Recently I encountered a graceful leaf, with a wavy center, swaying in the rays of metaphor-laden thoughts:
-should it remain suspended on the sun’s wheel or ascend toward the patch of earth?
I inadvertently entered into a sort of silent dialogue with myself, because I very much liked the leaf’s question.
To ascend toward the Earth!
So I took my phone, so as not to forget it, immortalized the scene, and added successive layers of color, with my own nourishing inquiries:
• Might it have some form of self-awareness?
• Is it capable of fundamental questions that would guide it on its path?
• Is it afraid of death?
• Does it know the Epicurean reply: “You have never encountered death and never will. When it appears, you no longer exist; as long as you exist, death has not yet appeared. Therefore, you will never meet, and there is no reason to fear one another.”
• Does it know that to descend into the underworld, into the earth, is in fact, as the world’s great mythologies say, a motif of initiation, of rediscovery, of transformation, of rebirth in the leaves’ spring?
• Did it hear Jung in another life cycle, when he spoke of the concept of the shadow and emphasized that “gold is found in the darkness”?
This leaf’s uncertainty reminded me of James Hillman, the psychologist who founded the school of archetypal psychology.
He upholds the notion of “descending to heaven”; any ascent first needs a descent, a grounding.
A tree, in order to rise to the sky, grows downward, driving its roots deep into the darkness, into the soil, finding its stability, refining its fibers.
For us humans, this growth involves discomfort, pain, confronting depression, disappointment, and distress; quite often, our roots remain short, inadequate, our fiber fragile.
At the same time, I told the leaf about the oldest myth that appears in the hymns of the Sumerian temples, that of the goddess Inanna, a testament to crossing the gates of metamorphosis.
“From the Great Above, she set her mind on the Great Below.
The goddess of the Great Above decided to journey to the Great Below.
Inanna of the Great Above decided to journey to the Great Below.
My Lady abandoned heaven, abandoned earth,
And descended to the Netherworld.
Inanna abandoned heaven, abandoned earth,
And descended to the Netherworld.
She gave up being mistress, she gave up being mistress,
And descended to the Netherworld.”
Inanna adorned herself with royal garments and tied around her waist seven divine secrets, thus prepared to enter the realm of no return, the world of death and darkness, ruled by her sister and adversary, the goddess Ereshkigal.
The two sisters, light and darkness respectively, symbolically represent a single goddess with two opposite aspects.
Their confrontation essentially summarizes the long road of trials; whether hero, god, or goddess—man or woman, leaf or leaf—one discovers and assimilates one’s opposite, the part of the self not yet known, by devouring it or being devoured by it.
Defensive systems, adaptive systems, “personae” begin to fall away, and the hero is forced to set aside pride, vanity, status, fleeting triumphs, life itself, and must bow or submit before what is intolerable, terrifying, unacceptable, bitter.
Only then does one discover that oneself and the opposite are not different creatures, but parts of the same body.
Or, as James Joyce says: “Equal opposites have evolved from the same power of nature or spirit, as the sole condition and medium for the manifestation himundher (the duality he–she) and are polarized to merge by the symphysis of their antipathies.”
Then, very briefly, I also mentioned to it the legend of Orpheus’s descent into the underworld.
Let it decide where to find its inspiration...
In Greek mythology, Orpheus personifies the archetype of the artist, musician, poet touched by divine grace.
He is known as the son of the god Helios-Apollo and the nymph Calliope.
He receives his famous lyre from his father, created expressly by the ingenious Hermes.
He is so talented that he impresses the gods of Olympus; even the rocks would tremble in emotion and shift from their places upon hearing him play.
At some point, he meets the nymph Eurydice, of incomparable beauty.
She becomes the muse that inspires his verses and his creations.
But Aristaeus, the agricultural deity, a minor god in Greek mythology, also falls in love with her and pursues her. While running to escape him, she is bitten by a snake and dies.
Orpheus cannot be consoled by this loss and decides to venture into the underworld, into the realm of darkness, to implore Hades, god of the inferno, to return Eurydice to him.
With his music, he manages to charm the furies of the underworld and Hades himself, who agrees to free her, on one condition: he must not look back at her until they both reach the light.
Upon crossing the fateful boundary from the shadows, tormented by fears and consumed by longing, Orpheus, sensing her behind him, turns around too soon. A small part of her shadow had not yet emerged into the light.
Thus, he loses her a second time, drawn back into the depths of Tartarus. Perhaps he paid the price for allowing himself to be ruled by passions, impatience, by the hubris of his lyrical talent, by his subsequent useless lamentations on the banks of the Styx that moved rocks, trees, and wild beasts with his lyricism. We do not know; we can only guess.
If the leaf itself has its own Eurydice, an unintegrated anima, is it now descending for the nth autumn?
But what about us…me, you?
How do I, day by day, collide with my conscious shoulder against Ereshkigal?
Which part of me is still captive in the dark?
What aspects of my existence remain dissociated, split, left behind in pain?
Who is my Eurydice?
How many times have I “looked back” too hastily, lost patience?
Can I make corrections?
How do I ignore the inner Aristaeus, the animus counterbalancing an uncontrollable anima, airy or overly watery?
Difficult answers for humans!
We do not have the reflex of descent, but rather that of pleasure, of comfort.
We are not trained in falling, in inner upheaval, in limitation, in loss, in lack of energy, in mourning.
The word comes easily to me to say that we have a mind uneducated, coarse, immature.
We can undergo various therapies with pompous and fashionable names, we can read massive libraries of experimental psychology, sit with a laptop in front of us, elegantly anesthetizing ourselves; but if we do not deliberately ascend toward the underworld, where there is no “all-inclusive” tourism, no vacation photos worthy of Instagram, where encounters hurt and courtesies sting, we will not succeed in knowing the world of our personal power, the world of true measure, the world of our own essence. For inner demons and the abyss have this restorative quality of recovering the fullness of the self, of rounding out reality.
I dare say there are no saviors, no matter how we have created them in our psyche; it is a solitary journey, in lucid contemplation, demanding time, surgical honesty, and radical dedication.
The condition of maturing is precisely this crossing into Hades’s dimension.
The chance of maturation lies in a mind that is educated, flexible, antifragile, freed from the control of old adaptive schemas, from seemingly unadjustable inertia that once served our adolescent or childish consciousness.
Surely, my amber-hued graceful one has already discovered—before us—that every hero or heroine must “ascend to the earth” alone, that something old must find its end so that something new may surface in consciousness, fulfilling the principle of inner completeness or intrapsychic wholeness.
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