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