How To Return from the Underworld

Reunion

(An answer to the titular question--for those who don't wish to read on: I have no idea! Every return is different...but I do think sharing stories of return are vital. They help us find a semblence of roadmap in the ever looming dark.)

The practitioner placed her hands on either side of my throat, gently holding as if she were pressing a thin fabric against my pulse points.

I felt a swelling in my center, a hard lump, a block.

It was the story. This story.

I don't know how to tell it. Yet.

So I will tell another one instead.

This is an old trick I learned as a fiction writer. When you get blocked, don't stop writing. Change course. My old teacher used to say, "the story knows more than you do, you have to trust the story." And when I taught during in-class assignments I would say, "don't think, just write."

It is hard to trust our stories.

It is hard to trust any story when you are in it.

That is why the old stories land so deep, because they have been tested. For thousands of years. Perhaps for longer.

Because they can be trusted. We know them in our bones.

"Once upon a time there lived a girl with an ear for the wind. She lived in a moon blessed house, somewhere between the seasons. She was quite young. And so very old."

This is a story I can tell, I've been telling, about the woman-girl searching for her spiritual home, only to find that it has been with her all along. This is a story I wrote, when I was only twenty years old, illustrated and self-published. It is my first book titled, It Was Wild.

This woman-girl travels all over the world, seeking and seeking, only to find that her very own place, her moon blessed house, her cat, her body, these are the elements of magic she has been looking for all the while.

Hi. I'm here.

For the past year I've not felt very here. But I am now coming back home, in body and brain. Healing. There is more to tell, more to share.

But for now I am grateful to be home.

By this and every effort may the balance be regained.