from journal for Saturday, November 21
This was the second full day of the Courage & Renewal Retreat described in an earlier post:
We were told to wander around outside or inside your space, find things that are beautiful, find yourself seeing them in new ways. On a shelf in my bedroom, I found a pottery pomegranate, given to me by a woman who researches and teaches traditional women’s ritual dances. It was broken and glued back together.
Pomegranate — Persephone cast her ear to the great below. It wasn’t any rape by Hades, it was her choice. She went down, down, under — go down under and through — came from a dream, a powerful dream. so I went down and Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds while she was down there. So Demeter searched for her daughter and while she searched and mourned nothing grew upon the earth. The people began to starve. So they went to Zeus and prayed him to make Hades give up Persephone — o but that was the patriarchal version. In the myth of Inanna, her angry sister killed her and she hung on the meathook until Ninshubur, her trusted secretary, one of the “essential workers”, knew what to do. So the weird little hermaphrodite critters echoed the sister’s pain and brought Inanna back to life. As she walked back up the road from the underworld, she gathered the tokens of authority that she had let fall. I notice that the pomegranate was broken and glued back together but there was a piece missing — “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” When she went down she was Kore the Maiden, but when she comes back she is Queen of the Underworld. I have earned my PhD in PTSD.
The myth of Persephone has long been meaningful to me, especially when we started doing the Sacred Circle Dance Kore — a Greek word, meaning maiden, pronounced Core-ay. I talk about it some way down in this post about the Grandmother Patches.
“There is a crack in everything..” Words by Leonard Cohen, from a Hasidic tale about cracked vessels.