Balance is like grace:  We don’t know we need it until we don’t have it, or until it’s thrust upon us.  Without the right amount of sleep, play, food, imagination, order, or disorder, we get sick, disoriented, unable to function as we should. 

Most of us resist that part of balance we don’t understand. We go along without much thought. Then, like Alice, we fall through the rabbit’s hole into another realm of being. Everything is different, turned around, confused. We find ourselves having to deal with experiences and feelings that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, dark. We experience what the ancients called the underworld, that sudden adjustment experience or compensation that comes when we’ve stayed too long in the comfortable or familiar.

The underworld is a metaphor as old as the Sumerian myth of Inanna, as contemporary as Dorothy’s journey in “The Wizard of Oz” from the safety of Kansas into Oz and back home again. We visit the underworld often against our will, because we are part of a larger will, and because there are things worth learning we might otherwise choose to avoid. Call it the universe, life, fate, God, whatever metaphor you choose, a larger wisdom is at work in our becoming and knows better than we the balance it takes to become whole.

Our descent into the underworld takes many forms. It may visit us as a short funk or as an extended depression, an altered state of suspension in which we descend into the abyss and wander the darkness of old woundings. It might be a subtle shift of consciousness, a moment of visionary union with a loved one. It happens naturally as a descent into our night dreams where we encounter images and messages we don’t absorb in our topside or conscious world.

It may come as a temporary lapse of conscious control — a sudden change without warning in our behavior pattern, or an “out to lunch” experience for which we cannot account. It may be a fragmentary memory that pulls us away from the focused moment and sweeps us off in a flood of emotion. It comes sometimes with a troubling experience that shatters the peace in our family life or relationships. 

It’s a movement downward, an inward spiral, a walk on the edges of our otherwise ordered life. We go there without notice, without conscious choice, pulled there sometimes by faceless energies just beyond awareness. Far from the goal-directed, cerebral, doing of our topside world, the underworld is affect-laden, pre-verbal, being to the core.

Like a swimmer in an underground cave, we find the gold — the truth or experience that had evaded us in our conscious mind or living — and swim back to the surface, changed. We find ourselves reshuffled, shaken by the journey, spewed back into ordinary life with a deeper awareness. All the pieces that felt flung into the air, chaotic, float down in quiet patterns of newness and opportunity. Things look different. We are different.

This natural process of compensation, built into our humanness as a corrective experience, transforms and reshapes our choices and understandings. For my part, my funk, my revisiting old woundings, is a reminder I don’t want to go back there. I might otherwise forget and repeat old, dysfunctional patterns. My night dreams teach me something about myself and my journey I can’t hear on a conscious level. They salt my life with clarity and direction.

My intuitive gropings lead me into connections with the invisible world I could not make with my conscious mind. This expands my capacity to imagine and to enlarge on hidden gifts I would not otherwise dare to dream. My personal wounds release compassion for others and provide a mirror in which I can confront my character. This calls from me a more forgiving spirit.

The sudden falls from grace that erupt in my family life, my personal life, my world, force me to learn a deeper truth I would otherwise choose not to face. The best and worst in all of us is just that – in all of us. Learnings from the underworld are pearls of wisdom, untapped energy, sacred signals from uncounscious sources.

I am reminded of the biblical story of Lot’s Wife who looked back over her shoulder as she climbed from of the valley of destruction and was turned into a pillar of salt. Slipping into the underworld and returning with what James Hillman calls the salt from it — being able to look our dark, destructive energies in the face and transform these into energies of strength and wisdom — allows us to return to our topside world more alive, more connected with the earth, our inner resources, our deeper self.

We must avoid the natural urge to resist, as Lot’s wife did – resist leaving the known, cling to the familiar, spend our whole time in the underworld looking back over our shoulder at what we know to be true in the topside world — or we won’t be able to integrate what our wounds are trying to teach us. We need to cooperate, move into our wounding and through it, so the energy that was stored or repressed in our unconscious can be harnassed on a conscious level and add salt and passion to our life.

