It Begins with a Call - Part 2

I have heard it said that when a belief system falters or is rejected, another must necessarily replace it.  The realm of the imagination in general and the story of Persephone in particular (along with my night visions) took the seat religion would once have occupied.  A longing filled me, rising and falling over time, now urgent, now quiescent, but always there.  I wanted to hold onto the feeling of communion that I got with the brightness in the dark.

           

“Go down, go down, go down,” the story urged.  I either didn’t hear it or I disregarded it.  Going down was not high on my list.  A Spring baby, I reveled in Her resurrection.  She didn’t choose to go down, but was forced.  Why should I choose it?

           

But Her name was truly etched on my heart. Did I think I could get the young flower child and not the Queen of the Dead?  Along with adolescent angst, the dark poems came, the grief poems, the separation poems, and later my Plutonium Ode, which recognized Hades’/Pluto’s dark underworld, double-edged wealth.  As above, so below (or in this case, as below, so above).  Isn’t all wealth in this culture dark and double-edged?

           

After many, many years (and with the generous help of my son Max, a gifted graphic designer), I made a book of my Persephone poems.  And, much later, in my elder years, family raised, career concluded, years of poems and morning pages written and spiritual experiments conducted, hundreds of rituals done and altars built, the unending longing still tugged and the story still advised, “Go down, go down, go down.”

           

I wanted to place my trust, finally and unequivocally, in the unseen that had been with me all along and that I had never fully accepted as real.  I wondered where Persephone, my guide and muse, would take me. 

After many years without one, or even wanting one, I found my way to a teacher.  I had enough trust to go with an intuition that the time, the place and the teacher were what I needed.  I prepared to go to her.  I created a SoulCollage® card; SoulCollage® is a process that for years had informed me. I was drawn to an image from a calendar, and I used it to make one of my few single-image cards.  Nothing else could be added to it; it was complete.  The image, from an old calendar, was of a young woman with a calm demeanor, bedecked in jeweled headdress and garments, holding out an equally ornamented box.  After I completed the card, I went back to the calendar to see what the artist called the painting.  It was “Proserpina,” the Roman name for Persephone.  Of course!  The box in her hands is the one Aphrodite sent Psyche to collect.  Trust synchronicities!

           

The story begins, then, with the gift of the box of mystery that supposedly holds beauty, down in the underworld dark. It begins, as it always has for me, with Persephone.

The Box

They say

nothing was

in the box

that she could see.

They say

something invisible

sank her into a

deathless sleep,

a powerful something,

like a poison gas.

What was really in that box, 

and why was Persephone

its keeper?

The mysteries held

in the dark realms

beneath the surface

always twist our

minds.  They are

never knowable.

It makes no sense

our trying to sort

them out.

So, perhaps we don’t think

of consequences,

or we don’t care to think.

Psyche didn’t, and

look what happened to her.

What happened?

In the end,

love rescued her,

that’s what.

Not so bad.

Persephone must have

known, or at least

suspected that the girl

would lift the lid.

She left her to

her own fate.

I wonder,

did it disturb Her?

Intrigue Her?

What did She

make of this

so-called beauty

in the box?

It Begins with a Call - Part 1

I have been working on a piece of writing for some time now.  It is a work in progress, and I really have no idea where it is going.  But I'm taking a deep breath, taking the risk, and starting to share it.

This story begins with breaking a lineage.  This story begins with a fire.  This story begins in childhood.  This story begins with a dream.  This story begins with a longing.  This story begins in elder years.  This story begins with a call.  This story begins with an image.  This story begins with fear.  This story began centuries ago.  This story begins with a story.  All of these beginnings are true.  Or maybe none of them is true.  What is true is that this story does not have an ending, no happily ever after.  It may or may not ever have an ending, except for the inevitable death of the writer of the story.  This story is what I have.  Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that this story is actually many stories within stories.

