Navigating Mystery, Part 8 (final)

 That Persephone travels between worlds has always fascinated me.  I believe She  reframed what was once done to Her into an acceptance of Her fate and Her calling, and into a graceful way of moving through and relating to transitions.  She reframed uncertainty into mystery. When I can acknowledge and stop the self-torture of imagined fear, I have a chance of doing so also.  I live in and with this story and try to follow Her lead.

With this understanding, I can finally stand up. I head for the rose garden, a place of exuberant beauty in early June.  The waters of the fountain cascade down their stone steps, accompanied on both sides by pink roses in full bloom.  I walk past the little pond surrounded by crimson, peach, yellow, deep red, and white roses, all exuding their intoxicating fragrances.  I love the roses but do not linger; I am headed for the hillside where the oaks and redwoods live, a bit of the wild held captive but alive in the city.  I sink down at the foot of a redwood, my back against its strong trunk.  I respect the oaks, but I love the redwoods.  Here it smells of redwood duff, spicy and clean, and the ground is littered with twigs and dried needles.  It is not a soft place to sit, but no matter.  Finally, the young woman across the pond stops yelling into her cellphone.  There is a sweet breeze, and now the caws, cries and songs of various birds filter through.  I close my eyes, just to listen more deeply.

 

Morcom Rose Garden, Oakland

When I open them again, I turn to face the tree and am stunned to see what I am sitting next to and had not noticed before.  Someone has left an offering at the foot of this redwood tree – bougainvillea, lavender, thistle, poppy heads - a messy arrangement clearly here for some time.  It reminds me of that first trip to Eleusis, where I also found an offering left by someone else.  I straighten out the tangle of dried flowers, making some artful order out of the chaos, and then add something of my own.  How wonderful to feel again the companionship of unknown, unseen lovers of what I also love and venerate.  The tree does not speak to me, per se.  But sitting in its calm and majestic presence is sufficient.

 

Uncertainty will always be with me as it is with everyone. There is an old saying that false security is the only kind there is.  Freeing myself from the grip of fear, does not mean it will never visit me again.  There is no “happily ever after” in my or any other story.  Even in fairy tales, “happily ever after” really implies “happily until the next trouble arrives.”  I may not be “cured” but I hope there has been some healing.  There is a world of trouble outside this garden, full of violence, grief, disaster, and plenty of pain.

But what is happening in this moment is full of life and of mystery and deserves to be lived prayerfully. I look around.  The trees, the roses, the hillside, the mother walking by with a baby in a front pack, the sky, the sun falling in full force over there and in dappled patches here under the trees, the crows winging overhead, the offering of flowers … this is life, all of a piece, sacred, here and now.

 

I stand up, look around, and confirm that this tree, the one I was drawn to sit beneath, is the only one with an offering at its foot. 

 

When I reconsider to whom and to what I give my authority, here is my answer:  I give it to the redwoods.

 

 

Found offering

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

 

Navigating Mystery, Part 4

 Maybe grief was not okay in my family.  Or any big emotion.  Certainly, anger was unacceptable.  I wasn’t much older when I began to be punished for having “temper tantrums.”  Either my mother would leave me alone on the floor of the living room to “cry it out,” or, when I was older, she would send me upstairs to my room until I calmed down.  If I stomped up the steps in anger, I had to come back down and walk up quietly.  I knew why anger was bad; my father had a big temper, too.  He was never one to hit or spank us, but he was a large man, and when he was angry, his voice and his presence swelled to fill any room.  His explosions sucked all the air out.  My breath would freeze on the inhale, and I would shrink, trying to make myself too small to notice.  My mother was evidently concerned that I’d grow up to be like him because I also expressed frustration and anger.  I eventually learned to wrestle with the big feelings and to attempt (not always successfully) to tamp them down.  My mother socialized me using shame and humiliation.  My father’s name was Melvin, and when she really wanted to keep me in line, she would call me “Little Melvin.”  I hated that.  I knew what it meant, and I was afraid that I would grow up to be like him, or at least like the worst of him.  I don’t mean to paint a totally negative picture of my dad – he was a loving man and father, but he loomed large for me on the anger front.

 It was in those early years that I met Persephone. I began taking ballet classes at age 3. One of the first ballet recitals I danced in was the Persephone story; I had the role of the north wind in the meadow where Persephone was abducted.  I loved ballet.  Out of all the nine years of recitals I performed in, this story is the only one I remember. It stayed with me. I began writing Persephone poems as a teenager. Although I never experienced the kind of extreme trauma that Persephone did, I lived in fear of change, of being dragged down into the dark realms, of waiting for some other shoe to drop.  I always expected it would drop.  I was wary.  Uncertainty was to be avoided.  I made the decision not to risk too much, not to reach too high, not to shine too brightly.  I remember telling a friend in 7th grade, “I believe in never expecting too much because then you’re never disappointed.”

