomach. Your heart opens to a potential new stream of thought. A valve decalcifies.

Writing truth will open valves of new energy. It will liberate parts of you from being captive for many years. It takes a lot of psychic and physical energy to resist truth. It chronically exhausts the body. It wears off your tissues and bones. When we move against truth of the body and truth of the soul, it brings illness.

Writing that is not yours will feel flat. Sometimes you must write something that will not feel truthful in your body, just to know the different quality of landing it has on you. Perhaps, you will make your arguments in a linear and logically deduced way: proving the worth of your reasoning and clear for everyone’s understanding. Perhaps, your mind will be licking its mouth in gladness and vigorous word equations. But your body will feel that your words have not reached the pinnacle of what you really wanted to say.

Your readers will also sense the same flatness when you write something that does not stir a bone in your own home.

All of this is a practice and act of fine-tuning the feeling instrument. Re-sensitizing the body, giving permission to feel and discern.

Permission to feel and discern.

(We will dive much deeper into this in the Headwaters writing course.)

Red Thread

To write is to walk a labyrinth. To make art is to walk a labyrinth. The further you move into it, the closer you get to truth, something that is real. Let’s wander in together.

꩜꩜꩜

In your hands, you hold a heavy stone that once was a part of a great sculpture. You can’t exactly tell what body part it is, nor how you got it. And so, you tie a red thread around this stone and place it at the entrance of the labyrinth. You enter.

The red thread is coiled on a spindle. It marks your way through the corridors—your way back. Stone walls collect moisture of mineral-rich water. Slow drops echo and glimmer in a dim light. Breath reverberates and transforms into a rhythm of your walking. Turn after turn, sounds of the outside world peel off layers of coherence until you can no longer hear them.

You reach the final turn and end up at the central point—the eye of the labyrinth. Here runs a basin of an underground stream. No one has ever found out where this water comes from. The sound of this stream pierces through your heart. Your palm penetrates the current and you pull up your hand to your mouth to taste the spring water. Another time your hand reaches the stream, you fill a disk-shaped clay vessel to take back with you.

On your right lurks an engraved sculpture of the Minotaur, the beast that would feed on the aliveness of new ideas, raw connections of thoughts that in their due time turn into art. Once alive, this creature is now shaped out of the same stone that the labyrinth was cast from. You pick up a sharp stone, lying beside your feet, and chip off a part of the sculpture.

Holding onto spring water and the piece of the sculpture, you’re ready to return. And so, you follow the red thread back.

꩜꩜꩜

A few months back I learned about a myth of Ariadne’s thread.

Ariadne was a princess and a daughter of king Minos. In secret, she gave a thread to Theseus, who was about to venture into the Labyrinth. Theseus wanted to kill the minotaur and free his fellow Athenians from capture. She told him that conquering the beast was just half of the work. Another, perhaps even greater challenge was to find his way back. The labyrinth had only one entrance and one exit. Ariadne’s thread helped Theseus navigate the labyrinth and return alive. (You can listen to the whole myth here.)

Body is a Labyrinth. Body is the red thread. Through it you go to find what feels truthful, real. You bring back the lifewater and a calcified memory of what kills truths and ideas. The red thread is the map: for each time you enter the labyrinth—the path will be rearranged.

Much love,
Rūta