Navigating Mystery, Part I

After attending Deena Metzger's Writers' Intensive a few months ago, I had the thought that I'd like to blog some of the writing from the week, but I needed to sit with it for a while.  I wasn't sure whether I would want to write more or at least revise what I'd written.  Looking at it from this bit of distance, I have decided that it's complete as it is.  Not liking long blog posts, I plan to put it out in segments.  So, here's the first :

“What if we reframed ‘living with uncertainty’ to ‘navigating mystery’?”  

-- Martin Shaw   

 

The first time I went to Greece, the car rental agent and the desk clerk at the hotel in Athens both advised us not to go to Elefsis.  “It’s just a dirty, industrial city,” they warned.  Of course, we went.  The Persephone story had been with me my entire life, ever since I danced the part of the north wind blowing over the meadow where Hades pulled Persephone into the underworld.  I was five years old.  The story wove in and out of my life after that. Eleusis, the old name for Elefsis, was where the mysteries celebrating Demeter and Persephone were held for over 2,000 years.  How could I not go?

 

The historical site did not disappoint.  When I arrived at the Plutonion, the cave said to be the place where the goddess descends and emerges from the underworld, I found a bouquet of flowers someone had left on the ledge at the opening.  I was not alone in loving and honoring this ancient being and Her story!  Tears filled my eyes.

 

The second time I visited Eleusis, my mother was dying.  The trip had been arranged long before. I hesitated to leave the states, but my mother encouraged me to go.  Red poppies covered the Spring hillside, and we were practically the only visitors to the ruins on that weekday morning.  This time, I sat by the maiden’s well, where Demeter wept for her lost daughter, and I wept for my dying mother. 

 

Sitting on the rim of a well, a liminal place, at a liminal time, considering the deep relationship between mother and daughter.  I never fully understood why the Persephone story took me the way that it did, but certainly the mother-daughter bond was part of it.  I was a Spring child, too. 

  
The Plutonion, Eleusis

A New Poem: Mabel's Mermaid

My friend Gail and I were sitting in my living room recently, talking and sharing poems, as we do, and looking at the mural hanging from the mantle that my nine-year-old granddaughter gave me two years ago, and I realized it deserved a poem.  Here is a small section of the piece:

And here is the poem:

Mabel’s Mermaid

 

Once there was a girl child

who lived (sometimes) in

an enchanted, watery world

of visions and dreams and art.

One day, the girl learned that

her grandmother was very ill,

and so she brought to her

a smiling mermaid

with purple hair and tail,

swimming in an azure blue ocean

with yellow and coral-colored fish.

She swam alongside a sandy beach

laden with shells and other

treasures from the sea.

Every day, the ailing old woman

lay in her chair by the window,

her eyes drawn to the mermaid,

blue eyes shining back at her,

lavender hair streaming out

through the dancing waves.

She would return the mermaid’s smile,

her heart easing just a little bit.

After the grandmother recovered

and no longer spent all day languishing,

she kept the mermaid in her purview,

never tiring of the smiling face

that lifted her spirits, the precious gift

of her precious girl.