           

Let’s say that it begins with a call.  Things do begin with a call.  Sometimes you hear it, and sometimes you even follow it.  If you don’t, something dies inside, and a particular way forward shuts itself off to you.  The call is always surprising, fresh, original.  Where does it come from? Spirit, intuition, the thread you’re given to follow, your dreams, your parents’ dreams, out of left field?  Sometimes it emerges out of memory, out of what has transpired in this life, or in one’s parents’ lives or their parents’ lives.  It may lead away from these, or deeper into them. 

           

For instance, in my life, I continued and furthered the breaking away from thousands of years of lineage that my parents initiated.  I am close to one hundred percent Jewish, all the way back.  My parents, however, joined no temple and never attended one other than for the requisite Bar Mitzvahs and weddings.  I always believed they simply chose to reject organized religion.  Someone must have told me that; it was the story that I believed.  My older sister recently informed me that it was all her fault.  Our parents had tried to enroll her in Sunday school, but the synagogue gatekeepers refused to place her in the higher-level class that my parents requested and felt she warranted.  So, they left in a huff and never came back, and neither my sister nor I got formal religious education.  I’d never heard that story before. 

We did celebrate Hanukkah and Passover, and my father spent Yom Kippurs sitting alone in the back yard (or later on the patio of our house in Miami), praying or contemplating, or whatever it was he did out there.  When I came of age, I left even these observances behind.  The traditions had a fond, familial feeling, but not enough significance for me to carry them forward.  I’ll always be Jewish in my bones, but I no longer carry the lineage, and my sons even less.  I feel a certain wistful regret about this, but, again, not enough to draw me back into the fold.

           

And yet, despite my disconnection from religion, from early on, there was something ineffable and intangible that hovered around the edges of my consciousness.  There was an inkling of another reality, a murmur of a call.  I didn’t understand that.  I didn’t know what it was that I felt.  At night, alone in the darkness of my bedroom, before my older sister was sent up to join me, I sometimes had an experience.  The dark took on a quality of brightness.  There was no light, but there was an indescribable brightness to the dark, followed by a vision.  It was always the same vision: a garden swing, double-sided, in an arbor.  The light was golden and ethereal.  A child in pale blue corduroy overalls sat on the swing, and perhaps others. Maybe the child was me. I always felt a sense of peace at seeing this scene, maybe even euphoria.  The way I described it to myself was, “I feel clean.”  I never told anyone about this. I’m not sure why; perhaps I knew they wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t want to minimize its power.  It didn’t happen frequently, and I couldn’t will it to happen.

In waking life, at age four, my ballet teacher planted the seed of a story in my awareness, and, like a magical vine, it grew and twined itself around my being.  As the years passed, it beckoned and called and sang and tugged.  Its name was Persephone.

Camus said, "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."   Persephone was mine.

My Persephone SoulCollage® card

Memory

This morning I was writing in my morning pages about my times with Ruby, and I suddenly flashed on a memory from my early childhood in Baltimore, going with my grandmother (my father's mom who lived with us) on the bus downtown.  Here's the resulting poem:

Memory

Wearing patent leather shoes

            and white gloves,

Going on the bus downtown

            with my grandmother.

Riding the escalators in

            the big department stores.

Eating lunch in Hutzler’s basement,

            chicken chow mein, or shrimp salad on toasted cheese bread.

Visiting my cousins’ grandpa Harry’s shoe store,

             next to Mr. Peanut

Nodding and waving in the window,

            the smell of peanuts and oil filling the street.

Sometimes we would go to

            the big library, the one with

The science museum on

            the top floor.

Always, we would go through Lexington Market

            on the way back to the bus,

Stopping to buy paper cones brimming with

            buttermilk, creamy and tart.

Almost 60 years ago now,

            she, 40 years gone, me 50 years gone from Baltimore.

That downtown probably long gone, too,

            but alive in my memory,

Even down to the smells of

            department store perfume and exhaust fumes on the street.

I wonder what memories

            my granddaughter will carry

Of times spent

            with me.