Within the Cave Something Pulses – Poetry and Program

What if we allied ourselves to the energies of the season?

What if we dove into the silent dark and welcomed the wholeness of who we are?

What labyrinth wisdoms await?

What dreams are fires in the dark?

What if our shadow was an offering, and monsters were actually the secret password?

What emerges in the fruitful darkness?

The season is turning, both outside and within, and both personally and collectively. Autumn’s march toward the deep dark womb of winter invites an Underworld transformation. A cave comes beckoning.

We embrace the dark to find renewal and our own sacred. We go to the cave for the descent into ourselves, to rest, to greet the wounds and monsters, but also uncover the shimmering treasures to bring back as gifts to the world as medicine.

BOOK: Within the Cave Something Pulses is a new collection of chthonic poetry charting seasonal spelunking of the darkness, a wandering in the labyrinth, and tender tending of the dreamfires that emerge in the fruitful darkness.

I am not sure which came first, the poetry or the program. They’ve been incubating in the dark womb for years, and perhaps like most things, they co-created one another, subsidized by the anchors and treasures of the seasonal darkening, the gifts of solstice, and kissing monsters on the snout.

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Carve Your Beautiful, Dark Cave

The path to the dark cave starts innocently enough
with a sign full of useful information
in broad daylight, blue skies.

A fulfilling breakfast—small potatoes and duck eggs perhaps,
wild berries plump with promise.

Before you know it
you can hardly remember
the color of berries or eyes
or the sound of the river flowing.

Bats reign here
and the dominant thoughts
are of a bed and that last meal.

Feel the shape of those walls
textured by the smooth slink of years
moist with mysterious things
you’d rather not know.

To either side, tunnels to treasures
or traps.

There’s no way to know
and no sure way out
other than following the scent
of the deepest voice with you.

The deeper you spelunk
the brighter the darkness.

Hard pains, sweet pains
nectars maybe, but first the cuts
both slow and quick deaths.

Sometimes monsters
and the secret password
are the same thing.

Of course, you could avoid the path altogether
by staying “at home”

But don’t think darkness is avoidable.
Or are you one who believes in light
without the dark?

Trailheads without wounded trailfeet,
mountain views without valleys?

Oh, what an imagination!

Come now!

Carve your beautiful, dark cave
and then come home, my friend

with well-earned feet
and a heart that knows.