equinox comes, and i return from the underworld.

in the mythology of my name, this is the time when i crest the surface of the earth again from a long journey beneath her tender skin. i have again spent the winter in the depths of the crucible, being stripped of power and re-dressing myself in truth so that i can emerge as a gift of life and creation, bring the buds out from their protective limbs and shower this earthly realm with the light of fertility once more.
i might change my name, take a load off for a while. but who knows? maybe i'm just destined for this madness of intensity. i must like it, anyway - i keep grooming it from the wild garden of potential.

i know why.

i hunger for purity. for purity of my spirit and my mind. for purity of intention on this earth where even my tribe feels like a microcosmic re-hashing of the bigger melo-drama of the "world" as it's unfolding and collapsing out there. we're going to flourish, but we're still a bunch of puppies in a box, crawling all over each other trying to get to the nipple for a drink.
an ideal exists in my spirit that tells me that my tireless quest for a free-form truth-in-communion in the human realm is a worthy quest. that there is yet a golden kiss at the rainbows end and my horse has yet the will for the journey over the cliffs edge. it tells me that i don't have to sign up for a weekend-long processing workshop of neo-tribal dialectically specific inter-personal soul searching to find it (though sometimes i love those weekends, too, expensive and self-referential as they are). and every so often, as i wander the ferocious ludicrous of this third dimension i find it laying on the ground in front of me, glimmering it's gold-nugget glimmer on the pavement.

i had the curious gift of a journey cross-country in the winters last raging storm last week. it was insane - it's been a couple of years since i spent so many hours breathing deaths breath through a kiss that, gratefully, never landed. it didn't land in my body last time, either, and i've known it every time it comes as the close eye of god scrutinizing the nature of my soul and the progress of my work in this incarnation. i had an opportunity to remember what a friend of mine told me about how prey animals deal with the shock of being hunted if they survive - while the hunt is on, they get clear and do whatever they can to escape. then when they arrive somewhere in safety, they completely freak out to discharge their nervous system. then they get on with their lives. i think if not for the story telling nature of the mind, my journey would have played out much the same. peril, navigation, freak out, sleep, get on with it. as it stands, i'm currently resting in an attic in the burbs of pennsylvania, allowing my whole spirit to come back into communion in one place and re-assuring my body that it's okay for it to trust that my minds decisions are not solely an act of insanity and that we can make the journey home all in one piece.

and i found incredible things in this journey. that people are eager to help each other, and awaiting no more than an invitation to do it. that people are living as well as they can coming from and through a system that is so incredibly well designed to crush the average spirit that it amazes me how many of us not only survive, but flourish. that god will crush me with the most insane test, but soothe my ravaged soul with constant reminders of support, love and security all the while, if only i will keep on 'til the end and let the whole lesson play itself out.

i came to the edges of my capacity in new ways this winter. in a moment when what i really, truly needed was deep, silent rest, a dear friend of mine discovered cancer in her belly and asked if i would help her with her journey. knowing nothing, i said yes, and embarked on a crash course in service. from the position where i started - only child, loner, gypsy, self-employed and generally self-indulged - it was a radical shift in reality on all levels. what does it mean to show up for someone else? what does it mean to give, to really give? in those six weeks, i just barely began to know. and the knowing is flourishing within me. then i still needed that rest and the next thing that came to me was the vine and the ladder, to clean out the empty well and then replenish it with a fresh spring. then came this mission. now, four months later, i am finally resting.

i don't claim to know what has happened within me over these last months. only that profound change has occurred. the knowing will express itself as time unfolds around me, new relations arise and offer themselves for experience and i respond to them perhaps differently than i would have before. it is the responding that illustrates the transformation in my reality. i learn by continuing to experience, and by studying how i choose, and choose differently. i have a new appreciation for myself in the world, and if nothing else, this winter needed to happen for that. i have a mission here, and a path to follow. it is time for the steps that fall on it to be assured and solid in all the dimensions. i cannot live forever in the dream world, this much i now know, and for that i am grateful.


so i return. and the first thing that i have done in my emergence is lay deeply into the ground, wet and fertile as it is, breathe deeply of the fecund eros of it's eagerness for life, and relinquish the electricity of the experience to her skin. i am finally smiling again, tenderly as i may. i am finally peaceful again, in my solitude. from this, i know i can walk with steady steps forward into the rising sun, singing the love songs of creation to the birds who taught them to me in death time.