Returning From The Underworld

Lately, when I’m working in my studio,  I prefer listening to the sounds around me.

The screech of the bluejay and singing of the chickadees. The whoosh of wings at the feeder when all the birds fly away at once, the tick of my iron, and the repeated rhythm of cars on Route 22.

If I do listen to anything it’s music or a podcast.  I try not to bring the News into my studio.

But still, it seeps in like cold air between the cracks in the floor boards and the unseen spaces of the old windows frames.

Today I  remembered the dream I had when Kamala Harris was running for president.  The one about the Black woman coming out from behind the velvet curtains, doing a beautiful dance, then going back behind the curtain.

When I had the dream I hated that she went back behind the curtain. I didn’t want it to end that way. I even blamed myself for dreaming it.

Now, I could see the dream as a premonition.  But I don’t think it was.

I think it was my subconscious telling me  that no matter how much I wanted it to happen, there was no way Harris would not be our next president.

That wasn’t a political assessment.  It wasn’t about what the democrats did wrong to make them lose the election.  It was my own personal feelings that deep down I couldn’t really believe that a woman, and especially a Black woman, would be elected President.

As much as I wanted it, a part of me still believed it was impossible.

But I chose to believe, to be happy and hopeful when I could be.  To enjoy that time of not knowing. While leaving the possibility open that it might not happen.

Which is where we are now.

All that hope and believing I’m sure made the fall for me harder.  But I don’t regret it.

And as I try to figure out what to do next, I think of Baubo.

The maid from the Greek myth who made  Demeter laugh so hard  (Baubo picked up her skirts and showed Demeter her vulva), she emerged from her depression.  The depression that began when she tried unsuccessfully to bring her daughter Persephone, back from the Underworld.

When Demeter laughed at Baubo’s most base and bawdy humor,  it brought her back to life and she was eventually able to help her daughter return from the underworld.

That’s how I feel.

Like I’ve traveled to the underworld and I’m waiting for that shock of laughter to bring me back.  Because it has to be laughter or something like it. Something positive and unorthodox  and irreverent.

I hear people around me saying they are waiting, that the time will come to do something.

But I think it’s more personal than that.  And maybe even slower. Not a big whoosh like the birds all leaving the feeder at once when the Blue Jay shows up.

But something that builds gradually and individually, yet collectively, with the same ache.