It Begins with a Call - Part 5

(The teacher asked: “How do you bring your work into the dark?”)

I am frustrated.  She has told me this before, or something similar.

           

I wanted this to be a healing story, not something of the dark.  I wanted it to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  I wanted it to be complete.

           

What I have now is trying. I am trying to learn to think mythologically.  I am trying, as the teacher has so definitively taught, to divest myself of my acculturated mind.  I am trying to ask the right questions.  I am trying to live with a broken heart and stay in the pain of it.  I am trying to understand the importance of place, and I am trying to sink roots into this place I have chosen. I am trying to accept living in the tension of the opposites.  That is a lot of trying.  I’m sure there is more.  I would like to be simply doing and not just trying.

           

Go down, go down, go down.

           

I am down, damn it.  I get that the ancestral is here.  I know I need to open the box.  I don’t know how.  Is that true?  Or is it that I’m too afraid?

           

Some years ago, in the temples of Malta, the Dark Mother claimed me.  She who is prior to Persephone, Kali, Hecate, and Oya, put Her hand on my head and spoke to me.  She said, “You are mine.  You gave yourself to Persephone, and your heart swells in the presence of black Madonnas because they are my manifestations.  I am prior to all.”

Ggantija Temple in Malta

I don’t want to be the Judas of my own personal religion. 

           

One bright note here is that when I went to Topanga asking for more consistent connection to Spirit, my prayer was answered.  That should be the story, the whole story, beginning, middle and end, but it is not.  I am not ungrateful.  I am surprised and bewildered; connection did not come in the form I would have expected or could have predicted.  It came in the form of a headache, and the demand to sort out …. what?  Something.  What is in the box, perhaps.

The Woman in Black

I am wandering around.  The path ahead dissolves in the misty late afternoon winter light.  I walk slowly, with no destination in mind.  I could sink down here and just sit.  It wouldn’t really matter – going, not going.  There is something dead inside me.  I see I have given it a certain amount of sovereignty, and it has been steadily spreading.  A large part of me is numb now.  I will have to muster up some strength and initiative to dispel it, or I risk its complete dominance.  What it insinuates is, “What’s the difference?’  I don’t want to believe that this is the whispering I’ve been hearing in my ear.  No, this comes from the inside. 

           

I think about that small story reputed to be of Cherokee origin in which a grandfather tells his grandchild that there are two wolves living and warring inside of him, one evil and one good.  When the child asks which one will win, the old man says, “Whichever one I feed.” 

           

My former teacher, Angeles Arrien, used to say, “Don’t feed your inner critic gourmet meals.”  The same goes for inner demons.

           

I push myself to visit the oracle tree again.  When I actually visited Dodona almost twenty years ago, the leaves whispered to me to light candles to the gods of my ancestors and to the gods of my land, and to make offerings to the goddesses of my heart.  On that same trip, I also visited Athena’s temple at Delphi where She instructed me to unwrap the cords binding my heart.  Interesting that Athena, always reputed to be responsible for heady things was the one to instruct me about my heart.

           

So, here I am, come around again to the oracle tree.  This is now the place where Athena rises out of Zeus’ head.  The lady in black is here with her elbow nudging His occiput.  “Headache.  More headache.”

           

Who are you, woman in black?  I know you come from the underworld.  Are you a dark angel?

           

She only looks at me with what might be a slight smile.  She does not speak, but stares into my eyes.  I look back.  I cannot tell if she is trying to communicate something.  I do not know if she is mute.

           

She strokes her long black dress, smoothing it out, and it rustles in that way that taffeta does.  I whisper to her, “Please!”

           

She blinks.  A message?  I close my eyes to listen to the wind in the leaves of the oracle tree.

           

“Doldrums.  Doldrums.  Doldrums-s-s-s-s-s.”  That is what I hear.

My eyes fly open.  Is her smile a bit wider now?  I look for another blink or nod.  Nothing.  I don’t know what more I can glean here.  Zeus stares sternly ahead.  He is in pain.  Athena gracefully handles her snake companion.  She turns towards me and smiles.  I feel a blessing wash over me.  I know I must go.  Pulling my cape around me, I walk again.  Slowly, inch by inch, I reclaim my inner territory and oust the numbness.  It is too easy to go dead in the Doldrums.  I am not dead yet.  At least I understand that where I am is the Doldrums.  In the material world, this is an equatorial place of calms and possible squalls or baffling winds.  Oya’s realm, then.  I should make an altar and give Her an offering.  I could be here a while.