Coming Back from the Underworld

As I was talking with a friend yesterday, I realized something that surprised me.

It is not darkness I am uncomfortable with. It is light.

My life has been strikingly underlined by the notion of descent. From a very young age, death and darkness seemed to lure me deeper and deeper into something I did not yet understand. I could feel that there were important matters waiting for me somewhere underneath the surface, but I had no language for them, no understanding of what I was supposed to do with them and definitely no map for getting there.

So for decades I resisted the call.

The image that comes to me is of myself swimming in an enormous sea while some Cthulhu-like creature from the depths has a tentacle wrapped around my ankle. It keeps pulling me down while I am kicking and fighting for my life to stay on the surface, because I am absolutely convinced that the surface is where life happens.

This is where I am supposed to survive and thrive. Go to school, get a job, make money, find a partner, make something sensible out of myself and preferably make sure I have enough pension when I am old.

Meanwhile, Cthulhu keeps pulling.

I thought whatever was underneath me wanted my life. It was a call of death.

Only much later did I begin to wonder if it was actually trying to bring me back to actual Life.

Because the underworld is not only where we bury what is horrible. It is where we bury what we cannot bring with us into the life we believe we need to live.

There are all these little bargains we make, often without realizing that we are making them. If I give this part away, can I belong? If I stop trusting this knowing, will I be understandable? If I don’t feel this, can I function? If I become something slightly different from what I actually am, will you love me?

And after enough bargains like this, we can find ourselves trying to walk through life without metaphorical hands and feet and wondering why everything is so damn difficult.

This is also where the power of myths and archetypes has slowly revealed itself to me.

There are journeys that are almost impossible to explain through the linear, straightforward language of ordinary life, especially while they are happening. My own has taken decades. Certain passages have lasted years, others months, and some probably only a moment. If I had tried to explain one week or one month from the middle of it, what would that really have told anyone?

It would be like picking a few beautiful stones from a riverbank and trying to explain the whole landscape with them.

The stones are real. They belong there. But they cannot tell you about the river, the mountains surrounding it, the weather that shaped them, the animals that came to drink there or the thousands of years of water moving over their surface.

Some stories need time before we can even see what story we have been living.

I think this is something I am only now beginning to understand properly. There is a time for speaking and there is a time for allowing things to remain without explanation. Not everything needs to be understood while it is happening. Not every strange encounter needs to immediately become a lesson, and not every transformation needs to be announced while we are still lying half-dissolved in the alchemical vessel.

Sometimes we need to let the story unfold in its own rhythm.

And somewhere along the way, myths came to my aid.

I have started to think of them almost as the tribal elders I never had the opportunity to meet in this life, speaking across thousands of years in riddles. They rarely give straightforward instructions. Instead they tell us about forests, caves, monsters, severed hands, impossible tasks, death, resurrection, journeys beneath the earth and people returning from places nobody is supposed to return from.

And somehow they say:

Others have been here.

There is an enormous relief in that.

Perhaps human beings have always needed stories like these because there are places in us where ordinary language simply loses its hold. The subconscious does not speak primarily in explanations. It speaks much more like the dream world does, through symbols and images, animals, water, fire, houses, blood, death, birth, seeds buried underground and snakes shedding their skins.

There needs to be a certain fluidity when sailing these waters. You cannot enter the dream world carrying a ruler and become angry when the ocean refuses to be measured in centimeters.

Maybe this is also why I have always felt strangely at home there.

The symbolic world was never the one that seemed particularly strange to me. The strange world was the one I kept being pulled into for the sake of going to school or getting a job or doing all the things a sensible human being was apparently supposed to do. I remember this almost constant bewilderment toward what was called the real world.

Wow. You really believe in these things here.

Still, I tried. I went to school. I worked. I studied more. I tried to make myself into something that would have a recognizable place in this reality. And all the time there was this nagging feeling that I was simply looking in the wrong direction.

So naturally I did what we are often taught to do when life isn’t working.

I tried harder.

Until eventually a wall came up.

There was nowhere left to push, and what had been calling me from underneath for most of my life became impossible to ignore. I had spent decades fighting the creature around my ankle, believing that survival meant staying above water. Eventually I had to stop fighting and turn around.

That was the beginning of my conscious descent, although the descent itself had clearly begun long before I agreed to participate in it.

And slowly I began to understand that the underworld was not empty.

It was full.

Full of grief I had not felt, truths I had not spoken, instincts I had stopped trusting, desires I had traded for belonging, power I had been afraid to inhabit and ways of knowing that simply did not fit into the reality I had been trying so desperately to survive in.

When enough of ourselves has been left underground, descent becomes something other than a journey into darkness.

It becomes a journey of remembrance.

Or even more literally, re-membering. Returning the missing members to the body.

And yet there is something else I am only beginning to understand now.

The darkness is necessary.

A seed needs darkness to germinate. It contains the information for what is going to become, and the roots need the deep, dark earth. They will continue growing downward for the entire life of the plant.

But the seedling cannot grow toward the center of the earth.

At some point it turns toward light.

And this is where I seem to find myself now, after such a long cycle of dying and dying and dying. Images of birth have been appearing everywhere. I have felt myself somewhere in the birth canal, with something that has spent a very long time germinating beginning to push toward the world.

And suddenly I find myself facing an initiation that feels almost more unfamiliar than the descent ever did.

How do you return?

How do you take everything you found in the darkness and bring it into the world without abandoning either world? How does something that existed as intuition, prayer, longing, symbol and invisible potential become body, relationship, creation, home, matter?

How do you stop digging when digging has become one of the things you are exceptionally good at?

And perhaps the strangest question of all for someone who has spent so much of her life learning how to die:

How do you allow yourself to live?

I don’t know yet.

And I don’t particularly want to rush toward an answer.

But I have been feeling that it might be time to start telling some of these stories, alongside the myths and archetypes that have somehow kept finding me exactly when I needed them. Not as interpretations of how anyone else’s journey should unfold, but as invitations into a language that has helped me understand my own.

Maybe these old stories are not maps in the sense that they tell us where to go.

Maybe they simply leave strange markings on the trees saying:

Someone passed through here before you.

So perhaps this is the beginning of Stories from the Underworld.

Stories of descent and return, of the pieces of ourselves waiting patiently underneath consciousness, of the monsters that may not turn out to be monsters, of dying while remaining completely alive, and of the strange moment when, after becoming very comfortable in the darkness, we realize that the next great unknown might actually be the light.