 

But I am old now and desperately tired of fear’s grip on me.  I worry that I am too old for whatever initiation may be required to change this. There are traditional rites of passage for adolescents, for new mothers, for entering the elder years.  I am entering the elder-elder years.   The final initiation gapes like an open doorway in my mind’s eye as I get closer and closer.  As Mary Oliver says, "I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world."

SoulCollage® card - Persephone

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

The Beauty of the Process

 If you saw my last blogpost, you’ll recall seeing this SoulCollage® card:

 

To recap, I made this card to help me overcome my fear of the statistics around my cancer diagnosis.  I have struggled to come to terms with the methods and nature of the western medical establishment in which the disease is treated rather than the person.  But this is just backstory, as you’ll see.

 

Here’s one of the beauties of SoulCollage® - while the process of making these collaged cards is very simple and a lot of fun, whether done alone or in community, it also can generate far greater insight than you might expect. There are basically two ways of making cards: have an idea of something you want to make, something you’d like to include in your deck, and look for images to capture that; or just pull images that you’re drawn to and see what evolves.  I always thought that the second method yields the most surprises.  Often, you don’t understand the import of what you have made until after (sometimes long after) you’ve made it.  But with this most recent collage, which was clearly created with a specific intention, the same kind of surprised awareness arose well after the fact.

 

Let me explain. The young woman’s image at the top of the card was cut off a photograph of her rock climbing.  I wanted a picture of a woman overcoming some difficulty, and this picture seemed ideal.  And so, I placed her practically climbing over the doctors who formed the lower background. On one level, this clearly achieved what I intended.  Mission accomplished. 

 

I selected the photo of the field of sunflowers for the lower background because it was full of life and new growth. As the sunflower is the chosen image of life and hope for sarcoma patients, it embodies even deeper symbolism. (And this was before the invasion of Ukraine and all the resulting sunflower images, but another synchronicity, for sure.)

 

The doctors are in their operating room, peering down at the little figure on the bottom left – me: small, bald, and fatigued from their ministrations.  April was the month I was diagnosed, and so I included the calendar page along with numbers representing the awful statistics concerning this disease. 

 

I will say I did feel some strength and resolve after completing the card.  But it didn’t end there.

 

A few days later, I sat with the card again, and another realization leaped into my mind and practically bowled me over.  Truly, the woman is no longer a rock climber.  I succeeded, as SoulCollage® inspires us to do, in giving the image an entirely new context.  She is now picking flowers in a field.  She is leaning over to pluck one.  Oh. My. God.  She is Persephone!  Of course she is!  And the medical establishment sits in the underworld beneath her.  Well, I have obviously been on an underworld journey.  And yet, the little me in the corner holds a big bouquet of sunflowers.  She will arise.  I have.

 

But is Persephone about to be pulled down like when she first picked the flower?  Or is She in this field during one of her subsequent annual ascents?  The card does not say, but in SoulCollage® we let the image speak.  What the woman said when I first made the card and before I understood Her significance was, “I am one who has been at the will of the medical system, for good and for ill.  I am one who has climbed out of the mindset that I have to be one of their statistics. I am one who chooses life and who refuses to be intimidated by their statistics.”  So, knowing this, I can be assured that we are viewing one of Persephone’s returns in the Spring.  She and I have already been down there.  There will be other descents.  But not now. 

 

And what about the central doctor?  Is he then Hades?  That’s a tricky question.  We can never approve of Hades’ actions in abducting Her, but is He evil?  What a terrible job He was assigned!  I can’t blame Him for not wanting to bear it alone.  Sadly, in the ancient times of the myth’s origins, Greek marriages were often conducted in this manner, or at least without the women being consulted, yet alone giving consent.  I do not condone his methods, even so.  But it is also true that through this awful act, Hades made Her a powerful queen. Her life and purpose drastically changed, and who can say whether this was a good thing or bad?

 

But back to the doctor – he did save my life (and I truly love my surgeon who called me “my miracle patient” and who, interestingly, was born in Greece). He, unlike Hades for Persephone, was not the cause of my troubles.  But he did drastically change my life.  Then he, they, western medicine, left me in this place.  My surgeon gave me the chance. If I want to be truly healed, I must use what they can offer but also take it into my own hands. I’m the one who can harvest the sunflower.

 

I have always tried to imagine Persephone’s story forward, beyond what we’re told in the myth.  It is up to Her to choose how to proceed.  Hades offers Her tremendous power in all the realms. I like to believe She took it on.

