Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.

Pay attention to everything in the world,  as if it's alive. 

David Whyte

 

Persephone (2016)

The Big Thaw

starts with a trickle

water running through silence

as innocuous as breath

a slight relaxation

at the corners of the mouth.

Just when winter

has become a habit.

An old coat the sun peels off 

with just  a touch,

your foot

leaves a signature

in new mud

shiny as  new skin

or fresh, primed canvas

You notice a blade of grass

green, defiantly green.

Inhale,

you take your coat off

a crocus opens

in the blue iris

of some one's glance.

Lauren Raine

Vermont, 1982

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

From: 

 New and Selected Poems

Copyright ©: 

 Mary Oliver

At the Equinox.......

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.

Pay attention to everything in the world,  as if it's alive. 

David Whyte

The Big Thaw

starts with a trickle

water running through silence
as innocuous as breath

a slight relaxation
at the corners of the mouth.

Just when winter
has become a habit.
An old coat the sun peels off 
with just  a touch,

your foot
leaves a signature
in new mud
shiny as  new skin
or fresh, primed canvas

You notice a blade of grass
green, defiantly green.

Inhale,
you take your coat off

a crocus opens
in the blue iris
of some one's glance.


Lauren Raine
Vermont, 1982

New Mask: Persephone

Persephone  is truly the Goddess of the Equinoxes, because She is both symbol  of spring and life's renewal when she returns to her mother Demeter at the turning of the seasonal Wheel, and she is also Goddess of death, wife of Hades, and Queen of the Underworld in the ending and dormant times as the Wheel turns.  

Having said this,  I allow myself here to move out of the great universal language of archetype, and will get a bit personal.  The truth of life in nature is that everything is changing, everything dies to become something else, or at least, make way for something else.  As beings embedded in nature, this is true of us as well, whether we like it or not.  The summer ends, and as we feast on the delightful fruits and breads of the harvest, we barely notice, indeed, we find ingenious ways to deny, the slow creep of winter.  And yet that beautiful, or horrific, or both, Leveler is already advancing over the horizon, implacable and indifferent.   Both Demeter and Hades have jobs to do.  

This is true of nature, this is true of biological life, and  it's true of our psyches as well.  When Persephone calls, I listen to what She has to say, whether it occurs in the flowering fields, or is a painful cry echoing from caverns deep in the Underworld.  And that is the point at which Hecate may appear with her torch (but that is another story).  

We all love the Song of Persephone in the spring, the song that tells us "this is the time to BE", to feel the honey sun on your shoulders, to love, to move away from the lonely tunnels of the mind and into the great Conversation of the fields, of the planet.

When Persephone calls from the caverns, not so easy.  Recently I had a meltdown from out of seemingly "know where".  All of a sudden, I couldn't sleep, found my face full of tears that would not emerge from my eyes, was angry, very angry, and having just completed a massive project  wanted nothing more than to jump into my car and just keep going, free.  I didn't, but I really, really wanted to.    You try to discover the language and content of that dark song too, what you need to know to become more fully human, what the soul is trying to tell you.  You don't "transcend" the nighttime  voice of Persephone, you listen and change,  you ultimately mature, you keep on moving.

We are approaching (again) the Vernal Equinox.  This is the liminal Goddess  Persephone's  time, the poised moment of Balance.  Which moving away from psychological jargon simply means realizing that we must, somehow, say "yes" to all of it, and keep moving, keep dancing the light and shadow dance.  Persephone will dance with us, will educate, if one can  accept this Moving Point of Balance.   

We are all, in the final analysis, Wanderers.

"Pesephone II" 2016

Persephone the Wanderer
by Louise Glück,

In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

we may call this
negative creation.

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
“home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother’s
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?


“Persephone the Wanderer” from Averno by Louise Glück.
Copyright © 2006 by Louise Glück.

Blessings to all at the Equinox!

The Equinox and Persephone

 

The Big Thaw
starts with a trickle
water running through silence
as innocuous as breath, a slight relaxation
at corners of the mouth.

