In the meantime, April is here! my Starbucks drought is over (joy of joys, they've made me up a whole new kind of iced mocha!) and in celebration of spring, this week I would like to devote my little electronic corner of the webworld to the theme of emerging.
Today I'm thinking about Persephone emerging from the underworld.
Many times, in winter,
I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,
how can I endure the earth?
And he would say,
in a short time you will be here again.
And in the time between
you will forget everything:
those fields of ice will be
the meadows of Elysium.
Excerpted from "Persephone the Wanderer" (the second one) from Louise Gluck's amazing book, Averno.
Warmth has returned to New England. Ice has melted and green and petaled things are pushing up and outward. I am rubbing my eyes to see in the glare of new light. I've had cleaning frenzies to banish the dust. And I'm trying to make out who I am now after that cold journey inward. I'm trying to see what this revived earth means.
This morning I passed the towering line of seven trees that I call The Sisters in the secrecy of my own head. They finally have green things springing from their branches. I smiled up to welcome them back (a man I passed looked at me strangely). I was struck by their indifference in return (go ahead, you can laugh, too). The trees had endured the winter, but not in the way that we do - with a sense of relief when spring finally, finally returns. More like maybe they are simply, stoically willing to forgo attachments in exchange for renewal each year, in exchange for the ability to cheat death, perhaps indefinitely.
Gluck's poems insist that nature lies to us; the dead stay dead. Maybe unlike trees, our lot in this short life is attachment - to lovers and mothers, as with Persephone. Maybe that's why these seasons take such a toll on us, forcing us to grieve and revise and wisen.
I had a long elaborate dream this winter, in which a young woman who had been banished to the bottom of the sea was called to re-emerge. She was dressed in blue and green and purple batiks, as were her attendants, who formed receiving lines on either side of her and took her hands to steady her climb up out of the sea. She had been banished by a white-haired villain; in the end, she had to fight him. She was joined by everyone who had ever been pulled under by some darkness or other, which turned out to be everyone in the (dream)world.
Yesterday I clambered over some warm rocks on the North Shore and sat and listened to the rhythm of the ocean. So like breath. Such an enormous sign of our tiny spot in the universe's ballroom, our spinny dance between sun and moon that curves our psyches and our stories to its tune.
Speaking of which, did you see the new Alice in Wonderland yet? In this one, Alice climbs back up out of the rabbit hole, pulling herself out with dirty elbows. She has defeated Fear, her hair is wild and her muchness is restored. And then she (quite anachronistically) refuses a stinky marriage proposal and trots off to become a trailblazing, world-traveling businesswoman.
I wonder what year it'll be when the story changes and the maiden emerges to choose a life and a lover, both of which encourage and enrich her deepest self?
I raise my iced dark cherry mocha to that day.
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