Before you go (2)

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PART 2: The Unclosed Circle

I have carried the wisdom of the medicine wheel within me for several years. But it is now, in the most difficult of times, that I understand even more what it wants to show me. It speaks to me in a new way right now — no longer just as a map to follow, but as a language that feels more and more truly my own.

For there is a circle in the shamanic medicine wheel that is meant to close.

A movement through the vision of fire and the feeling of water, through the courage of earth and the gratitude of air — and back again, through the center of the heart where all is united. Not a straight path. A circle that encompasses all of life: the light and the shadow, what is born and what dies, what we carry and what we can finally lay down.

But sometimes the circle doesn't close.

Sometimes it is broken by circumstances. By illness. By war. By having to leave someone in the middle of life, or in the middle of death, and never truly getting the chance to complete what was.

That is the kind of circle I carry with me. No longer as a burden, but more as a recognition. A line that runs backward through generations of women in my family — and which now, somehow, runs through me.

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What was lost in East Prussia

My grandmother left East Prussia in the 1960s. The area that once belonged to the Polish noble name her family carried — a name borne by history for many centuries — in a land that was no longer a place she could call home.

She traveled. And she left her mother behind.

A mother who had breast cancer. Who was dying.

My grandmother talked about it until the end of her own life. How she left. How she never truly came to terms with it.

The circle did not close for her.

And then — as if the pattern had its own momentum, its own will to continue — my grandmother herself died of breast cancer. With a relationship to her daughter, my mother, that never had a chance to become whole. Too much trauma over time with words unsaid and things unresolved. My mother received her breast cancer diagnosis almost at the same time. Her body did not allow her to be fully present when her own mother died.

Several generations. Several separations. With circles that did not close.

I am not telling this to make it heavy. I am telling it because it is the background to why I understand something now that I did not always understand — why I, despite everything, choose to stay.

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When illness changes a room

There is a belief that serious illness changes people. That something softens. That what has long been locked suddenly opens up.

It can happen. But not always.

And it's worth stating directly: a person is who she is, even when her body fails her. Patterns built up over a lifetime do not disappear just because life is nearing its end. They can even become clearer — because when control over the body slips away, the need for control over other things is greatest.

It changes the dynamic of an entire room. Of an entire family. Roles shift without anyone deciding it. The unspoken takes up more space. And those who remain around begin, each in their own way, to see things they may not have seen before.

It's not simple. But it's real. And it is in the real that something actually can happen.

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The Medicine Wheel

In the shamanic medicine wheel, there is a direction called West.

It is the place of death and rebirth. For encountering what is difficult to see — in oneself, in others, in what has been. The Jaguar is the power animal here — the animal that walks fearlessly through the night, that knows every shadow without letting it take over.

I am in the West right now. Not as a choice I have made, but as a place life has brought me to.

And the West is not comfortable. It is the place where you can no longer pretend. Where illusions fall. Where you see a person as she actually is, not as you wanted her to be. And it is also the place where, with a little courage, you begin to see yourself more clearly: how much of what is happening now is not just about the present but about your entire history.

The medicine wheel teaches us that each direction has its gift. The West's gift is not comfort. It is to dare to see what is, and to let go of what no longer serves us.

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South: to feel without losing oneself

In the South of the medicine wheel, water flows. The Serpent is the power animal here — the animal that sheds its skin and shows that renewal is not a choice but a necessity. South is the direction of emotions. The place where nothing needs to be explained or defended, only felt.

It is also the most difficult place to stay in, when everything within you wants to either shut down or react.

I have learned something about that. That there is a difference between feeling and acting on what you feel. That it is possible to let the irritation be real without letting it control you. That it is possible to be moved without losing yourself.

South does not teach us to get rid of emotions. It teaches us to move through them — as water moves, always onward, always in motion, without getting stuck.

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Seeing your life in the light of the East

In the East of the medicine wheel sits the Eagle. The smallest of the power animals, yet the one that flies the longest distances. Not to escape it — but to see it in its entirety.

That is what happens when I look back now. Not as an analysis. More as a recognition from a bird's eye view.

