When you have leaned too far in the direction of user-friendly: practice obscurity.

It might seem a tenuous thread. It might not pull a cart but it will waltz through the backyard on a summer evening and remind you why you are alive.

“Only if you are Thin will you be Beautiful.

                      If you are Thin and Beautiful you will be loved.”

I swallowed it; I did not see other food to eat.

The seed sat in my belly: a hard heavy cold thing, a dead weight.

As I grew older I learned to water it. First I watered it with rage. Rage that the only image of beauty offered was Barbie. She was beautiful. I was not. This was the first flowering: a vibrant orange flower with red flames on its long spiky petals.

Later I learned to water the seed with sorrow and forgiveness. Sorrow for all the years lost to regret and despair. Forgiveness for all the parts of myself I threw away over the years, rejected because they weren’t perfect enough. This was the second flowering: a green and blue water plant.

Now I water the seed with a prayer: I love my body. This is the third flowering: a maple tree as old as my grandmothers (they would be over one hundred years). Like them the trunk is thick and strong, the roots go deep, and the canopy is wide and shady.

When I was a young woman I was brought to the Land of the Dead by the Lord of Thin.

One is enough to throw you out, send you down, hang you up.
One is enough to wake you up.

I was abducted by Hades. They say it was an awful thing.
It was necessary to remove me from the tribe. I would not have been able to do it myself.
It is hard to see the trap when you are inside it.

I am also Inanna. An older story. I went down to the underworld to meet the Dark Sister.
To be hung on the meat hook; to suffer, change and return.
They say it was an awful thing. But it was necessary to transform.

Inanna goes down of her own choice. Persephone is dragged.

Long ago I  was dragged down but I am no longer a victim.
I am a woman who can see in the dark.

Down below on the floor of the underworld were all the parts of myself I had thrown away over the years, rejected because they weren’t perfect enough. They looked up at me and I looked down at them; we all suffered.

One day we reached critical mass, my rejected parts and me, all that suffering compressed down so far it had to expand. A chemical reaction occurred and a small goddess of compassion was born.

Like a loving mother, the small goddess of compassion said, Yes – when you are frightened I will be with you. Yes – when you are hurt I will comfort you.

The chrysalis began to soften

& uncurl

& brighten

and transform into  The Wings

                                   of a

                                Butterfly.

When I say yes, the transformation begins.

Persephone was their only child. They wanted to give her the perfect childhood. Like the Buddha, all darkness would be kept from her; she would see only the beauty in the world. She was sent to an all-girls boarding school and an all-girls college somewhere in the Boston beltway.

Life was so perfect for Persephone that when Hades rode by her dormitory in the spring of her senior year, in a black leather jacket, on a black motorcycle, he was the most exotic thing she had ever seen. And she climbed on the back of the bike and they rode off to San Francisco, where they lived in a basement apartment and read Russian novels. Hades fed Persephone pomegranate seeds, and it altered her reality in ways that seeds from her mother’s garden never had.

For the first few years she tried to bring Hades home with her for family holidays. This was a mistake, and  she  learned to leave Hades on the West Coast. So each year, on the first day of spring, Persephone takes a plane and flies off to Marblehead where she helps her mother with the gardens for the summer. Then on the first day of fall, she takes another plane back to the West Coast where Hades now lives in another basement apartment in Seattle and writes computer code for Microsoft.

Life goes on like this for a number of years. In her early adulthood it does not occur to Persephone she has gotten in a boat and it is traveling down one particular river.

Then a few years go by and Persephone starts to look around. And she says  “I have gotten in a boat and it is traveling down one particular river.”

Then more years go by and Persephone comes into the center of her adulthood. And she says,  “I must decide if I am going to claim this river as the River of my Life.” So she sticks an oar in the water and she writes a letter home, explaining that the life she has looks nothing like anyone imagined but it is giving her a sense of rooted truth in the world.