SY | Becoming Sovereign
Teller: SY
SY is a pursuing her post-graduate studies and also on a journey of self exploration.
SY came to me as a referral (a gift to me, in my opinion) from a sister-friend-beloved who heard me on my mission to story people, and connected us- SY, who technically is a stranger but in our meeting was anything but that- I related immediately with her voice, as if we were part of a family and who share essential mineral composites.
Theme: Map of Becoming
While SY is a picture of grace and composure in person, there was an emotional undercurrent in our session- one senses fear on the back of courage, suppression giving way to hard-won empowerment. There is a tireless push-pull energy beneath the surface, ‘all over the place’ she says of herself - but one cannot help but notice she is following her North Star, her Big Dipper, closer than ever.
From the writer Martin Shaw, we hear that in times before, when two wild horses headed for different directions are attached to your chariot, to become a Warrior, you create a ‘third movement’, ‘forged from the tension of both wills’ (1).
Listening to SY, I heard the oppositional wild horses within her, and SY is the embodiment of the third movement, a destiny she calls the impossible possibility, as she exerts her might both pushing ahead and pulling towards, with and without clue.
I witnessed the third movement between being with someone, and being with yourself - being with a new place, embodying a new reference point. Between leaving someone and arriving at yourself, you are in transit, in-journey, which is the time where everything that cannot be defined clearly, happens.
This third movement continues to evolve to that of being between knowing who you are not (in a bad way), and not yet knowing who you are -as you let go and return to embrace all the times you were not who you were (in a good way), when you surprised yourself, when you went, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize I was her’.
And here I wonder- is it also not the third movement when one has their attention ‘all over the place’, but also benignly focused, on that shoreline, backed by an enviable back-of-mind breakwaters, unyielding and still, still yourself, as the waves of happenstance come and go.
Shaw finishes, that when the Warrior ‘rides the counterweight’, he becomes sovereign- after much struggle, ‘something new is born’.
Art Print for ‘SY’ © 2023 The Inner Workshop.
In the story of girl who seeks out the wild, I wanted to offer my clue to S’s heart-led navigation, based on the wisdom that we are of the world, its beauty holds our answers, that nature and ecology holds lessons for our being. That her being and particular way of blossoming, can entirely be found -maybe- in the living ways of the tomato flower. I hope my portrait of S serves as a witness in her journey to claiming sovereignty.
1. Martin Shaw, “Navigating the Mysteries” in Emergence Magazine Vol. 3 Living With The Unknown, 2022.
