The rain finally arrives.
The September heat cools to a crispness that calls for a cardigan the color of golden wheat. The sky slinks into a moody gray. The trees are busy whispering to one another, rustling their crimson and yellow streaked leaves as the crows caw and swoosh like elegant shadows from neighboring roof-tops.
A full moon approaches. I feel the power of this upcoming lunation, the aptly titled Harvest Moon, rising and gathering in the oceanic tides of my inner being.
With my human eyes gently closed, my inner sight brightens and from within I see the ascent of the Harvest Moon, lifting up like an autumn queen onto her throne in the glittering night sky.
Her supercharged brightness illuminates my inner world, the terrain of my patterns and my cycles, my thoughts and my dreams. And in her glow, I think of Mary Shelley.
I have amends to make to the gothic mother of science fiction, the 19th century British writer of Frankenstein.
This illumination of a mistake struck like lightning while crunching on toast, sipping on coffee and humming along on my Body Writes workshop. In an earlier post, edited and emailed out to the world, I had written that England’s Lake District was the birthplace of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Ahem … this is not … true.
In that lightning strike of insight, while eating my breakfast and musing on the workshop, a few facts clearly presented themselves about Mary Shelley and her writing of Frankenstein …
First, the inspiration for the tale came to Mary in a vivid nightmare while vacationing on Lake Genevain Switzerland.
Second, she composed the novel in Bath, England, 200 miles or so from the Lake District, in the autumn of 1816 and winter of 1817.
Third, Mary Shelley did travel to the Lake District for solace and replenishment, and it is widely believed and accepted that she incorporated the wondrous scenery as potential settings in some of her writings.
With this rush of realization, I paused.
I made a mistake.
A public mistake, and on a literary subject (lamented my inner English minor voice) I should have known.
I could feel the familiar inward cringe constricting my muscles and turning the blood in my veins to ice water. My thoughts precariously teetered between lit and unlit streets – one where negativity lurks and devours, the other where compassion is gentle and all-seeing like moonlight.
I choose the illuminated thought-path.
I stay honest with myself; I am humbly honest.
With this generous dose of self-compassion, a path is made clear about what to do next. I corrected the published piece on my blog and determined that I would include in my next piece the true inspirations and locations where Mary Shelley birthed her creative work.
And through this process, under the guidance of the coming Harvest moon, another illumination occurs …
This is the work of inner alchemy.
In the past, even in the recent past, I would have slumped into a fit of perfectionistic despair about that blurred sharing of where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
But something was different this time … and that’s the pause, and how I could tenderly meet my human self in the pause.
This is the work of inner alchemy. Similar to the full moon, where I re-remember the truth of my wholeness, and from there, I can also see and understand that I am a human being – in phases of learning, of experiences, of chapters, and yet, always whole.
Mary Shelley is an alchemist, too.
Frankenstein emerged from the depths of her own life experience, her own devastating grief from miscarriage, her own contemplations on the scientific and medical topics of the day. While storms raged across Lake Geneva on that fateful and dark summer holiday in Switzerland in 1816, she listened attentively to Lord Byron and her then-boyfriend and famed poet, Percy Shelley, discuss galvanism, an idea that electrical experimentations could stimulate life.
Mary Shelley alchemized her own heart-ache by creating. She alchemized the shadows around her to create a story that is still relevant to us today.
In our tech-advancing world, Frankenstein poignantly cautions us to take responsibility for our creations and the either meaningful or destructive actions those creations can have on society.
Sitting here in 2023, with the full moon in Aries a few days away, the sharp whistles of birds stretching across the now pure blue sky, I think of teenage Mary Shelley. (I just googled to double-check … she was 18 when she began writing Frankenstein.) She wrote from the personal, and the personal will always be universal. The real resonates across time and space, even if the real is “hidden” in a fictional monster story.
When we are brave and can shine awareness onto our midnight natures, onto the inner terrain of our humanity, we are freed to see the wholeness of this human being existence, and also, we light a candle of insight, of connection, of conscious presence for those who journey with us.
That’s the work of alchemy. And that’s the work we’ll be exploring in the upcoming Body Writes, Alchemy of Autumn. (Link to register and discover more is below!).
And sometimes when we look within, we can stir our shadows into a legendary and timeless ghost story. Other times, the work of alchemy will include being a little extra comfortable with making a mistake and writing a piece that reveals that truth, and there will be the serenading of crows and the whisperings of autumn-hued leaves that speak to the splendid beauty of transmutation, and the simple power in letting things go, in letting things be.
And here in that liminal space, I breathe and feel the inner magic of alchemy.
