Grief is a feeling so deep no words can really be found to soothe it. It is a feeling that is like a gaping hole in your chest, a longing from the core of every single cell in your body that nothing seems to fix. They say it gets better and perhaps it does, until the day something triggers the pain you thought you had worked through and you are back at square one.
The Ngangkari healers offer a deeper, different insight to that which I had known. Many people suffer grief, but the Ngangkari healers state that what people suffer is really the loss of a soul, the Kurunpa. When someone dies, their Kurunpa leaves the body, and the loss of the spirit is what now causes those left behind grief and worries. It is the job of the wati ngangkari to place the Kurunpa into those who can care for them (Agaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council Corporation, 2013).
The Ngangkari healers offer us great wisdom, as it is the soul’s absence which causes such grief, it must be found, held and embraced to continue living on for us to heal.
Whether you remember a person or not, you remember how they made you feel.
Who is a person without their skin suit? What is their essence?
Just as Michelangelo needed to to chisel away the superfluous material to reveal the sculpture that was already complete, clay holds the answers to these questions.
With love and patience we can remove the clay that does not belong to reveal the essence of a soul that we have been missing. By doing so, we do what the wati ngangkari do. We find the soul, not all the fluff attached to being human like someones occupation, relationship status and postcode. We illuminate this through sculpture and learn to hold a soul in that which continues to live on.
We find their souls in our hearts and grow to be more beautiful because of it.