Now, take a look at the space around you and imagine that this is a map, across time and space, of your life. It contains all the phases, all the transitions, all the cycles you’ve been through. Find a place in the room that feels like it marks where you are here and now. Where are you?
Trust your body to go where it wants to go. And maybe when you get there, you can close your eyes or move into a gesture or pose that represents where your life energy is right now. Maybe it’s still and full, or large and dispersed. Notice your energy, and notice the space around you. Allow yourself to settle into this moment: your here and now, your starting point.
The Spell:
Remember, wherever you are right here and now, whether you like it or not, is a potent starting point. Honor this. You’re meant to be here, to be intimate with it all, and your efforts have not gone unnoticed. Understand that in the next several days, you will experience magic and miracles in your life. You will see the signs that move you in the direction you’re meant to go. Trust them. No matter where you are in your life or what you are doing or how you are feeling, just know that the doors are opening.
By this time next week, you will have gone through the transformation you want to experience. You will have received the support you need, perhaps in unexpected ways. The intentions you have put out into the world are on their way to being fulfilled—in the best ways possible, for all who are involved.
The elements are with you. The sun, moon, and stars. Your ancestors. Your cosmic origin. Time and space are conspiring to assist you. Just hold that in your heart, and in your bones. Know it to be true. Your belief is the initiator.
I used to love running when I was a freshman in high school. The PE teacher would say “1, 2, 3, go!” and I’d be an instant blur, dashing toward the hundred-yard line as my classmates lagged behind me. My hair haloed my head, my cheeks glowed red, I was a morning person. And even if I wasn’t genetically built to be faster than my more athletic classmates, who’d already breezed through puberty, I was always the first one across the finish line. Because running was exhilarating. It made me feel my aliveness. It made me feel like I was actually good at moving, something I’d never experienced before, given my two left feet and hands that never knew where to come to rest.
I knew I was awkward, but running made me feel lithe and free…a gazelle who could finally relax and stretch out to her full length in the absence of predators. Still, despite my prowess and the obvious pride I felt in my speed and agility, the PE teacher’s eyes seemed to glaze over when I entered his field of vision. He’d give me a cursory unimpressed stare and quickly move on to the next order of business: weight lifting (the girls got the shitty rusted weights while the boys got to use the newer equipment—a glaring disparity I recognized but didn’t have the passion to address) or running laps in the gym.
Toward the end of the semester, I overheard him encouraging one of the girls to join track and field as a runner. She was pretty and popular, naturally lean with a whip of dark hair she wore in a high ponytail…but she’d never once beat me at short-distance running. I wanted to feel surprised that the PE teacher hadn’t thought to approach me, but I was used to being underestimated, unseen. I was used to having people size me up and put me in a box that fit my ostensible dimensions. They seldom saw that I had extra arms and legs and ambitions I didn’t wear on my sleeve that would easily unfurl and splinter that fucking box to pieces. They certainly did not know that the things I most longed for required trusting where I excelled and taking risks where I did not.
I trusted my body’s refusal to be pigeonholed by people who did not understand me. I was willing to risk looking like a haptic jumble of graceless limbs as I careened across the blacktop and took my place at the other end, patiently surveying the girls who ambled indifferently toward me. It wasn’t a race, so none of this mattered to them. My triumph was what it was, only to me. It meant something only to me…which is why few people would be able to tell you that, once upon a time, I was good at running. That’s why it's my responsibility to remember.
New Age pundits will say
that the point of power is where you
take what life gives you
and respond to it in constructive ways
rather than reacting to what someone else
has done or failed to do
Nobody can make you feel anything
curtly says the life coach
who brandishes a sheet of paper
with a colorful wheel containing individual “feeling” words
like enraged, enthralled, elated
after she gently corrects me when I offer that I feel overlooked
because “overlooked” is not a feeling word—
it’s a weapon I’m using to project blame outward
while keeping myself comfortably cocooned
in a blanket of self-righteous indignation
I struggle with this assessment
but I’m willing to be wrong
so I consider what would happen
if I did the thing she’s telling me
if I chose my words so they fit neatly into her suggested template
for conflict resolution:
“The story I’m telling myself is that you might be [blank]
and I’m feeling [blank]”
I consider what would happen if I were to tell
an inconsiderate workshop participant:
“The story I’m telling myself is that you might be a racist
based on everything you’ve said and failed to say
and I’m feeling pretty fucking angry and uncomfortable”
Would my assessment be incorrect?
