"A myth in the mess"
making sense of peace and taking out the trash with Hekate and Hillman
Yes, the dream is made of scraps that belong to the Goddess who makes sacred the waste of life, so that it all counts, it all matters. —James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
Dear Wanderer,
Sometimes I feel like I’m living in the Other World. I’ve heard over and over that the astrology of this month is the most intense and fraught of the year, with its Mercury retrograde upon Full Solar Eclipse upon much-anticipated Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, all presided over by a cold, wet Saturn and wet, angry Mars converging in Pisces. If this month had a bumper sticker it would read: get it, sit down, shut up and hold on!
Yet in my own life, this month has brought a rare period of calm, spaciousness, connection and satisfying productivity that has taken me completely by surprise. I am accomplishing both my mundane tasks and my deep creative work, maintaining my health, enjoying my family and connecting to nature/spirit—and balancing all these things with an ease that is just wholly unfamiliar to me.
I don’t mean to brag. The usual state of my life is get in, sit down, shut up and hold on! Why, in this time of everything being turned upside-down, is my upside-down is actually, for once, right side up?
What is going on? I ask as I relax in my bed with a pile of library books (!), having declared, over the weekend, a Lay In Bed And Read Day in a moment of divine inspiration.
The way I see it, there are several possibilities at play:
First, I’ve recently begun bullet journaling, a method which once seemed impossibly overbearing and structured for my disorganized mind that can barely manage basic hygiene most days. But, I learned, it was created by a fellow attention deficit person to maximize organization and harmony and reduce stress in his life. It basically functions like an extension of my brain, and it is MAGIC, Wanderer. It keeps my priorities and tasks close enough in mind that they don’t suddenly jump out and scare me like they always do, but allows me to “close the tab” on them so I’m not constantly putting energy into worrying about them (ADHD brain is basically like a document that can’t save, so you learn to keep multiple tabs open all the time, which uses A LOT of energy). But I don’t really like bullets so I’m calling it my “mushroom journal.” I don’t have the metaphor completely worked out yet, but something about spores!
Also, it’s viably spring here in the Willamette Valley, which means all kinds of blossoms and their medicines. I revived my habit of taking flower essences and recently moved on from magnolia to trillium; I’m thinking about making up a batch of hard-working dogwood essence to get me through the last semester of my MFA program! We aren’t separate from the energies of the turning Earth as they flower—I’m blossoming too.
My work has become real recently as well. I’ve hit a turning point and am writing for my thesis what I feel is the actual material of my purpose here on Earth. After years of tripping over my own dysfunction and unhealed wounds, it’s empowering! I’ve worked hard for it.
But what accounts for the feeling of deep calm and (wonder of wonders) safety pervading my life these past days? Nothing external has changed: I still live in the belly of an empire that cares naught for Life. Every atrocity that has been taking place is still taking place. The Powers That Be still Are. My body continues to have its limitations and attendant challenges.
Perhaps I am learning, finally, “how to sail my ship,” in the words of Amy in Little Women, which precludes the impossible need to control the weather.
Perhaps Life just will be ever surprising, keeping us on our toes. Goddess knows that’s been Her habit. My dreams of swimming in deep water despite sharks and flying with grace and ease despite trouble on the ground have been richly symbolic and surprising of late. Hillman reminds me that dreams are the realm of Hekate. “Hekate, who has traditionally been represented with three heads,” writes James Hillman, “keeps us looking and listening in many ways at once.”
And it’s unsettling to feel peace, to feel my habitual hypervigilance recede. To feel softly supported by a force I can’t see, don’t have to control, am simply nourished by. I mistrust, a part of me catches myself, as I listen to rain on the dark street or my husband cooking in the kitchen, and wonders what will shatter this sudden, delicate peace.
Only it doesn’t feel sudden or delicate. It feels, like the leaf of a succulent, both pliant and plump, grown over time with the full consent of the earth, rain and sunlight. It’s not as if there aren’t problems, but peace still glows like a hearth fire as I feel my way toward answers. I hold the mistrusting parts of myself, ready to cut and run at the first sign of trouble, the hypervigilant ones, the joyous ones, the ones that remember peace, all with the same easy hand, no longer trying to control or deny any of them. Perhaps that’s the difference?
The junk of the soul is primordially saved by Hekate’s blessing, and even our trashing ourselves can be led back to her. The messy life is a way of entering her domain and becoming a “child of Hekate.” Our part is only to recognize that there is a myth in the mess so as to dispose of the day residue at the proper place, that is, to place them at Hekate’s altar. (Hillman)
It doesn’t particularly matter why I’ve made it to the eye of the storm this eclipse season. It might even be folly to try to pin down the answer, as if mastery of the question was ever the goal. I feel, more than see, the “myth in the mess” of my messy life. The way I see it, I’ve always lived in Hekate’s domain. I’m learning to stake my claim in her Underworld, where all that is thrown away by the daylight world finds its worth. “Ritually,” writes Hillman, “the garbage was placed at night at a crossroads, so that each dream may lead off in at least three directions besides the one we have come from.”
Possibility. The word glimmers with promise and I realize just how small, how precluded of possibility illness, poverty and grief have made my world seem. But something—something—has shifted, and I will be leaving the sweepings from my altar, my ritual garbage, at the crossroads for Hekate tonight. I’ll say a blessing for you too, Wanderer. May all our dreams lead in at least three directions besides the one we’ve come from.
Peacefully,
Sasha