Beginning to climb from the Abyss

©MC_2023

It is enough that I am here, that I am starting. I wanted to write this for you, neighborhood children/friends, tales on hauling oneself from the deep… but better advice is to write this for me, alone, no one wants to read exhortatory messages - especially from someone continually pulled down (succumbing to or perhaps less generously repetition compelled into) these familiar paralyzing depths - 

I am pulling up, a 30 cm at a time, towards the surface of watery depth, my own abyss, hard pull after hard pull upwards. Maybe someday in this you’ll find comfort, as everyone has the time of dark nights and the dark valley. 

Still, each step has to be made by myself and for myself alone. It has been my nature to feel I am forever putting others first, offering service but that may well be too how I tumbled down into the darkness… God knows that the darkness, so familiar, so enveloping has been a safe place for me all my life, safe but not comforting but that it is well-known. 

There is in a wonderfully evocative scene in Disney’s Ariel when she encounters the swirling mesmerizing ink swirl of black that is Ursula - all powerful in her dark powers and desires. 

In that scene, admittedly for children, I felt a familiar resonance, the engaging siren call of the deepest dark. In the cartoon Ariel submits in order to find love - and in that decision is trapped, voiceless. 

The deep dark seems to emanate a powerful all-encompassing love. It may be a form of love as protection from the danger of exposing one’s gifts to the light, to the scrutiny and reactions of others? In that then, it is the comfort of cowardice.

This undersea black blue deep can be deadenly attractive as it leads us to abandon our gift to its overwhelming power, but it is the fatal trap of a smothering, seemingly protective form of love - when it is in reality something very different. It seems to protect the gift - to protect the vulnerable self from full expression. When if the gift is hidden in starless inky depths, the sharp teeth of the world tearing or trampling or stealing that gift seem to be thwarted - when in the end, this is a deception, as it too in the end is a rejection, a trampling and a theft. 

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