Women Who Write

A Personal Reflection on Grief, Love, and Creative Resurgence

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

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.

Drawing a spiral. Photo by (my fiancé) Niels Devisscher

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.

The eve before my birthday. Photo by Niels Devisscher

“A woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately, some part of that power will become hers.“
— C.P. Estés

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.

Writing under a Rowen tree. Scotland, 2024.

A Room of One’s Own

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.
— Virginia Wolf, 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.

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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.

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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.

By the Fairy Glen stream, Scotland 2024.

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.

By Colette Saint Yves

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.

“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.”
— Francis Weller