Into the Dark, Unafraid

I am in class for Inner Territory work. We begin to talk of current events, of the world-as-we-know-it ending. We’re given a challenge: what is the world we are wanting to create? If we could build a new world—a world that includes everyone—what would that look like? In my head, I see a spiral. I see women, together. I see images just out of focus—just out of reach. I take that moment a seed and pinch it between my fingers, placing it in the soil of my heart, hoping it too will grow roots.

//

I am reading a book—The Rebel Witch by Kristen Ciccarelli. In this book, there are two factions—two warring sides. As we often see in literature, of these two sides were two individuals, in love with the other. Enemies by name, falling in love with the soul of someone they should not know. I don’t want to give too much away, but at the end of this book people are beginning to question the two opposing sides. People are beginning to wonder what could happen if they built a new world. On the eve of their launch into the world as a third way, they host a party and everyone begins to dance. We read these lines:

It was a world where enemies could be not just allies, but lovers and friends, and most of all, equals. It was a world where no one needed to hide who they really were.

I place the book down, close my eyes, and find that seed buried months ago. I rub it between my fingers, feel the hardened edges as soil gets under my nails. A memory resurfaces.

//

I am 20 years old, lying in the dark in a room at my grandmother’s house. My boyfriend, the man who will eventually become my husband, sleeps in a room down the hall. My sisters are with me, curled up against each other on the full size bed. I am sleeping on a cot. Or trying to sleep. In another world twenty some years later, I will have a friend who tells me that weird shit happens to you at night, Elora. But I do not know her yet, and I have yet to make the connection of how the night curls herself around me, making me her secret keeper. And this night, this particular night, I am feeling the suffocating fear of mortality rise up and settle in my chest.

I’m going to die young, I think.

I do not yet know how to decipher the Truth from the Fear. I do not yet understand the ways in which my nervous system has frozen in place, hiding secrets from me out of safety and protection. If I knew then what I know now, it would have broken me. Instead, all I know is the way my arms feel like lead. The way the pricking of my skin feels like a message from the Otherworld.

I sit up straight, staring into the darkness, as if I look hard enough, I can find that point in my not-so-distant future where I stop breathing. It feels like it could be right now, the way my heart is rattling inside my chest. It feels like, with the heat radiating up my spine and grabbing hold of every vein, I might combust in this room. I throw off the sheets and stand on shaky feet. Walking toward the door, I blink to steady my vision. I just need to get down the hall—I just need to open the door to the other room and feel him by my side. I just need. As expected, my love rests in bed, quietly breathing. I crawl next to him, startling him only for a moment before he pulls me close. I wrap my hands around his arms and close my eyes. We say nothing. He doesn’t ask why I’m there, and I don’t share the thought that just landed right in the middle of my hope for a future.

A few months after that moment, I will be in Idaho in a one bedroom log cabin. I will be sitting on another cot, during the bright sunlit afternoon of summer. I will be days away from 21, where only my little brother will remember my birthday. I will hear the footfalls of my great grandpa Joe walking into the room and collapsing onto the cot next to me. He’ll pull off his boots and look me in the eyes.

“He’s coming over today.” He will tell me. He will say the name of someone I’ve known my entire life. This time, though—this time feels different because there are those pinpricks against my skin again. There is that lightning in my veins—the heat that feels as if I will combust. There is that clouded vision turning black around the edges.

We’ll hear the crunch of gravel as his truck turns through the gate and there will be a death. A before and after. Who I was that night in my grandmother’s house is no longer, because now my heart is pushing me off that cot and out the front door and behind that horse trailer. She is bursting through the seams of my t-shirt. She is yelling at me about danger. I am wiping tears off my cheeks and I don’t remember when I started to cry or why. The gate is wide open, letting his truck through, and a gate has swung shut inside of me—refusing entry.

//

I turn 44 this year.
I no longer believe that I will die young.

I have uprooted this thought in the land of my heartwood, the brambles of my inner territory where wild things grow. This thought remains as a grave, marked in stone. I brush my hands against it, feeling the rough edges underneath my fingertips. I know now the outline of truth this thought was bringing me—the boundaried land of my rebirths. I know now it was the birth of my oracular knowing, and with it, the death of who I thought I was in this life. Since that moment in my grandmother’s home, I’ve experienced a myriad of rebirths, all with the same hint of death. I am a Scorpio Rising with significant 12th house planets—I am no stranger to the ways in which our traversing into a new landscape and experiencing an initiation—a rebirth—requires a death.

And yet.

There is still a particular keening when it comes to me imagining the future. I know now this is a trauma response. I know now this is a protective mechanism of my mind, anchoring me into the present so I can survive. No, don’t go there—not yet. There is a real and present danger here you must reckon with first.

So it’s no surprise I shut down when approached about what I envision for the future. I didn’t even know my favorite flower until I was 33 years old. I had no idea I could stretch into this skin and provide myself with the expanse my soul so desperately craved. And now that I know the feeling of pomegranates dripping down my chin, I find myself comfortable in the dark. I’d rather hold the lantern for others as they traverse through their untamed wild lands of creativity than point that lantern to my own future and dream of what could be birthed. I am familiar with, intimate even, the process of death.

I am still scared shitless of the Return.

//

There is a theme that has resurfaced for me lately—the one of Alice in Wonderland, dropping down the tunnels, merging herself with another world. It speaks to me of Persephone, and the more I see this nod toward Alice in my day-to-day, the more I pay attention. A few years ago, I woke up with the phrase you are Persephone hanging over my dreamlike state. I balked at first, pushing away the thought as nonsense, but the more I dove into her story, the more I recognized a resonance—a kinship. The spiraled similarities here are still forming, but both of these women know how it feels to drop into the underworld only to return with stories of below.