 

What the card does not show, and so perhaps I need to make another one, is that there is community.  I may often feel alone, and in many ways my suffering and path are all my own, but as the sunflowers grow together, connected, in the field, I am not alone.

Godforsaken: A New Poem

 I just had a delightful time sharing poems with a friend, sitting on our deck.  After reading this one to her I decided maybe I could put it out a little further into the world.

Who would blame the gods 

for forsaking us now, 

given what we have done 

to what was bequeathed to us?

Yet I feel their presence, the old gods, 

the ones here at the beginning.

I sense them watching and waiting,

still filling the air with presence,

still charging the earth with fertility,

despite our efforts to poison them 

and the waters as well.

Only fire is uncorrupted, 

breaking out here and there

in the overwhelming heat 

of unnatural summers.

But its intent to cleanse 

rages out of control,

and the winds rise 

to fan the flames and

to whip storms into 

a frenzy over the seas.

Is there still time for us 

to reverse course,

to remember the gods 

of the earth and the sky,

the depths both below and above?

I want to cry out, “I won’t forsake you, 

gods of our ancestors, goddesses of my heart! 

I will honor the ancestral and the sacred.”

Maybe they will hear me, but I do not expect

them to intervene in our debacle.

It is up to us to adhere to the teachings 

that we scrabble and scratch to unearth 

below the glittering surface 

we have been taught to sanctify.

Like Rachel, I will keep my teraphim, 

my household gods, and worship 

what they stand for and embody.

What is holy is holy.

The least I can do 

is not abandon 

what I know to be true,

SoulCollage® card with my own teraphim

Persephone Returns to Find a Pandemic

I have been writing daily (or almost) poems - what I'm calling plague poems, in this time when we are sheltering in place.  Most of them I've not thought much of, but today I thought about the beginning of spring, and Persephone's return.  This is what came. I can't say it's one of the deep and inspiring poems I've been reading on Facebook.  But it's certainly a different perspective!

Persephone returns

and finds her mother

busily commanding the revival

of spring flowers, the blossoms that will

turn to fruit, and the tiny

new green seedling heads,

primed for planting.

But the streets are so quiet,

the air surprisingly clear,

and there is a striking absence

of hustle and bustle.

Below, she had noticed

the large parade of arriving souls,

confused and stunned

by their fate.

But she had

paid that no mind.

There are always reasons

for mobs of souls to appear

in the underworld –

war, famine, floods –

all the disasters.

She looks around now

and sees no injury to

the earth itself.

Demeter looks up and

dusts off her hands.

“Pandemic,” she says

in answer to her daughter’s

wordless query.

Demeter points out her

jasmine, azalea, daffodils, freesia,

the flowering plums and leafed-out

pomegranate trees.

“Beautiful as always, isn’t it?”

She draws her daughter to her

in a welcoming hug.

“It is,” Persephone nods.

“Quiet.  But a little sad.”

“Humans!” Demeter replies,

shaking her head.

“Always getting into

one mess or another.

Maybe this time they

will learn something.”

“What can we do to help them?”

Persephone asks.

“I am helping them!”

her mother retorts.

“I am giving them beauty

and sustenance.

They must do the rest themselves.

They blame us or some other god

for their foibles, and sometimes

our wills do overcome them,

but this is not our doing.”

Shrugging their shoulders,

the two wander off, arm in arm,

to admire the mother’s

handiwork.

When She's Gone

I haven't posted for a while.  I've mostly been working on a piece that I began at Deena Metzger's Writers' Intensive and I'm still not sure where it's going.  But this morning, one of the SoulCollage® cards on my writing table caught my eye.  It's a card for Hades, god of the underworld.  I made it earlier this year in Redding when my friend Alexa and I led a SoulCollage® group together (it's really fun to get to work with other people's collected images).  With all of my focus on the Persephone story, I hadn't thought before then to make a card for Hades.  Here it is:

So, this morning as I was looking at the card, the words "Hades paces" popped into my mind, and then this poem followed.

Hades paces.

He doesn’t like it

when she’s gone.

It’s not that he envies

her summer reveries,

the company she keeps, 

or the blossoms and fruit of

the sunshine world.

No, he’s made

his comfort here

in the mist realm,

but he feels unsettled,

unbalanced, drained

without her.

The dead drift by

in their bland uniformity.

Maybe it's color

that he misses.

Maybe it’s the fragrance

of flowers she is always

wrapped in, exudes,

even here.

He drums his fingernails

on the cold slate table.

He paces.

This is what he misses,

here among the gray

and boring dead -

her aliveness,

her very life.