Time to Go Down

One of my tasks for the weekend is to do a descent ritual. I'd known I needed to do it, but until this morning I wasn't sure it would be for. I was doing Morning Pages (Julia Cameron's daily creativity exercise) and started writing about two things I knew I needed to let go of in the underworld: my current job and my relationship with Michael. I kept writing, and found myself expressing the need to strip away all the old expectations and identity limits left over from my youth and college years.

You would think that at age 43 I'd be over all that by now, but no: those expectations go very, very deep, and are tied in with my self-esteem and my beliefs about what consitutes security.

I hasten to add that these expectations are not overtly negative -- but if I continue to be ruled by them on a less-than-conscious level, I am going to be blocked from becoming my authentic self. I'm going to let the expectations of my loving, mundane, middle class parents and my highly selective, leaders-of-the-world undergraduate college dictate who I am.

"Who I am" doesn't even come close to fitting into their paradigms: walker between worlds, wise woman, underworld priestess, Pagan author, bdsm practitioner and instructor, tarot reader, wife to a disincarnate husband. Even "spiritual director" is outside their realm of understanding, since for me it involves working outside a recognized denomination, being a solo practitioner, not operating within the defined boundaries and under the auspices of an established organization which confers legitimacy and and security.

Those are the key words: legitimacy and security.

I've been struggling with legitimacy for several years now -- but it's still and issue. My current job issues have highlighted the security aspect.

Time to shift paradigms. Radically shift them.

And Ereshkigal is just the lady to help with that.

Expensive -- But Worth It!

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And here I've been fretting about my day job. . . !

Wolves & Ravens - January, 1983

Only a few folks are going to understand the significance of this, but it's important enough to me to capture here.

In the course of sorting through my files this afternoon, I found a paper I'd written for my Advanced Biology class during my senior year of high school. It was a major research paper (or what passed for one at that time) on wolves.

Why wolves? I can't remember now. Maybe we were supposed to do a paper on some kind of animal. Maybe the topic was open and this is what I chose. (Maybe Mr. T had suggested it?) I know that I didn't have any particular interest in wolves at that time.

The paper consists of 21 hand-written pages (plus illustrations and a small bibliography) still held firmly in a plastic binder. I paged through it, shaking my head slightly at the painstaking handwriting, the earnest juvenile scholarship. I didn't read much, but I did scan the last page. To my surprise, I found a description of a unique connection between wolves and ravens. I included a substantial quote from Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men:

The wolf apparently takes great pleasure in the company of ravens. The raven. . . commonly follows hunting wolves to feed on the remains of a kill. In winter, when tracks are visible from the air, ravens will follow the trail of a wolf pack in hopes of finding a carcass. They roost in neighboring trees or hop about eating bloody snow while the wolves eat, approaching the carcass when the wolves have finished. But the relationship between the two is deeper than this, as is revealed in the following incident. A travelling pack had stopped to rest and four or five ravens who were tagging along began to pester them. As Mech writes in The Wolf:

"The birds would dive at a wolf's head or tail and the wolf would duck and then leap at them. Sometimes the ravens chased the wolves, flying just above their heads, and once, a raven waddled to a resting wolf, pecked at its tail, and jumped aside as the wolf snapped at it. When the wolf retaliated by stalking the raven, the bird allowed it within a foot before arising. Then it landed a few feet beyond the wolf and repeated the prank.

"It appears that the wolf and the raven have reached an adjustment in their relationships such that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other, and each is fully aware of the other's capabilities. Both species are extremely social, so they must possess the psychological mechanisms necessary for forming social attachments. Perhaps in some way individuals of each species have included members of the other in their social group and formed bonds with them.

That was the end of my paper. There was no proper concluding paragraph, just this long quote about the unusal social relationship between wolves and ravens.

For some reason, when I was 18 years old, this caught my attention and merited special mention -- so much so that there didn't seem to be anything else left to say.

Letting Go

I was halfway through a box of file folders before I realized that the process of sorting, discarding, and grouping was an ideal lead-in to my ritual with Ereshkigal this evening. There's a lot of history in those files, a lot of old interests, old values, old passions -- a lot of who I used to be. I like the person I used to be, but I don't need to keep all of her old things as I go forward.

I let go maybe one quarter of what was in that box, most of it clippings from newspapers and magazines regarding old interests. I also let go some files of letters from friendships long expired (but kept others), let go of bits of personal history that didn't have any real significance, let go of a couple of old stories written in junior high and high school that I liked, but had no reason to keep. I have the memories of what I wrote and why. There was no need to keep the pages.

There are still at least three more boxes to go. It's going to take longer than I'd expected.

But another large cardboard box has been emptied, broken down, and put on the stack in the garage, so it's out of my office -- and that feels good in itself.

Today Has Been a Wolf Day

Via girlonajourney1



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