They lay themselves in their own grave, only to return—rebirthed and renewed. And they return with vision; with clarity of what comes next.

//

I’m seven when I first start dreaming about him. I remember it with clarity. I’m at work with my mom and reading books in the waiting room. I sit on the couch, reaching for the next story that will catapult me up and away from the overwhelming blue of the room. Blue couches, blue carpet, blue walls. I love coming to work with my mom, but I do not understand monotony of color.

I choose the next book in my favorite series: The Babysitters Club. It doesn’t take me long to read the entire thing — maybe a a few hours. Within minutes I’m lost in the world of these characters I see as friends. I look up from the last page and sigh, satisfied. One day, I’ll be as cool as Claudia or Stacy. I know it.

And then I blink and am lost in a daydream that hits me with force.

I’m not sure exactly where I go that day in my mom’s office—it’s somewhere deep where thoughts turn murky but tangible. Somewhere we’re given hints and visions of what’s coming. It feels like electricity dancing on my skin. It feels like the ocean’s rhythm deep in my veins. I inhale deeply and close my eyes, afraid the feeling will leave me.

What comes next is a deep knowing.

I would fall in love one day. That’s what I see: me in love. It’s me and some figure, walking hand in hand, a cloud of rosy lavender surrounding us. It’s the first experience I have with intuition and the feeling is addictive. I stand up, the books falling from my lap. Butterflies cause a ruckus inside my gut, and I walk slowly around the room trying to alleviate the way they tickle my insides, my arms moving back and forth like I’m dancing. I feel like I’m floating, but with roots burying themselves deep in the earth, keeping me safe from falling.

This must be what love feels like.

And he’s out there waiting. I can feel him like I can feel my own breath.

You’re out there, I think. You’re out there, and we’re going to fall in love. I smile and run my finger down my braid. You will be my air, and you will be my roots, and falling in love with you will feel like Truth.

I do not yet know about intuition. I do not yet know about rebirth and the compost of what was—what we must lay down in order to move forward. I do not yet know about the ways in which my own oracular sight will blossom and grow in the coming years. All I know is that this moment is a seed. I place it deep within, in the quiet brambles of my inner forest, and wait for it to resurface. There will be other seeds that join this one. Seeds that are watered with the tears of necessary death. For now though, for now all I know is hope.

//

Here is where my Heartwood is pointing me: the space in the middle of the forest. Because in the center of my heart rests these seeds I planted. They are the seeds of my knowing, of the hidden power that lies within these veins. They are the seeds that were buried out of protection and have rested in the soil of vision. And now they are breaking ground. They are demanding water, attention, care. They are desperate to breathe new life into what was once lost. They are whispering that it’s time to return.

//

I am realizing that so much of my hesitancy to vision cast into the future is a hesitancy to embrace life. More specifically, it’s a resistance of embracing me. So comfortable with the darkness of the womb, I am unwilling to experience that first flash of sunlight—that blinding warmth of clarity. As much as death has a sting to it, so does birth, and I am well-accustomed to the bite of compost but not yet familiar with the stretching that comes with breath. If I were to do this, if I were to let myself lean into that breath, then I would speak the truth. The one buried here in this center of my Heartwood forest. The one that has only known soil and womb, grave and compost.

But your breath is your knowing, Mary Magdalene reminds me. It was she who told me this all those years ago, fresh off my dive into Persephone’s lair. I know now she said this to me so I would be ready for this moment—for that first intake of breath.

I am 20 year old me, looking into the dark and seeing the outline of 43 year old me exhaling for the last time before breathing in something new. Something lasting.

Because all of those seeds I planted are blooming. They are Alice’s garden—her wild roses and lilies and pansies. They are Persephone’s meadow—her violets. They are my rose bush. My petals of peonies unfolding. The shoots of lavender stretching toward the sky. And they all have something to say.

//

I sit in the middle of those flowers, that overgrowth of green bursting with color, and let myself breathe.
I let myself know.
I let myself tap into that oracular vein.

The world waiting, the world I am meant to vision, is just within reach. Shimmering with gold and resting in the belly of the cosmos, she too is a seed. I can see her outline, the makings of a spiraled shell—a Fibonacci sequence of nature and life.

In this world, women wouldn’t have to meet in the quiet, whispering secrets and developing a plan of whether they forgive, flee, or something entirely different. In this world, nature would be our partner and our guide instead of a space for profit—an expanse for data centers that suck dry the land and siphon the life force from the area. Children would be free to live, no longer fearing the heavy hand of a father or the sharp sting of their mother’s coercion. There would be no island with dark secrets. No politician hungry for power. There would be beauty, yes. There would be singing. There would be the scribes and record keepers, the archivers of story, the shamanic myth tellers moving society forward through the native tongue of transformation and change. There would be the mothers, gathering everyone close to their chest. There would be the fathers, lifting everyone high above their heads, laughing with delight at the way the eyes always turn toward the sun. We would lean into the erotic instead of shutting her off. There would be no severing, no cosplaying, no overwriting of matriarchal magic. We would move forward as a circle, and not a ladder. We would rest in meadows and point toward starlit skies.

We would never be without, while never missing the noise of once was.
We would answer the call within our soul, rather than listen for the voice of someone else.
We would allow the return, making plans to receive the wisdom of those who have resurfaced from their pilgrimage.

We would look into the dark, unafraid, and know that the breath we see ending is just another beginning—a rebirth into something new.