I see my grandmother as a young woman with her husband and her young children... how she left her dying mother whom she loved so incredibly deeply. I see how the sorrow over what was interrupted never truly found a place to rest.

I see my mother who could not be fully present when her mother died. Not because she didn't want to, but because her body wouldn't allow it. A different kind of involuntary absence, another circle that was not closed.

And I see myself. Who chooses to stay.

I don't make a big deal of it. I don't try to tie it into a story about how I'm breaking a pattern or healing generations. It's about something much simpler and much more difficult at once: noticing that I don't automatically move in the same direction as what came before me. That something, for reasons I don't fully understand or need to understand, is different in me.

And perhaps that is all that is needed for the circle to begin to move again.

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North: ancestral guidance and what is carried forward

In the North of the medicine wheel sits the Hummingbird. The smallest of the power animals, yet the one that flies the longest distances. North is the direction of ancestral wisdom, for what is carried forward through generations — not always in words, but in the body, in patterns, in the choices we make without truly knowing why we make them.

I often think of my grandmother now. No longer with sadness but with a kind of gentle recognition. What she carried — all her terrible experiences as a child in World War II, the loss of a son, a husband who carried the same fear and trauma but in his own way. I see what she didn't get to finish. What she passed on without knowing it.

I see my mother. What it's like to grow up with kind, but traumatized parents.

And I think about what I want to carry forward.

It's not a dramatic decision. It's a very quiet inward movement, a question you ask yourself silently: what of this is mine to carry, and what can be laid down?

The North of the medicine wheel teaches us that we don't have to walk alone. That there is wisdom behind us, in those who lived and suffered and loved and fought before we even arrived. That we can ask them for guidance — not with words, but with an inner listening.

And what I hear, when I listen now, is not an answer. It is more a relief. As if something in the chain changes just by being seen — finally with distance. In its entirety.

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What is, is

I no longer wait for the relationship to become something else. I do not wait for a closure that feels perfect or a reconciliation that resolves everything that has been.

What is, is.

There are days when irritation is close. When patience runs out by two thirty. When it would have been easier not to be there at all.

There are also moments of stillness. Of something that needs no explanation. Of sitting quietly without saying anything at all.

Both things are true. And the center of the medicine wheel — the heart, the place where all directions meet — teaches us just that: that the whole encompasses contradictions.

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To stay

There are those who stay. Not because they have to, not because it's easy — but because something internal simply does not move in the direction away.

And something changes in the one who stays.

It can show in the pace. Reactions still come — the body remembers everything, it doesn't need to be reminded — but they no longer fill the entire room in the same way. A comment lands. A tone is recognized. And sometimes, not always but sometimes, it stays where it arises, without one going into it.

The other thing that can change is what one carries. I noticed how easy it was for me personally to start taking responsibility for moods that were not mine. To try to regulate a room that cannot be regulated. I don't do that in the same way anymore. I help when needed. I am there when I am there. But I don't carry what doesn't belong to me.

What I am beginning to understand, beyond everything I have learned in spirituality, is that it's about being able to be in contact without entering into what is not mine. To be able to feel — without having to act on everything I feel.

The circle has not closed. It may never do so in the way I once hoped.

But it moves. Slowly, unevenly, sometimes with irritation and tears but sometimes also in moments of stillness in between. Of love. And understanding.

And that is enough.

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About those who don't stay

There are people who leave. Who make a decision — often late, after much, after attempt after attempt — to break contact completely. To choose themselves in the only way left.

This is by no means a weak act. Nor is it a cold act. It requires a courage that is rarely visible from the outside, and it is a way to take care of oneself when nothing else works anymore.

Had circumstances been different, experiences different, the inner landscape different — perhaps that path would have been mine too.

The only thing that seems to matter, regardless of which path you choose, is this: to be able to discern what is actually your own.

And stop carrying the rest.

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This text is not an encouragement to stay. Nor is it an encouragement to break contact — regardless of where you are in life, with whom or at what stage. It is merely an attempt to put words to a path — the path that happened to become mine. If you find yourself in something similar, regardless of the decision you are carrying, I hope that something here made you recognize yourself. That it's okay for it to be complicated. That your direction, your path, is just as true.