Just when winter has become a habit,
an old coat the sun peels off with a touch.
Your foot leaves a signature in new mud,
shiny as a new skin or fresh, primed canvas.

You notice a blade of grass:
green, defiantly green.
Inhale, you take your coat off
a crocus opens
in the blue iris
 of someone's glance.

Lauren Raine 

Somehow the Spring Equinox has arrived, this winter, as other winters, has been survived, the drumbeat of Mother Earth beneath feet bared is quickening, the hum of life vibrates, the budding of trees is again a cyclical magic. If I still lived in Vermont, as I once did,  I would be hearing the sounds of snow melting in little trickles, a kind of underground budding and quickening  reflected in the eyes I look into.  The Equinoxes are all about the constant Balance of life's seeming dualities, the serpentine movement from Death into Life and Life into Death, light and dark, yin and yang.  To me, Persephone is the Goddess of the Equinoxes, because her journey from the underworld into spring is the transformative journey of nature. 

Before she earns her name, Persephone is Kore, the youthful aspect of the Triad Goddess, the naive Spring Maiden.  In Greek myth, Kore,  the daughter of Demeter,  is seized by Hades, and taken into the underworld.  Demeter, in her grief, causes the world to die - no plants bear fruit, no bees pollinate, no flowers bloom.   At last an agreement is made in which Persephone can be returned to her mother........but because the youthful Goddess has eaten 6 pomegranate seeds, she must return to the underworld for part of the year to be the wife of Hades. It is Hecate, with Her two torches, who assists Kore to return from the darkness into the world of light, and Kore matures into  Persephone, the dual and integral Goddess of both life and of death.

"Light is the left hand of darkness"

...........Ursula Leguin

This myth partakes, and is probably derived from, the much earlier Sumerian myth of the Descent of Inanna, wherein the Goddess descends into the underworld realm to encounter her Dark Sister, Ereshigal, Queen of Death, and it is the husband of Inanna, Dumuzi, who must travel for part of the year into the Underworld realm to become the husband of Ereshigal as well as Inanna.  In both these myths there is great wisdom about not only the cycles of the natural world, but our own participation in these cycles, physically, emotionally, psychically.  Without the sleep of winter there can be no exuberance of spring,  without incubation there can be no birth.   If we attempt to remain in perpetual youth, we cannot mature into the empowerment of adulthood.  If we refuse to allow ourselves to grieve, we cannot heal and move into new ways of being.

"Persephone did what Inanna did. Persephone's myth is about moving into a new state of being in the eternal cycles of life. 

 All the soul riches, the knowledge, the art, everything was running down the drain into Hades and it stayed there.  It stopped circulating.  This was the myth of the descent of Inanna as well; everything went down to Ereshkigal, the keeper of the Underworld, and got stuck there in the universal unconscious.  Ereshkigal, the mind of the underworld, was on strike - she refused to process.   We can look at both of these stories, the stories of Persephone and Inanna, and see that these two Goddesses are pathfinders.  Pathfinders to the unconscious, to the other worlds.  Persephone, Kore who becomes Persephone, creates something new that was not thought of before her journey.  And that's a very important myth for our time.  And it's also why the Eleusinian Mystery, which was about Persephone and Demeter, was the defining experience of mature spirituality in the Mediterranean basin for 2,500 years."

    ......Elizabeth Fuller, The Independent Eye 

 

 So today I, along with the shades of an ancient world and the unborn children of the future, honor the return of bright Persephone to the bright fields of her Mother, Demeter, Mother Earth, who is also the Mother of us all.  May a deep understanding of Balance enter our world on this sacred day, to enrich the fertile seasons ahead, may that same Balance bless all our lives.

 

 

Happy Spring Equinox!

SPRING

The Big Thaw

starts with a trickle

water running through silence

as innocous as breath

a slight relaxation

at the corners of your mouth.

Just when winter has become

habit, an old coat

with a touch

the sun peels back

the emerging mud

shiny as new skin

or primed canvas.

On which your foot leaves a signature.

You notice

a blade of grass

green

defiantly green.

Inhale, you take your coat off

a crocus opens

in the blue iris

of someone's glance.

 Vermont, 1982