If a racist barb falls in a forest in which none of the
other forms of sentient life particularly care or notice
does it mean it didn’t happen?
I think of the way I round corners
with a shopping cart
so timorously, lest someone in a hurry
come careening into me
I think of the trouble I go to
to contain my thoughts and judgments
to make them a secret only I know
I think of the way I round corners with words
hedging my judgments in the currently accepted
painfully polite chosen lexicon
so that no one can accuse me of reneging personal responsibility
so that no one can accuse me of
springing like an under-fed animal
on some imagined offense
Somehow we get past this awkward burp
facilitated by the fact that where most people’s faces would be
just their names remain in white block letters
and “Your Internet connection is unstable”
splashes its cautionary announcement
across my screen
What happens in you when you speak your truth this way?
When you choke down your protest and smile
at every innocuous invitation, like
“How do you feel about abundance?”
Abundance isn’t nearly precise enough a word
to hold the vertiginous expanse of itself
Abundance probably feels like
the billion trillion stars in the observable universe
an idea that scares me and makes me surge
toward the flickering candle flame of sufficiency
But I won’t say this
or tell you how I feel
I’ll merely smile
jot down notes in my gratitude journal
take whatever it is you offer
finesse and crank it through the mighty wheel of my imagination
and do my best to make it my own
If I return to the dream, I understand that it began in chaos. It always begins in chaos.
I take a bus to a hospital in Brooklyn. I remember what I'm wearing: a somewhat formal slinky blue dress, but my shoes are tattered, white, scuffed up like the patent leather slip-ons I used to wear as a child, which became old and worn as soon as I put them on my feet. I feel embarrassed about the discrepancy between my formal dress and my informal shoes.
I think I've just come from a barbecue or a party, and I'm here for a checkup or perhaps I work in this sad institution with its bald white walls and flickering bulbs that create a harsh hallway of vacant light, but I don't stay for long. I get into an elevator, along with a bunch of other people. In fact, it seems like we've hit the afternoon rush hour and perhaps everyone is heading out of this cavernous building and they’re going home. That’s what it feels like as I step into the tide of exhausted people, heaving in and out of them like a suspended breath.
One of the people I see, much to my chagrin, but also a bit of delight, is Sam. His hair is a bit longer and he looks older and he is talking to somebody but I could swear that he has spotted me and he’s doing whatever he can to pretend he hasn't, so that we don't have to be in communication or acknowledge that the other still exists. I’m staring at him with something of an ironic half-smile on my face because, well, what else am I to do? Always, we seem to find ourselves in the same place. And sometimes, a number of years pass between these encounters, but it's as if the universe is putting him before me and saying, “Look, this is your past and it is also your present.”
I don't feel angry at him the same way I used to. A part of me wants to do a forgiveness meditation, right in the midst of this crowded elevator, but I don't. I just wait for him to look at me. But he never does. And for the first time in a long time, at least in the realm of my dreams, I actually feel neutral. I don’t care if he sees me. I puff up with pride at my maturity. I take up more space than I normally would.
When we get outside, I realize we're on the other side of the building. I'm not familiar with this area. I don't know how to get the bus I'm supposed to take. I believe it's the number 28. I don't know where it's supposed to take me, but I have the sense that I need to get on it, and that a lot of things have happened before this moment. I've been with family. I've been with friends. And I'm just trying to find my way home, even though I only have a vague idea of where home might be.
At the bus stop, there are a lot of dangerous-looking vagrants, mostly men, and I feel scared but I will myself not to look scared. I wait at the bus stop, and I go through my purse, which is in arrears, like a tornado ripped through it. And there's so much garbage, lint, balled-up Kleenexes, wads of cash. Nothing in its place. Bus fare is just a couple dollars but I only have large bills.
I get on the bus, and the woman in front of me asks if I have change because she's in the same rut. I don't, but she keeps insisting that I do as she looks at the splayed-out contents of my purse. The internal atmosphere of the bus is almost like a living room; people are lounging in cushions on the floor. It’s cozy in here, but I feel some trepidation; I might end up living here, going around on the same circuitous routes down the same dilapidated neighborhoods, if I’m not careful. I don't know where this bus will take me, just that I have to get out of here. I don't know if Sam is on the bus. I don't think he is. But I seem to have forgotten about him, lost in my mortification because I'm holding up the line in my attempt to find two $1 bills. The bus driver impatiently gestures at a glass box of cash at her feet; she says, “You can probably find what you need in here.”
