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