#11: Persephone’s Return
Eternal Sunshine from a Deeper Well
On the eve of the spring equinox, Ostara, I made my first flower essence.
Trickster is a word that has been popping up for me. Playfully, coyly, slyly. The eclipse. The spirit of money herself. Existential Kink. This time of year is bringing up mischievous energy, the precipice of something big underway.
So my first flower essence was made next to a Baobab tree, some of the oldest living creatures on this Earth, in the front yard of the family home while the neighborhood black cat lay next to me, the vine of the flower used in the essence trellised in front of us. I looked up at the Baobab tree and saw my father’s initials NA carved into the trunk, something I’d never noticed until that moment. Wink.
I had thought I was making an orange jasmine essence, the subtle scent of citrus having thrown me off as we have plenty of orange jasmine bushes around, too. But after sitting with the flower in a journey — where their trickster je ne se quois was revealed to me — I’d realized, duh, it’s star jasmine, also known as confederate jasmine. (And while confederate jasmine can refer to the American South which is where I currently live and where these vines grow beautifully, it actually refers to the Malay Confederacy where these plants are native to in Southeast Asia.) Wink.
I fell under a bit of a daze in the twilight dusk, Pisces moon in the sky, on that equinox eve. Trickster.
But more than that, Star Jasmine’s message was one of childlike play, joy, and resiliency. Laughing, climbing, holding hands.
“Can you still play when things are uncomfortable?”
Wink.
On the day of the spring equinox, I was on a walk while listening to Ariana Grande’s new song “eternal sunshine” a pop confession on her former marriage and paralleling it to my own, when I came upon a cat that had seemingly just moments before been hit by a car.
With blood pooling from its mouth, its head moving softly one final time, I tried speaking gently to it in hopes that hearing a voice would let it know it wasn’t alone.
The day after the spring equinox, the backyard smelled profusely of jasmine and citrus and butterflies swarmed the bougainvillea, the smell nearly knocking me over which had never happened before. I had just been listening to “Heart of the Woods” from Kacey Musgrave’s newest album Deeper Well.
And up in the trees, there are voices that are echoing
A million different languages, songs we sing
The scent of jasmine led me to a very old prickly pear cactus that was shrouded in mealybugs. I hadn’t noticed this before and believe the scent of the Star Jasmine vine hanging right above it is what led me to notice.
It's in our nature
To look out for each other
It took me three days to spray off all the mealybugs from this cactus. As I did, the water would bleed a garnet-purple red, pooling in the soil.
When there's danger
We'll take care of each other
It’s said that spring is renewal — it’s also death and stripping away, I think.
For the first time in several years, I feel awake.
Not in an I’m-so-red-pilled-and-enlightened way, but more like an electric current humming and vibrating. Alive and with a spark.
Right before I discovered the title of Ariana Grande’s new album, I had rewatched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in honor of its 20th anniversary this year. It was a favorite movie of mine in high school and watching it now all these years later as an adult and after a big breakup was interesting.
Despite Clementine’s childish and aggressive behavior and Joel’s people-pleasing hyper-resentful avoidant strategies, what stuck out most to me was how Joel and Clementine attempted to save the very memories they were trying to erase.
How swimming in the depths of the mind led them to these other little islands of memories… little archipelagos of time since forgotten.
When they would land on a memory and try to hold onto it, it would begin to vaporize like smoke and vanish. But the subconscious undercurrent within all of those memories was Joel trying to hide and save them both from being wiped from each other’s minds eternally.
Clementine also continually tried to help Joel in any way she could so they could stay together, intact in those memories, even helping to repair the painful ones from Joel’s childhood that she wasn’t even a part of. She stayed with him in the vanishing memories, up until the very end when they had no choice but to let go.
On the outside, they often seemed to hate and resent each other. But in the subconscious abysms, they loved each other deeply but just found it so hard, for myriad traumatizing, human reasons, to express that safely and healthily in the conscious day-to-day. My heart breaks thinking about how many of us humans live this way for all of our lives.
Relationships in integrity with other humans are the hardest work we will ever do.
In an energy work session with a teacher where I was energetically separating from my husband in the etheric and updating karmic contracts during the last year of our marriage, she had said out loud what I also felt and knew to be true: there is love there.
It’s not lost on me that Eternal Sunshine the film is all about failing to erase and suppress the watery depths, the darkest parts and memories of our subconscious where instead it comes bursting into the light, ruling(ruining) our lives and eradicating all of the good right along with it.
At the disintegration of my marriage, I wasn’t only swimming and wading in the subconscious, transforming what was mine to transform, asking to update said karmic contracts, and looking at my own manipulative/selfish patterns, I was also becoming very alive in my body and conscious mind and watching the outer begin to reflect the inner. And what happens when the outer starts to manifest from the inner is that things will burn like smoke and fall away. The soil is richer, the path is clearer.