At that point, I realize this bus isn't going to take me to the place I want to go. I feel scared. I have the sense, especially judging by the hostile stony faces that peer at me, that if I decide to take this bus, I'm just going to be more lost at the end of the road.
It feels very familiar to me. This happens a lot. I get off a bus and I find myself in a strange neighborhood that is miles and miles away from my ultimate destination. I have a moment of semi-lucidity. I recognize that all I need to do is trust the universe, and I'm in a dream that is challenging me to do this.
I drop my bag and I back up. I get off the bus. I don’t care about the screaming bus driver or the jeering people who rush to pick up the small luxuries I’ve dropped. I find myself removing articles of clothing. Stripping myself of the things that are supposed to protect and conceal me.
I'm walking in the middle of the road with my palms outstretched, and a rebellious burst of freedom throws back my shoulders and opens my chest. I feel myself cave a bit, my sudden hope punctured by anxiety that maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this isn't a dream or a test, and I'm just a crazy person walking in the middle of the road, trying to defeat consensus reality and the reality revealed within my once-pristine purse. But I have to believe. I have to believe in something. Maybe God will come for me. Maybe a message will emerge from the middle of this absurd tableau.
The world around me slows and darkens to a cobalt blue. Cars disappear on the horizon. Everything is quiet and I’m assailed by a gale-force tension that clamps down on my bones and makes my teeth chatter. I start reciting the Gayatri mantra, which I often do when I reach this state of dream lucidity. Upon the first “Om” I utter, which resounds like a bell in the vessel of my throat, a bright smoldering sun pops up in the sky. It makes sense to me; after all, the mantra is about the emergence of clarity. Upon the second “Om,” I hear a distant peal of thunder that makes the scene around me crumble and erode. Upon the third “Om,” my voice is watery in my head, and everything around me plummets into darkness.
I continue to recite the mantra, but I can no longer feel my body and I can only vaguely hear my voice, a detached fish that floats in the oceanic clouds. I think a word, and I hear it gurgling at a remove from me.
This happens a lot. I get stuck in the bardos. God doesn't come to save me.
A part of me wants to stay here to finish reciting the mantra, to let myself dissolve if that is what's necessary. If that's the message, the lesson, I’m meant to learn. I feel myself hovering somewhere between dreaming and waking. It's one of the most treacherous liminal spaces I have forded. Somehow, I find myself slicing through the many layers of darkness and torpor, and I wake up in my bed. The remnants of sun, thunder, and darkness lie in fragments around me.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know the dangers of an underworld journey,” Prosperina muttered, her head bowed so low that her gaunt, tightly drawn face seemed to disappear into the silver webbing of her ceremonial cloak. “I’m sorry I failed you…and the sacred order.”
The Hiereia didn’t immediately respond. Instead, she waved a thurible of incense around Prosperina’s face. Smoke plumed up and spiraled around, enveloping Prosperina in a comforting blanket of frankincense and myrrh. She closed her eyes and breathed in the fragrance. It smelled like home—something Propserina had never known except in the hushed hallways and the airy, cavernous rooms of the Templum. It broke her heart to think that perhaps she had risked her only chance of a stable home.
Prosperina knew she wasn’t like other girls. By that, she didn’t mean that she wasn’t subject to the same flights of fancy, the same passionate trajectory of peaks and valleys, as other 16-year-olds. But her dark eyes hid other secrets—ghosts that didn’t seem to haunt those young women whose hushed whispers encroached upon her even now, while she stood in the Hiereia’s chambers, awaiting her verdict.
When Prosperina opened her eyes, the fog of incense had melted away and the Hiereia stood before her, a frown contorting the usually undisturbed serenity of her ageless face. Her voice was measured, with a hint of reproachfulness. “Prosperina, you didn’t fail me. You failed yourself. What have I taught you all these years? You know that we priestesses don’t suffer needlessly or linger longer than we need to—neither in pleasure nor in the void.”
Prosperina gazed down at the ground again, a curtain of hair obscuring her eyes so that the Hiereia wouldn’t see her shame. Sixteen years ago, Prosperina had been abandoned by her mother, who’d left her infant daughter at the gates of the Templum, perhaps eager to deliver her out of the poverty and suffering that had been their family’s lot for generations. At least…that’s the story Prosperina had been told, never having known her mother or family by face or name.
