Here is another revelation. I believe that I turn from Spirit, ignore it,
forget it, don’t trust in its existence.
I believe that I am fundamentally alone in the universe – no help, no
hope.
These
beliefs are lies.
My writing itself
exposes the lies; it is infused with Spirit.
Every morning I light candles and sage and make the call. Even when I think I am writing garbage, it is
all done in Spirit.
The gesture
becomes the mudra of my elder years, acknowledging shame and love, pain and
compassion.
This is how
I know:
She
speaks to me, and I listen. I have learned over
time to do this, and it has taken both the strength of Her reaching out to me and also
a certain surprising willingness on my part to entertain the possibility that
the communication is real.
In Malta,
in the mother temple of Ggigantija, my back leaning into Her ancient stone body
and feeling a hand on my head, I heard Her say, “You love Persephone because she
is one of my forms.”
In the Arizona
desert, I woke up in the middle of the night hearing the words, “Go out and pay
homage to the night.” I dragged myself
out of bed and walked outside, looked up, and saw a shooting star that swam
across the sea of the dark sky more slowly than I had ever seen before or have
seen since.
At Eleusis,
I had a vision of Demeter and Persephone, and I trembled seeing offerings left
for them by other devotees.
A few
months ago I dreamed an aardvark crossed my path. In waking reality, I had
recently written a piece called Walking
through Walls. The morning after the
dream, I googled “Aardvark” (after searching for pictures of squat animals with
snouts, not even recognizing what the animal I had dreamed about was). I read how magicians in Africa use aardvark
parts to walk through walls.
These are
just a few episodes of spirit presence in my life. There are others. I have sat with Persephone in my meditation,
and She has told me She would walk with me through life and into death.
Persephone’s
path to the underworld is a downward spiral into the center of my heart. She appeared just this morning as I uncovered
the shame I had buried as a child, perhaps my first journey into her
realm. Here is the revelation – the
underworld is at the core of the heart.
Only kindness and love can lead me out.
It was, after all, my mother’s misguided but well-intentioned love that
led me in.
But I do
have another mother, a dark mother of heart-breaking wisdom and
compassion. If I ever know trust, if I
ever take refuge, It is in Her hands that I place my soul.
It was a solitary road.
She’d seen no one
since leaving the women
at the crossroads.
All she knew was
the sound of gravel
crunching underfoot,
the wind in the Monterey pines
and the sound of the sea.
“Pacific is the wrong name,
for something so immense,
so powerful, so relentless,”
she mused.
“Maybe they named it that
as a prayer that it would prove true,
as a wish for their safety.”
She laughed aloud,
and the wheeling gulls overhead
cried out too, as if in response.
Memory was like
the ocean’s waves,
rising and falling,
touching shore and
running back
to the dark depths.
She realized
that she had now
lost her fear
of its failure,
had even relinquished
the worry about
where she was going and
when she would get there.
The wild and bitter wind
swept her mind clean
and left only
the pounding of her heart
and the rhythm of the waves.
The chopping barks of seals
called to her.
She could see distant splashes
where their sleek bodies
dove into the heaving sea,
disappearing below, below,
down into the dark, cold
depths of their home.
Early in
childhood, prior to assuming shame, I found the world to be wrapped in
magic. Things sparkled and glowed with
energy, and words created images and stories.
They revealed what was true, what was real, what was sacred. Words were a puzzle one could put together
and take apart, forming and reforming, a magic that was endlessly fascinating.
If I root
out and clear away the shame and self-doubt, I may find the old and eternal magic
below it all.
I want
words to flow, falling as if over cliffs, in waterfalls of syllables that might
be beautiful or clunky, or shining, or bouncing off rocks and open to the sky,
the wind, the trees, the clouds, the stars.
I want to find words that will be ladders to the universe without and to
the dark chambers within. I want my
magic back. I want to be the purveyor of
words and the conveyor of Spirit. Here is my (probably unsurprising but necessary) confession: I am a mystic. I claim it.
My hand is
on my heart.
