On the Surface
There are many kinds of journeys, many different tales. But I’ve come to believe the most challenging part of the initiatory path of descent, search and return is faced when you come back from where ever you have been.
Our culture likes it best when you come by your knowledge in approved and sanctioned ways. When you have followed the rules and norms. Perhaps gone to school, stayed on the common paths, collected your degrees and certificates in the usual way by passing all familiar milestones.
But the expertise that I respect the most seems to only come to those who have fallen down a well, or been swallowed up by a hole in the earth, struck by lightening, kidnapped by a god or demon, or carried off by a whirlwind.
School and training and apprenticeships and dues paying are nice, and I don’t scoff at them. They can offer essential tools, and maybe a title and even some letters after your name if you are fortunate and fancy like that. But sometimes, the most valuable things you have to offer are because you have traveled to hell and back, and usually more than once. And each time you had to face new foes and trials, and fight your way back to the earth’s surface.
When you fall down the rabbit hole others might not even notice you are gone, except for those who love you most deeply with the bravest hearts. You will struggle, starve and forage for resources to sustain you in the Other Place: a single pomegranate seed, a tiny bottle labeled “drink me”, a tin of Turkish Delight, an apple hurled at you by an angry talking tree. You won’t know as you swallow it down that the little sip, the tiny bite, means that the nether-world will live in you, and some part of you will live in it, forever. You just wanted to be refreshed for a moment by something that might have quenched or comforted you from your familiar life above ground. You will be too busy trying to find your way back, searching for the golden path, checking knobs on tiny doors, searching your way toward a lamp post that you wandered off from a lifetime ago to even think of this small morsel until much later.
The trials you face are harrowing, consuming, exhausting, transforming. Battles are fought, wounds inflicted and sustained, comrades lost, spells cast and with luck, and maybe some divine intervention, some curses may be lifted. You will have lost pieces of your heart forever. You will mourn companions and allies lost forever. You will never forget the incomprehensible, terrifying cruelties that you witnessed and negotiated.
With luck and labor and grit and grace you might even make it back home. But once you sink your nails into the topsoil, hoist yourself up and have dusted yourself off, you will realize that the hole or door or portal has disappeared behind you. And the big problem with that is that no above-ground-earthling will even know you were gone. Without the silver shoes or the rabbit hole to point to they won’t believe that you were ever anywhere that they haven’t already seen. They will believe a wardrobe is just a wardrobe, and a white rabbit is just a rabbit and a pomegranate is an ingredient they can buy in season at any grocery store.
You won’t have a medal for courage pinned to your chest or a School of Hard Knocks diploma to wave in their face. You won’t be given credit for anything you saw or experienced. You will look exactly like everyone else and you will be simultaneously over- and under-estimated for the rest of your days by people who have never battled an evil warlock, awakened from a coma induced by a poison flower, faced a gruesome monster, or left pieces of themselves behind in a distant land.
No matter how many times, how many trials, how many impossible journeys you have negotiated you will not be granted any authority, any legitimacy for all you have undergone. Legitimacy is only conferred for labors performed above ground, in the day light, where others can see what you are doing.
You just came back to where you started. Completely transformed but no further ahead in anyway that is recognizable to others. They may even decide you have fallen behind. They don’t care where you were or why.
Occasionally you will try to explain how you know what you know, all the wonders and horrors you have seen, and the kinder folk will pretend to be shocked or sympathetic or impressed but mostly they won’t really listen and they will have forgotten it entirely by the next time you encounter them. They might have some vague memory that leads them to placate or instruct you as to how things are customarily done on the surface. They will not grant you the standing that someone might deserve who has slain a dragon or been blown over a deadly desert in an unfettered balloon. They won’t be particularly interested that you were almost beheaded or turned into stone by a cold-blooded queen, or that you rescued a sibling who disappeared into thin air one strange, windy night.
There will be no celebration upon your return. No anniversaries or memorials. No ritual, no mark on your forehead to signify that you have seen some truly wild shit go down and have lived to tell the tale.
Some who have fallen down their own holes will find you. They will recognize you, and you them by the wild knowing look in their eyes. They will tell others that they find along the way to look you up, and together you will create a strange kind of underground community in and around the usual one. They will come and find you not because of any title, or letters after your name, but because you have survived the unsurvivable more than once, but only by the hairs of your chinny chin chin.
And as terrorizing as it was at least you were engaged, you were alive, and felt effective in the throes of the underworld conflict. Life on the surface is its own exhausting trial that makes everything transformative that has ever happened to you completely invisible, unfortunate or unimportant and you’ll have to find ways to introduce it and assert its value to others over and over without appearing mad, or a liar, or like you think you are special or better than anyone else.
You aren’t better than anyone else. You know you weren’t better or braver than the comrades who were buried in the underworld, only luckier. And you don’t for a minute imagine that the person in front of you - enjoying all the delicious fruits of normalcy - would do any worse or better than you did surviving on the juice a single pomegranate seed. For all you know they might have managed the whole wild ride far better than you ever could. But it doesn’t change the fact that they’ve never been there, at least not yet, and they don’t even believe in sentient devouring black holes, witches good or bad, or irritable kings who sentence others to dark and treacherous spaces on a whim.
But you know with complete certainty that nothing you have to offer of value on this earth comes from any paperwork you have ever completed before the proper deadline, but from encounters with the best and worst of yourself, of others, and the world around you.
You may never walk cavalierly or easily upon the surface, you may watch for rabbit holes for the rest of your days - but for you, and those like you - the unbelievable will forever be believable, and you may eventually find some power and comfort in that.
