"She swims to the bottom of the ocean,
Through all of the darkness found in the world.
Yet her integrity keeps her pure,
And clean,
And the deep initiation process,
Becomes complete -
So she floats,
To the surface,
Bringing what she has learnt,
Adding beauty to things along the way,
Putting light,
Back into a dark place."
- S MacDonald
"This small piece of writing that I have created speaks about the process of reclaiming the soul through deep initiation. Like a journey to the underworld, speaking to aspects of Persephone within Greek philosophy, and inspired by 'Running with the Wolves' by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, where a woman goes through a process to reclaim herself, either to reclaim her voice, values, imagination, clairvoyance, stories or ancient memories. But in this particular case, she goes for the deeper and the darker and the less known, and what she finds is the bones. In psychology, this is a way of describing 'solitude as a psychospiritual recovery project'.
It is much like reclaiming our 'inner self' after a process of deep thirst, the idea of saving ourselves, or getting our essence back after losing oneself completely. The process is giving power to who we are after such a fall to bring us into wholeness.
The irony is that the bottom of the ocean changes depending on where you stand. It can be one foot deep, or hundreds of meters deep. She swims to the bottom each time, regardless of how much depth an object or idea has. What's important is that she delves, and resurfaces each time. She understands the life and death cycle intertwined within all of the world, and she allows herself to die, to be born.
Naivety is described as 'not seeing bad in the world and only choosing to focus on the good' but rather innocence, is described as 'seeing both the bad and good in the world and choosing to focus on the good'. This is important because she must be brave enough to open her eyes through her descent, regardless of whether she likes what she sees.
In bringing what she has learnt to the surface, she has gone through the integration phase, alike that of a spiritual journey or 'dark night of the soul'. The process has pressurized her in such a way that she brings the memories and ideas she has now understood, but through her innocence, she has chosen not to adopt. She brings the stories but does not let the darkness become her. Her integrity keeps her pure because she does not allow herself to fall for distractions or impurity or things that are not 'her', even though she is both light and dark and both the ocean and non-ocean, simultaneously.
This is the true wild feminine, she does not confuse the definition of societies 'wildness' with her own true, wild nature."
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