The Quest for Cave Consciousness
The Cave of Winter. The Cave of Creativity.
“Cave bandwidth crosses moments, eras, epochs, eons. You have to learn to get inside the monophony, to tease it apart. Eventually, you encounter an extraordinary polyphony. You begin to sort, to filter. You hear whispers, laughter, murmurs, pleas. There’s a feeling that everyone is here. A wonderful feeling, I should add. Because suddenly you realize how alone we have been, how isolated, to be trapped, stuck in calendar time, and cut off from everyone who came before us.”
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Caves are on my mind.
In part, it’s a January thing. While this month has its modern, resolution-laden reputation, it’s still the season of dark and slow, of slumbering bears and mice who build a world beneath the snow.
I hope that your social media feeds, like mine, are full of invitations (and exhortations) to experience a gentle entry into this new year. I read these posts as necessary reminders: find, and stay in, the interior mythic landscape of the cave.
This “light has barely begun to return” time would have been cave season for our ancestors. The frozen world under the heavy sky could wait because (gods willing) there were harvest stores a-plenty and everyone had a story to tell by the fire.
I am trying to honor this cave consciousness, that energy of quietude and withdrawal.
Granted, it’s also theater season for the kids and new writing group season for my business, so I can’t fully tuck myself away with a stack of books and a “do not approach until spring” sign, but, as ever, it’s a quest to find the balance between the daily every-damn-thing and the soulful everything.
We Enter the Quiet of the Cave to Commune with the All
The quote above is from the strange and wonderful novel, Creation Lake, which has been my late night read this week. It’s delightful when a book that is ostensibly about a misanthropic secret agent working a job in a forgotten corner of the French countryside invites you to consider the polyphony of the underworld.
Caverns of stone weren’t part of my outer or my inner landscape when I was growing up. Cape Cod’s only cave was at Pirates’ Cove Mini Golf on the tourist strip.
So, when I first read about Oweynagat1 in Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted, I was very much a cave virgin, but apparently I was simply waiting to be invited into the underworld.
As I wrote in The Soveriegnty Knot:
I had tried to forget about the place as soon as I read about it [because “mom life” made such travel impossible], but part of my imagination slipped into the rocky cleft with the writer and never came out. When I happened upon a podcast interview with a local guide who described taking people into the mysterious Oweynagat while I was planning our itinerary [for a 2018 trip to Ireland, my first in 15 years], I knew this was the entire reason I needed to get back to Ireland. I needed to face all my fears of narrow spaces, descend into the depths, and experience this rebirth.
…
I was called to enter this cave to meet the Wise Woman in the capital letter sense. Not just the wise woman within me, but the wise woman within the world, within us all. She lives in caves, you see. She is the one who holds us tight in the dimension before this one, in the realm before birth. She is the one who welcomes us home at the other side of this human lifetime, in the realm beyond death. The wise woman is the keeper of your original self, the purest version of you that is untarnished by the expectations and masquerades of contemporary life.
As you’ll read in the book, part of me never left that cave, and a part of that cave came with me back to this ordinary world across the ocean. And, part of that cave became central to my work as guide for writers who are seeking to find their truest, deepest stories.
Later this month, the doors will re-open on my long-running global writers’ community, the Writers’ Knot.
This group provides a creative incubator and a vibrant sisterhood where we gather to write into new prompts each week.
Our conversations rarely touch on craft and strategy. Instead, we talk about the mythic imagination and the magical synchronicities that thread through our writing, even though we’re continents away from one another. We explore the realms of the archetypes and the ancestors, the gods and the spirit guides.
And, in this next iteration of the Writers’ Knot, we’re going to begin - and linger a while - in the cave.
When we enter the imaginal cave, we delve into the stories of the mystics and the grandmothers. We find ourselves in the hidden soul shadows that yearn to be revealed. From experience, I know the best place to do this sort of spiritual writing is within community.
In the months that follow, our community will explore other mythic creative landscapes that each possess their own special energy - including the cliff, the castle, and the cottage.
You can learn more about the Writers’ Knot on my website.
We begin together on January 22. I’d love to have you with us.
Uaimh na gCat, or the Cave of Cats, in County Roscommon near Queen Medb’s royal seat at Rathcroghan. Known as the home of the Morríghan, “The Gateway to Hell,” and the birthplace of Samhain, I’m not sure how I never knew about this place until the mid 2010s, but many of Ireland’s sacred sites simply weren’t common knowledge like they are now.