Journey through the underworld

Recognising the moment, 'I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.'(Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Gift from the Sea.) Sometimes it is only on looking back that we can spot the moment, the event, the loss, the realisation that opens the ground beneath our feet, and dropped us through into the dark unknown. As we fall we wake from our opiated sleep, a sleep in which we move through life on a more or less comfortable autopilot, our assumptions on how life is to be become shaken and disturbed. We look around, the ground is stone covered seeming empty of life, empty of growth, the sun either absent or burning our unprotected skin. We are exposed, vulnerable we ask ourselves: how can I live through this? Looking around again we see the corners, the jagged edges, the cracks, and we wonder that we have not fallen through before. And this is the moment that, if we are lucky, we find our way blindly, sometimes weeping, broken, confused and angry to the safe held compassionate and loving space of a garden or wood, mountain or seashore. We start to speak, the story is told. 'A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.'(Robert Frost.) We start to speak, and what we speak is the poem of our lives. We start to sift and sort our experiences of the world. We hold them in our hands, collected over a lifetime or several. We feel the weight, texture, shape, each has a colour, a name even perhaps a story with a beginning, heroes, a villain or two. Awareness that, moving from hand to voice,  we start to speak: patterns, connections, realising what belongs to us, and what we might carry for others, inherited or gifted, asked for or not. Speaking finally our love sickness our home sickness words freed into the waiting air, caught in the branches of listening trees, reflected in the songs of birds and the movements of fish. We dive into the brokenness of our hearts, each ragged breath, each sharp pain and dull ache opening, opening us further and wider until words finally spent silence claims us. And then sometimes at last we listen and finally hear our own heart beating and below that the heartbeat of the earth, slowly and steadily our minds calm, the stories loosen as the two hearts become one, and we can understand that we were never entirely alone, never entirely bereft that we carry the cycles and spirals of galaxies and planets, of histories and futures, elements and all that is composed of them. There is nothing we can speak that can loosen those bonds, break that connection. We carry all our histories, our virtues and our faults and the beating heart of the earth holds it all. The journey home. We pause and rest as we must after such speaking. We feel the soft darkness of night and leaning into its arms we sleep, we could stay in this womb like space, seductive and quiet, yet and yet our hearts life is calling us up once more into the daylight. So we walk. Over the barren ground  through what appears a devastated landscape, no sign of nourishment or comfort until exhausted we stop. Breathless now, we rest, muscles weak with effort, our steps uncertain. Our sense of direction confused, we have been walking this space for what feels like lifetimes. We cannot remember how this happened, whose call we answered. We stand and shake our fists to where we remember our gods once sat despairing. We raise our heads and scan the murk once more and this time, this time a faint glimmer, a suggestion of light, a smudge in the gloom. We cannot quite believe and yet we have to trust the relief that pours into our hearts and floods our souls surging the blood back into our weary bodies. We start to move. Forcing ourselves still to mind our step, conserve our energies. A false step at this point might strand us here in the realm of the dead. We tread softly, carefully and the smudge of pale in the distance becomes strong. We walk towards the possibility that this carries warmth and possibly, possibly the surface once more with its people and its lives to live: our people and the lives that have been on hold. And finally we stumble wordless, thankful into the stage yet familiar landscape we left. Resting in the warmth our bodies can acclimatise and our hearts relax. We have a sense though that everything has changed, nothing can be seen in the same way again. Our vision has shifted, we sigh in recognition that our souls now see larger more expansive truths. We will come to know the wisdom we have been gifted, and now carry understanding that this where true Home is found,  the coming home to ourselves. We move into the future 'Open the camphor scented box, redolent of the ancient roots of forgotten trees spared and smoothed by unknown hands bounded with carved flowers, leaves and thorns and ivory inlaid are the eyes of lost beasts. Open, find the perfect buds of roses browned, yet still sweet with summer. In the lid, the mirror gives me back myself. I see joys and sorrows, loves and losses in those, my eyes, and that, my mouth. The expression of mone, my mother's, my father's while the beauty in my eyes reflects back the blessings left by lovers and friends. I smile and am remade.'(Ruth Radburn)