Monthly Archive

The myth of Demeter and Persephone, as it is generally retold, goes something like this:

Persephone, the maiden daughter of the Earth Goddess Demeter, was joyfully picking flowers with her friends when Hades kidnapped her and took her to his Underworld realm.  Demeter wandered the earth in despair seeking her daughter, rendering the land barren so that the people starved and the gods and goddesses of Olympus had to do  without their sacrifices.  Finally, the gods and goddesses decreed that Persephone would return to her mother, but only if she had not eaten of the food of the underworld.  But, alas, Hades had tempted her and she had eaten pomegranate seeds.  Thus, she was forced to remain the Underworld, Hades’ captive wife, for four months of the year – winter – when the land would be bare and desolate, but come back to earth the other eight when Demeter would again make the land fruitful.

I have always loved and hated this story.  It is full of violence against women and the Earth is the unwilling object to be abundant or not at the gods and goddesses’ whim. Yet it also has a beauty and meaning that always eluded, yet attracted me.  Because it was written down millennia ago, this is the story that we hear.  Of course, it is not the only version.  In other renditions of it, Persephone journeys to the Underworld of her own accord and, with her mother, is a powerful goddess of life and death and rebirth.  How different the story and its meaning for women becomes when we change just a few things here and there.

Let us begin to think differently about our stories.  Instead of myths, folktales and other stories that have grown up by the retelling over time being frozen at the moment they were written down, maybe we can think of stories differently.  Maybe these stories belong to each of us, ordinary women and men, and it is our right and our gift from our ancestors, to reinterpret them to meet our own needs from generation to generation.  Many times I feel as if there are no myths or folktales that speak to me – they relate to lives long ago and few have come along that truly enlighten and inspire my own life.  Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.

Here is another version of the Persephone and Demeter tale.

Persephone was the maiden daughter of the powerful Earth Goddess Demeter.  She and her mother loved one another dearly, and her mother knew that the time had come for her daughter to become the woman she was meant to be, in all her strength and wisdom and bright joy.  Demeter also knew that it was time for humans and the Earth they lived on to evolve, too.  Humans lived in eternal summer, with abundant food and shelter, but no time to think, to contemplate and create, to honor that within themselves that was deep and rich.  Demeter was deeply bereft to give up her daughter to her daughter’s destiny, but she knew that she had no choice.   

So, Demeter called Persephone to her and told her it was time for her to go on an important journey.  She was to sojourn to the Underworld and become a part of it.  She was to be the link between the upper world of light, activity, and outward growth and the underworld of darkness, thought and inner enrichment.  Through Persephone, humans would learn to become not just the willing servants of the gods and goddesses, but creative and immortal in their ability to think beyond their daily lives and become like the gods and goddesses. 

Persephone willingly ventured down to the Underworld, though her heart was filled with sadness at leaving her mother and the beauty of the Upperworld and fear at what she would find in the Underworld.  When she arrived, however, she met and fell in love with Hades, whose realm she had entered.  In time, he brought her the gifts of the pomegranate, that fruit of fertility and holiness, and She brought him the joy and  pleasure of the Upperworld.  Yet, Persephone knew that her destiny was not to live in the Underworld all the time either.  So, again with grief at leaving her new-found partner, she returned to the Upperworld and come to a decision with her mother about what to do. Together with Demeter and a willing earth, Persephone and Hades helped bring the world into balance, with Persephone spending a third of her time in the Underworld and two-thirds in the Upperworld, in correct proportion for the Earth to allow humans to both be nourished through the fruits of the land and to dive deep into the restful contemplative cave of their own souls.  And so it is even to our own time.

I like that version much better and what does it teach us?  That women are powerful, that mothers and daughters and women and men together can remake the world, that love creates balance, that we must face our fears and put aside our own sadness at times to fulfill our destiny, that we must both celebrate the abundance of our time in the light and honor the nurturance of our time in the dark, and that we are like the goddesses of old if we will just recognize and use our talents and strengths. 

This is my story of Persephone and Demeter and it belongs to me, an ordinary woman of the 21st century, just as much as to any ancient author or contemporary scholar.  What is your favorite myth or folktale and how do you tell it?

I love reading what search terms people use to find my blog.  A day or two ago, someone searched on “being a hermit in everyday life.”  I had actually been thinking of writing a post on this, but never did because I didn’t think anyone but me would be interested.  So, this is for that reader that searched for this post before it was written.  I hope you are still around and like this post, created for you but with the anticipation that if you and I want to be hermits, maybe others do, too…

From the time I was little, I wanted to be a hermit.  My life’s goal was always to live by myself in a little cabin on a mountainside, spending my days gazing at the sky, gathering herbs and flowers, and writing pieces that I would somehow send out into the world without leaving my cabin (kind of like blogging on a computer!).  Of course, it hasn’t worked out that way.  Being a hermit has not been considered to be an appropriate career choice for several hundreds of years.  In fact, I think that hermitry fell out of favor at just about the same time as women have been persecuted for being healers and witches, oddly enough, or not.

To me, being a hermit does not mean being anti-social or even just going to live by yourself, Thoreau-like.  It means being the stillpoint around which the rest of the world revolves.  A hermit is someone who makes a mission of being in that place of solitude and contemplation where the voice of all beings and the earth can be clearly heard, where what is really happening and the intentions of people and institutions are obvious, where visions come to land like so many crows on a tall tree and where the future is not commanded by the past, where creativity flows and can be imbibed with your morning tea. 

