The Cave of Alchemical Awareness
In her essay on Enchantment, Lisbeth White speaks of awareness within alchemy:
All succesful alchemy requires three elements: (1) a substance to be transformed; (2) a container to hold the alchemical reaction; and (3) energy. In the case of inner alchemies, the container to hold the transformation is awareness itself. Our attention, and how it is held, creates the very container for change.
This is why there is such power in following our creative obsessions, those relentless curiosities. Our awareness—our focus, our attention—becomes the vessel in which the possibility of a new knowingness can arise.
Our awareness ushers in our knowing.
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My writing has never been linear. Instead, the stories and words loop around themselves in a spiral moving inward, closer and closer to the True Thing. It’s a fibonacci sequence—a coiled snake protectively wrapped around the clarity I’m moving toward. Sometimes, I get too close, too quickly. I rush the process, spooking the Truth into a deeper hiding space, safe from my excavation. Other times I hover, the awareness inching deeper and deeper into my sinew, until I am feeling the heat of knowing so intense I have to be the one who retreats. I am learning what it looks like to wait. I am learning the blueprint of my inner territory.
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When I was a little girl, I hid in my mom’s closet. Dark like the womb, her scent permeating off the clothes around me, I would push myself back behind the sweaters and scrubs and rest my back against the wall—my feet peaking out from behind the fabric. I would sit here for hours, my mind full of new worlds and possibilities. Her closet was where I learned my poetic leaning. Her closet was where I was safest from the monsters that lurked elsewhere. I would rest in the silence, stories filling the space around me like golden threads, and I would weave them together—creating something completely new. When we moved, my mother’s closet turned into my parents’ closet and my cave of safety disappeared. It was large—there was space. But it wasn’t my expanse. It smelled different. I couldn’t go and hide and disappear; couldn’t close my eyes and weave something new into existence.
So I turned inward, constructing a cave of my own.
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For the past 16 years, I have had a word carry me throughout the year. In 2019, that word was alchemy. At the beginning of the year, I thought it would be a year of magic. 2018 had been my year to rise—and like a seed pushing through the soil, I realized just how much grit came with finding the strength to get through the dirt and compost in order to bloom. If 2018 was the year I rose, perhaps 2019 in all of its alchemical properties would be the year I would burst into leafy and colorful growth.
I held this belief in my fingers, rolling it around my thumb and pointer as if sanding the edges of something sharp.
It wasn’t until December, when I was writing at a coffee shop on a sunny afternoon, that I fully understood the meaning of the word that had found its way inside my veins—particularly the piece that in order to partake in an alchemical transformation, the thing you are alchemizing is completely dissolved to create something new.
Unknowingly, I’d entered into a chrysalis of my own making. It was needed—but dissolution is never comfortable and often brings the pain of letting something go that has grown attached, calcifying with age.
I was still in the womb. Still in the dark. Still in the cave.
There would be alchemy here—there would even be clarity and awareness.
But I had yet to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays on my skin. I was not ready for this—I still had grottos of my inner territory to discover and the result was exactly what White predicted: with this additional clarity and awareness, a knowing was rooting itself deep into my bones. As the dawn of 2020 started appearing on the horizon, I was not the same person I had been 365 days before.
I was new.
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I tell my best friend that it feels as if I am in the cave beneath the cave. This isn’t necessarily new for us. My women and I often send the signal that we are deep in the cave and when we do, we know it’s for multiple reasons.
Wait for me at the entrance, like Ninshubur waited for Inanna. If I do not return, come find me.
I am currently in the midst of creation. I will return; I just need to time to myself to birth something new.
I am in the process of excavation. With Hecate at my back, I am traversing the underworld for pieces of my soul. Like Persephone, I will return with pomegranate stained hands and a deeper awareness of who I am.
This moment, when I tell Melissa that I am in the cave beneath the cave, is all of these things.
I haven’t been on social media much lately. I can’t. I tiptoe into the conversation, my head on a swivel, but the noise is too verbose—too glaring. The Truth on display for everyone to see and gawk at, I am aware that a new state of freeze is taking over the collective. We cannot move or act because we are in shock. We are in shock because what we felt to be True has been proven. And now that this proof is being shared widely over and over and over and over again, we are waiting for something to happen. We are waiting because something has to happen. We are waiting because surely that something, whatever it is, cannot be done by us.
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I have this vision of a group of women in a circle, their backs to each other. Each of them have one hand holding the woman next to them and with the other hand, they grip a lantern so they can see in the dark. They are in the cave. Writing and images line the walls and every so often luminescent dust, glowing in the light, is loosened from the space above them. They are whispering to each other, their words full of magic and memory and power. They are waiting for the threat that is coming—the threat they feel in their bones.
But they are not afraid.
They know the dark because they are the dark—they are intimate with the landscape of this particular womb.
They are waiting, but with the knowing that they are the hunted turned hunter—and now is the time for which they’ve been preparing.
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I am off social media because I want to remember.
Because I need to remember.
The hum of ancestral knowing has reached fever pitch since the beginning of the year, and I think of Joy Harjo speaking of the act of memory—how quickly we forget when we’re not willing to open our eyes and watch. How quickly we’re distracted. How effective they have been in making sure we have everything we possibly need to keep ourselves small and pliable and stuck. How our ancestors are whispering truths to us if we’re willing to listen, but how we cannot listen if we are allowing the voices of others to drown them out.
How now is the exact moment we must be aware, so that new knowing can enter our veins, and the alchemical process can transform the world around us into something beautiful—our pomegranate stained hands molding a future where caves will no longer be necessary for protection. Instead, we’d use them to commune with each other—weaving the golden threads of those who’ve gone before with the Mother who birthed us into being. That way, this time, we wouldn’t ever forget.
