Saturday, November 10th, 2007
A strange thing happens when I hear stories or see certain pictures…they talk to me. If I tune in carefully enough, everything speaks, and anyone can hear it if they learn to listen for it.
Ever since I used the picture of Pandora in my last entry she has been whispering to me. She wanted me to know her story, and to tell the portion unspoken in the myths. She knew I would understand. For in her story I found Eve’s story, and in many ways my own. The story not just of so many women, but of so many people regardless of gender, who have pushed the frontiers of their being, challenged taboos, and entered into the places they feared and previously protected themselves from.
It starts with the idea of sin. The shiny apple. The serpent power. Good and Bad. The inaccessible. The closed door, and the lands beyond it. Rumi said, “there is a field between wrong and right…I will meet you there.” A man of similar heart, Jung said “I would rather be whole than good.” What we repress never goes away. It may change shape or transform in some way, but it will come back in some manifestation or another until we address it. Until we integrate it. This is where the wholeness comes in, and where what we have been told is shameful or wrong inhibits us from exploring the totality of who we are.
Sometimes we ultimately discover that what we have repressed is not even anything to do with us, much less a part of who we are…but we still must explore it in order to find that out and shed it from our systems. For this is the “shadow side” of each of us so often talked about…the parts of ourselves that we are afraid to look at and so distance ourselves from, but which are still connected to us and looking for a way to be known. We reintegrate those parts when we make them somehow okay, or even beautiful.
Do you remember a time in your childhood where you just felt things, before you knew if they were wrong or right? You may have even decided they were wrong or right based entirely on how they felt. At some level, or in some cases, we still do this now. We feel people and situations and even things, and if we have learned to trust these feelings we make choices and take actions in our lives based on them.
We un-clip our own wings. We decide the cage door is open and the sun is out, and we are ready to feel the wind on our backs again. We let go. Pandora and Eve decided there shouldn’t be anything that was forbidden to them, if they desired to know of it. They consorted with the serpents and they got the blame for a legacy that started long before them, of exploring the dark side of all things, and coming through it intact…of finding that the last thing in the box after all the demons were gone…hope.
Are we any better off avoiding trees of knowledge or boxing evil away? I think not. I think we will only know our power around these things if we face them, head on with wild fear and courage both. I have spoken with the serpent. I have tasted the apple and I know why it is red. I have looked inside so many boxes that there aren’t many left…and I am glad. I grew up in many houses with boxes, never quite unpacked and I can tell you I decided long ago I didn’t want them. I choose my energetic boxes pretty thoughtfully now. I think about what I want to keep.
And every shiny apple has those damned poison seeds…and I know exactly what the poison is…shame. The feeling that we should not have enjoyed ourselves or trusted our feelings. We have been taught not to trust pleasure, and not to trust our bodies. We think there is a higher power that knows better, but for me that is the higher power, if we can learn how to accept and use it as such. I know the Goddess agrees with me on this one.
If your heart tells you to open the box, open it. Eat the apple. Leave the seeds.
Love,
Jennifer
