This letter came after a charged few days of thunder, full moon weather, and the feeling of another initiation moving through the Purpose sphere.
In the audio, I speak about descent, symbolic initiation, the difference between crash-landing and walking down slowly, and the strange little images we sometimes bring back from the dark. I move through thunder, Capricorn, the old feminine at the bottom of the spiral, the Well of Initiation, and one small dream-image of crocodile-headed children drawing a line.
00:01 — Morning peace
00:22 — The Purpose sphere
00:57 — The art of initiation
01:32 — Shock and awakening
04:09 — The symbolic body
06:54 — Hag at the bottom of the spiral
08:20 — The kiss of initiation
10:02 — Capricorn and descent
11:16 — The crash into the well
12:41 — Kundalini and the spine
14:48 — The Well of Initiation
16:45 — The one image that remains
18:58 — Art as a container
20:10 — The crocodile children
21:17 — The box and the boundary
23:57 — Letting the symbol flower
24:18 — The seed of the next cycle
25:22 — Baby wakes
My dear friend,
Let it move slowly.
That is what I want to say first.
Let it move slowly down into the body. Down beneath the throat, beneath the bright little theatre of the mind, beneath the hands that reach for answers before the question has finished forming.
Let it move down where things take time.
Where things darken.
Where things brew.
Where truth is not forced into speech before it has become warm enough to live.
There are some things we cannot understand too quickly.
The heart knows this.
The heart knows when it is afraid. The heart knows when it has been pretending. The heart knows when it has dressed itself in cleverness, in prophecy, in performance, in a shining little costume of “I’m fine,” when really it is standing barefoot at the edge of the sea saying, help me, I have lost my way.
Every escape artist knows the easiest trick is to fool the audience.
But perhaps the deeper trick is this:
the audience was never outside us.
We are the magician.
We are the crowd.
We are the locked box and the silver key.
We are the one waiting in the dark for someone to applaud the escape.
And how many times have we done it?
How many times have we slipped out of the truth just before it touched us? How many times have we made a joke, made a plan, made a problem, made a beautiful story, anything to avoid the simple, trembling fact of the heart?
The fool knows he is a fool.
That is his wisdom.
Not because he has escaped folly, but because he has stopped pretending he stands above it. He knows the tumble. He knows the road. He knows the little hat with bells on it. He knows how quickly the path can turn from golden to ridiculous.
He knows he will trip over his own feet eventually.
And still he walks.
That is the grace of him.
June has been and gone.
Or so it seems.
The roses opened. The light climbed to its height. The long days stretched themselves over the fields, and still something in us was waiting.
Still something in us was braced.
Still something in us could feel the old pressure gathering.
The hush before the weather.
The tremor beneath the floor.
The deep animal of the body beginning to stir.
The part of us that has been carrying too much for too long does not always arrive softly. Sometimes it comes with heat. Sometimes it comes with heaviness. Sometimes it comes with all the unsaid things pressing their faces against the glass.
Sometimes the road to the feeling centre is not a garden path at all.
Sometimes it is a spiral stair.
Sometimes it is a black well.
Sometimes it is a door at the bottom of the house that no one remembers building.
And there they are, waiting in the dark.
The old defences.
The breastplate.
The helmet.
The locked room.
The sharpened explanation.
The bright excuse.
The ancient vow never to need too much, never to fall too deeply, never to be seen in the moment of breaking.
But the heart is not an armoury.
The heart is a living thing.
And a living thing cannot keep wearing metal forever.
At some point, the descent arrives.
It arrives when the body can no longer hold the distance between what we are feeling and what we are performing.
It arrives when the false floor gives way.
It arrives when the trick ends.
It arrives when the audience goes quiet and the magician is left alone with the box, the rope, the breath, the dark.
And beneath the breath, something older.
A face in the dark.
A hand at the root.
A mouth asking for the kiss we have spent our whole life avoiding.
Do not turn away too quickly.
The old one is not here to ruin us.
She is not beautiful in the way we were taught to want beauty.
She is earth before harvest.
She is winter before song.
She is the bark of the tree, the bone in the field, the salt at the edge of the sea.
She is everything in us that could not be decorated.
Everything that could not be persuaded to smile.
Everything that waited beneath the performance until we were tired enough to tell the truth.
And maybe that is the key.
Down here, there is no need to dazzle anyone.
Down here, no one is asking us to float above the human story.
Down here, we do not have to be wise before we are honest.
We do not have to be healed before we are held.
We do not have to be luminous before we are real.
Down here, we can say it plainly.
I am afraid.
I am tired.
I am lost.
I have been trying to escape my own heart.
And the earth, being very old, does not flinch.
She has heard every confession. She has held every fallen crown, every broken wand, every torn map, every child who thought they had to become a miracle in order to be loved.
She does not ask us to perform our return.
She only asks us to arrive.
So if the weather comes, let it come.
If the tears come, let them come.
If the old armour clatters to the floor, let it fall.
If you find yourself deep in the feeling, do not turn it into another test of your strength.
Let it be the moment you stop performing your escape.
Let it be the moment the dark thing leans close.
Let it be the moment you discover that what you feared would devour you was waiting to be kissed.
Nothing is over.
June will come back around again. The rose will open again. The road will bend again toward home.
And when it does, perhaps we will not need quite so many tricks.
Perhaps we will stand there, breathing, barefoot, a little foolish, a little broken, a little more true.
Perhaps we will understand that the way down was never a fall from grace.
It was the mouth of the earth.
It was the old face in the dark.
It was the kiss at the root.
It was the beginning of our return.
With love,
Jenny 🌹
Jenny Dickinson is a writer whose work explores the long journey of becoming through story, symbol, myth, and the changing seasons of the soul. She lives in North West England with her daughter Nancy and an ever-growing collection of notebooks.
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