Offering to the Underworld

Tamu dubi. My sweet bear - it was the Swahili nickname he had engraved on the handmade ring he made me out of black Tanzanian ebony when we were starry-eyed teenagers. The ring of first love, made with so much tenderness, so much hope, worn and tattered and cracked by years of loyal wear.

I brought it out of my collection of memories and treasures, holding it fondly, slipping its smooth roundness on and off of my fingers. I didn't realize that this worn ring, and everything it symbolized would play a monumental role in my own personal transformation.

It hurt. Tears tugged at my eyelids, begging to course down my cheeks every time I thought about it. We were asked to do a ritual, putting something of importance down into a dugout hole in the earth, symbolizing our intention to descend into the underworld. I knew it was to be this ring. Every time I thought about it, some part of me wanted to break down in rivers of tears - wanted NOT to do it, wanted to find something else, something with less emotional weight.

It was the only thing I had left, and I realized a part of me still clung to it. He is gone, the relationship is shattered along with all the hopes and dreams we shared. And I felt shattered. It was the ring of my first love. The ring of my best friend. We were going to change the world together, grow old together. But just like I unintentionally cracked the ring, I had unintentionally cracked that dream too.

Tears flowed hard and unabashed as I walked down to the portal hole. I missed my first love. I missed the safety. I missed my other half. I missed my best friend. I missed him. I missed knowing what to expect from life, knowing where I was going. I missed feeling protected from the life's buffeting storms.

But it was fitting that I put his ring into the portal to the underworld. It was from the safety of his arms that I was plunged into my own underworld. And in a way he traveled there with me, through all the agonizing heart-pain of betrayal and shattered dreams, it was his underworld journey too. In a way he and I were still connected, him somehow a part of the deep symbolic language and fabric of my psyche.

So, with tears and trembling, as a sacrifice and a memorial - to honor him, to honor his place in my life, to honor the pain-filled story that would become my own personal myth - I offered his ring to the underworld. The overwhelming symbol of my first adulthood - and its death. I offered the gift and sacrifice of myself, my hopes and dreams to the door of death... In the hopes of one day, a rebirth.

I spent the next 5 days in nature, surrounded by wildness mirroring my own wild soul. I walked sometimes courageously, sometimes full of dread into the land of shadows and death, spending afternoons ankle-deep in fertile, primal muck. Spending time in pitch darkness at the bottom of a swampy gulch, watching as my own projections attacked me from all sides in stereo clarity. I spent time dying and making peace, and then dying some more. My muck was calling me, beckoning me with every step to dissolve into it, back into the fertile, primal source of life and death and rebirth.

And so I gave myself to it, to the process that had begun so many years ago, the process of dying and disintegrating. I honored it. I intensified it. I dove head first into psycho-spiritual darkness, my psycho-spiritual muck, teaming and vibrant with deathgiving power and lifegiving vitality.

When it came time to do the final ceremony, to retrieve the item placed in the portal, I walked with a lightness I had not felt in years. As if all the gunked-up emotionally toxic waste that had been clinging to the crevasses and corners of my heart had been run through with a raging river of cleansing water. Sometimes that steady stream of tears that emanate from the depths have the same effect as a raging river.

I found the ring in the hole without much trouble, and held it with fondness one last time - slipping it on and off my fingers. Looking at the crack in the wood. Loving and appreciating all the memories and even the heart-wrenching pain it symbolized. Appreciating the part it played, the part he played in the mythic story of my life.  And in one last symbolic gesture of death, I dropped it back into the earth to be reclaimed.

And so I celebrated and honored death, and yet transformation continues. Rebirth is also a process, one that I will dive into just as passionately. This is my mythic story; one that I wouldn't change for the world.