Newhaven Fisherman - reproduced with acknowledgement Edinburgh Museum
Recently I held a Swan Ancestral Session for a young man living in Iceland. He was born in another land and was brought up speaking English. Even though he had lived in Iceland for a long time and had learnt the language well, when it came time to express himself, especially when he was emotional, he found he could not speak fluently. And yet, when he dreamt, he dreamt in Icelandic and spoke it perfectly. He told me he was drawn strongly to Iceland, that he had to uproot his whole life and world to move there and yet he was facing these issues of being stuck in his expression there. When he got emotional he could not speak.
When we journeyed together he saw himself as a man mending nets. He was very skilled in his craft. His grandmother had taught him how to do this when he was a small boy. When his little hands couldn’t mend the nets well, his grandmother asked him to look into the water and see that ‘all nets mattered’ because even though it wasn’t perfect and he’d left big spaces in the net, the net still worked - small fish swam out of it but the bigger fish were held inside of it.
When the boy grew into a man, he was very respected in his village for his strong and well-made nets. He was relied upon and valued in his community. But with this responsibility, he became more rigid in his thinking and began to create a new belief that every net had to be perfect and that ‘every detail matters’.
Unfortunately the challenge in his life came when his wife passed away in childbirth. This moment fractured the man. He became obsessed with the detail that he’d missed. The one detail that he believed could have somehow saved his wife’s life. He punished himself for missing this detail, he believed he had failed and that he had not kept his wife ‘safe within the net’.
His grief was so strong that it took away his ability to speak.
After his session we spoke about perfectionism and that this story had placed an unbearable weight on him about getting ‘every detail right’. He created a new belief for himself to let go of the perfectionist and laugh at mistakes because he was always learning. He told me in his journey the most beautiful moment was when he looked into water and watched the fish in the reeds and listened to the music the water made.
It reminded me of this photo that I took when Tony & I used to gather water from the spring near Wombat Forest in Victoria.