I was bringing the unconscious conscious and collecting what I’ve deemed Moonpearls from the bottom of the well and integrating them as best as I could (symbolically devouring them or placing them in my chakras most often in my journeys).
From my writing here you know I’m no stranger to the underworld and eating the fruits of it. In this liminal space, I find a type of eternal sunshine in a deeper well.
Despite not being partnered anymore, my little islands are sometimes sad, lonely places and sometimes they are vibrant and overflowing; both as important and rich as the other. I will happen upon one occasionally, filled with memories of him and our life together.
Some are hard to look at. My shame for my behaviors and ways I could have been infinitely better and more giving; his casual cruelty and callousness that still plague me in my dreams.
I fall asleep crying
You turn up the TV
You don't wanna hear me
Some are tender and funny. Small moments even up until the very end that were love-filled, gentle, and kind.
Please, let me keep this one.
Our shadows dance in a parallel plane, just two different endings. In the higher realms, I see us as friendly and connected. Here and now though, we had to part ways.
We’re moving along in time and memory, in all directions, like smoke clearing, like fog lifting.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. | C. Jung
I can’t help but think of the Persephone myth, one told and retold in a thousand different ways.
It’s been told to me with two lenses overlaid. The first being of the poisonous plant path and how in an effort to remove the root of a peculiar plant she found perplexing Persephone, the goddess of springtime, fell into a hole in the underworld where Hades said she was now beholden to him and couldn’t leave.
She refused to take part in life there or eat anything. Witnessing her sadness, Hades made her a shade garden, one that didn’t need a lot of sunlight and filled it with plants like hellebore, yew tree, belladonna, Amanita muscaria, and datura, which she loved.
Persephone spent all her time there amongst the poisonous plants, feeling more at home. When she was offered the seeds of the famed pomegranate by a passerby, she indulged, swallowing six little seeds.
For the unfamiliar, it’s said that allowing a crumb of food of the dead to pass our lips while in the underworld binds us there for eternity.
A part of me thought, Of course, she ate it — she’s starving! Another part of me thought, Well she has Stockholm syndrome and has just resigned from caring anymore! But after doing my own poisonous plant spirit journeying it’s clear (to me) through the metaphors and symbolism that some part of Persephone loved the underworld and reclaimed part of herself there.
Another lens of the story is by Existential Kink writer Carolyn Elliot who says that Hades (also referred to as Pluto in her retelling, and in astrology is referenced as the planet symbolizing death, rebirth, and transformation) was really just a split consciousness (the darker side) of Persephone herself.
She engaged in her powerlessness-loving victim shadow and committed her own mythic hostage to the underworld to gain some perspective on that side of her repressed consciousness. It’s only when she ate the seeds (literally ingesting the underworld) did she remember that she created Pluto herself to experience herself as “innocent.” It was at that moment she was also found by Hermes and brought back to Earth returning home to her mother Demeter, who exploded the land with blooms and beauty in her joy.
As The Fates would have it though, Persephone’s six seeds swallowed didn’t go unnoticed by Hades/Pluto. In turn, she must spend six months out of every year in the underworld forever. When she has to go back down, her mother’s sadness causes the leaves of the trees to fall and the Earth’s harvests begin to die and turn cold until Persephone reunites with her in the spring once more.
In this new light of experiencing these sorts of primal, primitive urges as other Persephone was able to claim responsibility and in turn integrate it, becoming more whole. She found a lost part of herself, an icky part of herself that she wanted to experience, and the ability to bloom again, bringing eternal sunshine to the darkest depths of the well and vice versa. In that, she claims herself proudly as queen of the underworld while also being the goddess of springtime.
So what can we make of this?
Queen of the Underworld and the Goddess of Spring — she is the same.
In allowing the capture to happen, to sit in the shade garden, to swallow the seeds of the dead, that’s when she remembered it was her doing all along — her own medicine was the poison, setting her home again. Eternal sunshine from the deepest well.
A mirror to Clementine and Joel, unconsciously repressing their love and their hatred, their fate reuniting them and sabotaging them all the same — again and again.
A mirror to Persephone, eating the fruits of the underworld year after year, swallowing what’s hers, and reigning both the light and the dark — again and again.
As above so below.
From the sunshine and the well,
Tracy
“Queen of the Underworld and the Goddess of Spring — she is the same.” I love Persephone’s story and so appreciate the layered perspective and different lens. Resonates deeply!
really beautiful, I love the weaving of Existential Kink throughout! I’m re-reading this book in the middle of Saturn Returns + a big move and so appreciating its wisdom. Thank you for this beautiful essay :)