Being a hermit means is a courageous calling because it means sacrificing the security of being part of society, however painful that may be at times.  It is waking up every morning without a day’s worth of activities to distract you from whatever you need to face in yourself at that moment.  Being a hermit means actually believing that thoughts are things and have value, that contemplating goodness and beauty can make it come about, that the human mind is a thing of value apart from the economic goods it may command the body to produce.

In short, a hermit is the status quo’s worst nightmare.  Can you imagine an entire profession of people whose job it is to think clearly apart from the strictures of society?  Who are not beholden to the community for basic necessities?  Who do not care if they are thought of well by others?  Who can look at themselves in the mirror each morning without fear or regret because they are accustomed to seeking out their true selves every day?  No wonder you cannot major in hermitry at universities and there is no way to make your living from being one.

In fact, it is almost impossible for most women to be hermits in today’s world.  We have family responsibilities to parents or others even if we have no children.  Most of us marry. We do not make the kind of incomes that allow us to save enough to be financially independent early in life.  We are taught to distrust our instincts and our thoughts and not to look too deeply into ourselves. 

Yet, hermits are needed now more than ever.  We need people who see clearly and are willing to speak about what they witness.  We require envisioners to help us steer clear paths to a kinder and ecologically sustainable world.  The re-emergence of the Sacred Feminine gives me hope that, perhaps in our grand-daughters time at least, we will love and nurture our hermits.  Hermitry is a talent that will be valued when action is not considered the only way to solve a problem, when power comes from integrity within and not only the ability to coerce others, when people are valuable for their sacredness within rather than their economic benefit to others.

Still, if we see being a hermit as a way of looking at the world rather than a way of living, we can still be hermits.  We can make time for solitude and contemplation in our lives and not give it away everytime someone asks to do something for them.  We can make an effort to make decisions and witness people and events in a way that relates only to our values instead of what is considered valuable by society.  We can spend time in prayer, or contemplation, or meditation, or simply having faith, and genuinely believe that these are activities that change what happens in the outside world and are worth doing. 

I am a hermit and I always will be.  Solitariness is what comes natural to me.  It is something I have fought all my life because preferring to be alone was always somehow a bad thing, an indication of something wrong with me.  Today, I choose to be a hermit, a time-honored, valuable way of being. 

When I am lost, I wander.  When I feel as if I am at a crossroads and don’t know which way to go, or if I find that the road I have been on has ended with no directions as to  where to go next, or when I am empty of creative ideas or simply unsure of what to do in a situation, I begin to look around.  If it is pleasant outside, I take a walk without knowing where I am going or when I will return.  If I need to stay inside, I find the byways of my home and travel them, whether the internet, or taking a look at what is in my bookcase that I have forgotten, or maybe I’ll even clean out a closet. 

I always anticipate that an answer will come at least within several days of wandering.  It almost never takes more than an hour or two.  Within that time, something I see in my house will spark an idea or understanding, or an email will arrive with an idea, or the solution will simply come upon me like divine inspiration.  Sometimes what I receive is a response to a specific problem.  Sometimes it is just a small miracle that reminds me that life is so much more than I ever perceive day to day.

Once on one of my walkabouts in the neighborhood, I came upon this place that is no more than ten minutes walk from the house I have lived in for 20 years, yet I never saw it till I stopped looking for someplace else.

Why is wandering such a wonderful, if lost, art?  When you wander, you change your attitude from one of frustration that you are not in control to one of openness, wonder and trust.  When you are determined to go from “point A” to “point B” and you have lost your way in getting there, you have already pre-determined that “point B” is where you should be and that you should be able to get there if all were right with the world.  What if “point C” is really a much better place?  The universe contains an infinite number of “points” that it would take a lifetime to explore, so perhaps heading single-mindedly towards only one is rather short-sighted.

When you wander, you are almost sure to find something to inspire, to enlighten, to give joy.  Instead of demanding only one thing, you are saying that you love the essence of many things in the universe, just because they exist and have been created by Goddess, and are waiting for Her to place something new and delightful in your path.  As Darryl Zero, a Sherlock Holmes-like character played by Bill Pullman in the movie “Zero Effect” says, when you look for something, you may not find it; when you look for anything, you are sure to find it. 

When you wander, you are expressing a trust that you are a valued part of the universe and that you will receive what you need from it, even if you are surprised at what your gift is.  We humans have control over almost nothing.  We like to think we have complete control over everything, but, in fact, everything we love and consider ourselves to be could disappear in one instant of a car accident or some other catastrophic event.  When we realize this, we can choose to live in fear of every moment or we can choose to live in trust.   We can believe and act on the belief that even when we have had taken from us everything that gave us meaning and direction, there is, in fact, meaning and direction for our lives if we will be open enough to let it come upon us. 

Wandering is a way of nature, whether it be expressed as a river or a canyon, or a galaxy expanding, or driftwood floating hundreds of miles on the ocean, or a mind that is watching a sunrise over a lake on a summer day.  Rays of light, flocks of birds, and other natural phenomena may have their lines and pathways, but they are not the only ways of the universe.  When we wander, we are being like those creations that seek their food every day in the forest, here and there. However, instead of a meal, we seek enlightenment and wisdom.  The more we wander in open wonder and trust, the more we find, and the more understanding we have of this amazing universe that has been given by Goddess to us to enjoy and make better by our presence.