“Orphan bastard!” the other girls had spat and jeered and pulled at her long dark curls. She had been made well aware of the fact that she had no right to the treasures, the knowledge, of this place. Whereas the other priestesses had come here by way of family pedigree or unmistakable talent for the numinous arts at a young age, Prosperina had no claims to anything. She was devastatingly ordinary in both appearance and disposition. The only thing she seemed to have, compared to the others, was the tender regard of the Hiereia, who treated her with uncharacteristic kindness—which she seemed to purposely turn up whenever Prosperina found herself the butt of the other girls’ jokes and envy. Prosperina loved the Hiereia for her kindness, which followed her around like a shiny beacon—and it simultaneously made her squirm with discomfort. It didn’t help that the kindness shown to Prosperina was tempered by the severity of a schoolmistress whenever the Hiereia turned her icy gaze on Prosperina’s unfortunate classmates.
But perhaps the Hiereia’s motherly care had at least something to do with Prosperina’s emerging gifts. Prosperina knew things. Things other people didn’t. Things she never arrived at through ritual, lore, or scholarship. Things like the hidden maps of the underworld, which appeared as intricate networks of spidery veins behind her eyes when she became lost in hours of meditation. Somehow, she managed to memorize these visions. And somehow, as the Hiereia had verified, they were real and accurate. Which is why Prosperina was uncertain as to how she had gotten so lost. She’d shown so much promise…even the Hiereia had said so…yet she had risked it all.
She had been seduced by the intensity of the underworld. While the other priestesses had easily undergone the initiation—of diving into the depths and returning with a blessing from the Goddess of Shadows—Prosperina had become stuck in the one place where she had arrogantly assumed her superiority, where she had not heeded the warnings of the sacred order because she knew without a shred of doubt that she’d pass with flying colors.
How wrong she had been.
Prosperina could still feel the dark waters of Lethe—so cold that they practically seared her skin and created a permanent layer of frost around her blood. She could still remember the apparition in the water…the face of a woman who seemed so familiar, who appeared to call to her through the darkness, beckoning her to a grave fate. At first, Prosperina had thought, “This must be the Goddess of Shadows!” But quickly, she recognized her error. As she waded in, the cold entered her bones so that she could barely feel her limbs, barely remember herself. The sad thing is, in that moment, as the pale hand reached up from the blood-dark waters, she knew she would have sacrificed her soul to touch the perfect oval pads of those outstretched fingers. She would have been content to sink to the bottomless depths of oblivion...without resurfacing with the blessing she’d been tasked to return with. She would have gladly traded places with the wraith.
But then, the Hiereia herself had pulled Prosperina back up, through layers and layers of fire and ice. That sudden retrieval had been the most agonizing experience of Prosperina’s short life—like being pulled through quickly congealing cement. One simply didn’t emerge from the underworld without going through all the prescribed gateways. But it had been a matter of life and death. If the Hiereia hadn’t come at that exact moment, Prosperina would have been consigned to those frigid waters for all eternity.
The Hiereia’s voice pulled her out of her reverie. “I don’t know how we ended up here. Didn’t I warn you never to negate the above while you were in the below? You were there for one reason only. You knew the map—by Juno’s diadem, you had the map thoroughly memorized! Unlike the other priestesses, you knew the dangers. Why in the world would you purposely disobey the sacred order?”
“I…I…” Prosperina didn’t know what to say. How could she tell the Hiereia the truth? How could she explain that she had been under the spell of a stranger in the forbidden waters of Lethe? A stranger who wore her very own face? Prosperina wanted to explain, but she found that she couldn’t. Not yet.
The Hiereia sighed, mistaking Prosperina’s silence for contrition. “She who embarks on the underworld journey with the belief that she’s broken and needs fixing is the one who stands to lose the most. Yes, the shadow walk will take you to your wholeness, but you must descend with ironclad courage and conviction. Your doubts will make you weak, and that weakness can only lead to ruin.”
Prosperina swallowed the frog in her throat. She refused to cry. The Hiereia lifted Prosperina’s chin gently until it settled into the crook of her thumb and index finger. Prosperina willed herself to look into the older woman’s grass-green eyes without flinching.
“The meaningful witness can save you from isolated wandering, Prosperina. If you have something to say, say it now.”
Prosperina could hear the petty whispers of the other girls outside the Hiereia’s chambers; they were almost deafening. But they were nothing compared to the strangled, waterlogged cries of the dead, which seemed to be permanently lodged in her imagination.
“I understand, Your Reverence. I won’t let you down again.”
The Hiereia abruptly dropped Prosperina’s chin until she was once more left gazing at the ground…still remembering the vast blackness that lay beneath it.
“Good. Because when you’re ready to go back, the Goddess of Shadows awaits your arrival.”