Navigating Mystery, Part 5

 As Mary Oliver says, I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. 

 

I confess, I have been more of a visitor than a resident.  The land doesn’t know me.  I was never trained in its ways. I grew up without a deep connection to the natural world.  We lived in a city.  The natural world was a place to visit upon occasion.  There were parks.  There were visits to a beach.  There were summer vacations in the Smoky Mountains or the White Mountains of New Hampshire, places of beauty to love and marvel at but that were not central to my daily life.  I did spend much of my childhood playing out of doors, catching lightning bugs on warm summer nights, exploring the tiny woods a few blocks away from the house, sipping honeysuckle flowers growing along the back fence; building snowmen in the front yard on winter days.  I was not without any appreciation of the out-of-doors. I just wasn’t taught to see how everything is interconnected or inspirited.

 

Even so, I was not totally bereft of spiritual experience.  Often, I was afraid of the dark.  But once in a long time, alone in my bedroom, a radiance would wash over and through me.  Radiance is not precisely the correct word; the darkness itself glowed. I thought of it as “the bright of the dark.” It filled the room and me and left me feeling clean and peaceful.  Then, on its heels, I would see in my mind’s eye an image of a child in light blue overalls on a double swing in a garden.  The swing was draped with flowering vines.  This happened every time, and seeing this image made me happy.  That was my connection, if not to the natural world, at least to the world of the imagination, or spirit.

 

I danced the ballet again in my last recital eight years later, but Persephone continued to spark my imagination.  I was born in the spring, and she was a goddess of the spring.  But I worried that, like Persephone, I, too, could be pulled into some dark underworld.

 

Now, so many years later (and as I have said already) I’ve grown heartily weary of living in and with fear, and not truly connected with the earth. I think about the time Demeter occupied her newly built temple at Eleusis, grieving, unwilling to leave or to allow the earth to provide sustenance until her daughter was returned to her.  The first sit-down strike. I am no goddess, and it is fear rather than grief that I am reckoning with.  But I can sit down and dig in.  Here are my tools: an old leather journal and a decent fountain pen.  I intend to write my way into healing.

SoulCollage® card - Demeter and Hades at Eleusis