Caves are natural manifestations of the primordial womb of the Mother.

Nine days before my 34th birthday — which I only recently discovered is Walpurgis Night — I descended into the cave, the womb space. Caves are natural manifestations of the primordial womb of the Mother. Where womb is receiver and incubator, she is also burial ground. She is the one who pulls us in.

Since ‘Flow of Life’, I have been accompanied by a persistent presence, quickening the return through symbols, encounters, conversations. It’s a continuous pulling into the deepest place of my being. What is this drawing inward? This collapse into oneself? It’s a longing, a memory, for the union out of which existence emerges. This place of origin seems a reversal, where the outward and the inward cross into confluence. That point, those dual waters, is the source of this life.

The entire day moved like a symphony. I have learned to recognize this quality — the quiet orchestration of time, of people, of moments weaving together seamlessly. When I align with that pulse instead of the ego's urgency, life appears as I remember it before the Fall. The path to the cave undulated with an orgasmic rhythm, while the northern edge of the mountain stretched out across the plains. Wide sky, wide land, my body anticipating our arrival. At the side of the path, a single six petaled white flower with yellow center and orange rim, the poet's narcissus in its fullest expression — smiling directly at me. I pulled her gently from the earth, held her to my chest for a breath, and offered her beauty to Michael. His devotion is the invisible force of which the universe itself is made. I am here partly because of him.

When we arrived, two women were already present — they had just emerged from the dark and were still held in Her magnetism. While I was stretching, preparing to go down, one of the women climbed on top of the rock facing the womanly cleft. Seated in lotus posture, eyes closed, her hands gestured in delicate mudra’s toward the radiating darkness. The other woman was of Japanese descent communing with the rocks through Feng Shui, carefully running her fingers along the stone wall and slowly placing stones elsewhere. We acknowledged each other’s grace and bathed in the field that was swaying between us. The ceremony had already begun.

A few weeks prior I wrote a poem for the Primordial Mother. An invocation, inquiring about Her hiding. There are periods when I seemingly lose Her — when I can only taste the salt of Her absence on my tongue. Doubt seeps in and my body grows tense. Intellectually I know the disconnection is an illusion. I know Her pulse is infinite and omnipresent. But this knowing doesn't quench my thirst. This thirst is the drought of the feminine principle, wanting to re-emerge. Like Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who turned into the snake, and whose shape undulates like the path that led me here. Lilith refused subordination and chose the wilderness over a paradise that required her diminishment. She moved underground, taking residence in the roots, in the caves, in the night. What they called her exile was actually her initiation. She did not lose the garden. She found the womb beneath it. Because how could it be that her center resided externally?

Entering the cave, I went down into deep time, and rose again into the budding, greening forest around me. Each time I went, I merged with timeless space and the familiar darkness. I must have descended at least seven times. Wearing nothing but a silk scarf around my head, colored with my night blood. I had also woven a bird's nest from supple branches I gathered — and filled it with twenty two eggs, boiled and painted red. The peeling of the eggs in front of Her entrance was to practice the only prayer I know. The Goddess is in the egg. Which better way to relate to the feminine than communing with my own inner cycles?

Like Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who turned into the snake, and whose shape undulates like the path that led me here.

Before the procession I went in alone to recite my poem into the stone. I kneeled naked in front of the organically eroded altar, a few candles still lit by the women whose footsteps were now tracing the snake path again. I recited my poem over and over until the repetition grew into a smile. Lifting my face from the page, my eyes widened to take in as much of Her form as I could possibly contain. My tears landed onto the altar and I noticed the red rose petals between the flames, and the flickering light guided my eyes across the slippery walls which seemed to be shaped as an enormous inverted candle, as if wax had been dripping from the roof of stalactites for ages. Suddenly I felt called to vibrate my voice within Her. I hold a shyness in my voice and this seemed one of the reasons why I had made this pilgrimage. I started to hum and soon primal, operatic sounds followed — a song of ancient longing I didn’t know I carried. After a while of vibrating aloud through Her empty silhouette, I realized I knew the cave completely. The resonance of the echoing created an internal map and the four directions folded beneath my ribs.

And so I went deeper, sinking my body into the completely black cavern below. The unbroken connection resides in the sound of the unspoken. How graceful She is in Her silence. I knelt on the cold wet rocks at the center of the oval shaped chamber. It wasn’t easy to break this perfect silence but She invited me to allow whatever sound that needed release emanate. She received it without judgment. She received all of it. She does not need us ready. Only willing. I don’t know how long I was down there but at one point I heard in the far distance two female voices approaching. As they arrived they immediately slid downward, through the birth canal that led with a slight right bending toward the altar. They peered into the deeper cavern I was kneeling, shining their flashlight onto my back, I kept my face turned, like the moon — and waited for them to settle above. I continued the ancient moaning and suddenly their voices opened in song. From my own private darkness I joined them. Blindly, without cue our three voices met in choir. It was angelic, a crescendo of the void, rising and falling from the silence. A motherly melody that stretched my heart wide open.

We ascended together and as we reached the warm shadow of the budding trees we began to speak. Both women were from Iran. One's name meant Pleiades, the seven sisters. The other's name translated to turquoise, the chakra color of the throat. We spoke of the connection between the voice and the womb, how the fetus unfolds from these two points touching — two creative thresholds, one breath. I realized then that the ceremony had never been mine alone. It was Hers, offering back to me the very thing I had descended to find.

There was song before there was word. The voice as transformer, the throat and the womb opening as one. I am beginning to understand that my image is telling a story that goes way beyond me. Each expression has been an opening of this channel, which I couldn’t have approached any other way. The descent is not metaphor and so the hero got swallowed, for I could have never seen Her through those eyes. The experience is the work, the work is the continuous initiation — a pilgrimage of finding the vulnerable places within and breathing light into them.

I started to hum and soon primal, operatic sounds followed — a song of ancient longing I didn’t know I carried.