Rhythm is important. We cannot stay too long in the underworld, or go too long without revisiting it, or we lose the salt, the flavor, that our natural rhythms bring. Integrating what we learn from our wounds, from our set-backs, into our everyday living brings wisdom and a larger perspective from which to make better choices. Then, getting on with the tasks of living in the topside world stablizes and grounds our wisdom in healthy ways.

We too often see our underworld experiences as something to be avoided, or as bad things happening to good people, rather than as good opportunities to learn wisdom that comes from the other side of wholeness. Gifts we learn against our will that change our life, transforming and reshaping our journey.

Within the darkness, we discover a light.

It is through our wounding that we move into our inner self, discover our resources, our character, our sacred essence, and, calling on that, release the healing capacity within.

Early Egyptians believed in a topside world and a bottom-side world, an underworld. The underworld is our occasional descent into darkness, chaos, confusion. These are difficult moments, often terrifying, usually life-altering.

An occasional descent into this underworld forces us to look at things in a new way. We discover our wounds are openings into the invisible world of spirit. The more familiar we become with this natural cyclic process of descent and ascent, the more comfortable we become with the process of becoming whole.

Life prunes away those things in us that detour us from our essence.

“At the heart of the nature of all living things,” mused Alfred North Whitehead in his Adventures of Ideas, “there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy.” (294) The underworld ordeal is the vehicle of this “harvest.”

The myths that lure us away from home to seek our journey are usually those things we only heard about from others’ stories or dreams-come-true. Whitehead suggests that “the deepest definition of Youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.” True. It is the universal story of humankind to start out thinking we want one thing and to end up realizing we want something entirely different. As this maturing process unfolds, our youthful dreams are usually dashed.

The dream is important. It ignites and fuels imagination and passion, essential energy for the journey far from home. “Our souls are formed in the idleness of youth,” some wise man said. Dreams are borne in this idle play, choices too. We tell our youth, “Go to what you want and wait. A door will open.” It’s the rest of the story our youth aren’t told.
   
The door is an opening, not a destination. Getting that first job, buying that first home – these are but openings into richer choices. What we really want is not so easy to know in our youth. It takes time and the gaining of things we thought we wanted, until we get them — a high-paying, high-stress career, a large home with a large mortgage – before we can redefine our true hunger.

It takes us by surprise when we discover that, what we wanted after all is, as Saint Exubery says, “invisible to the human eye.” That’s the adventure that is never finished, not fixed in time, that’s always changing, always moving, just ahead of us. This stokes our passion.  Then, imagination teases us on, to discover what we really want at a deep, core level. It takes time, and lots of opening and closing of doors.

Carl Jung said we are pushed from within toward wholeness yet free to choose not to be whole. If our dreams are too narrow, we will settle for living off other people’s dreams without ever finding what makes our own heart sing. We can’t stand in two worlds. Either we’re on the path, our path, or we’re walking the path of someone else’s choosing. If we don’t stand tall where we choose to stand, it won’t reveal to us who we really are and to what our wholeness calls us.

What do we tell our youth, then, of their starter dreams? Just that – they are starter dreams. We now have starter marriages, starter homes, so why not starter dreams? Do whatever you undertake like it’s all the passion you need. Join your energy to whatever pleasures you, whatever energizes you, and that energy will spill over into your present venture. Connect with your present venture with the same passion and energy you would a sexual partner.

Represent yourself and what you really have to offer the world, because, if you’re unsure, you won’t offer yourself in your full richness. Be flexible, don’t get stuck in one choice, one venture, but be willing to go with the flow of change. If you’re doing what you do best, someone will notice. Be open to new opportunities to express what is in you, even when it doesn’t seem likely this is how you would choose it on your own.

Some doors may be closed to you. Go through the door that is open and make it possible to express your gift there. Make it work for you until something does work for you. Do whatever you do in your way, so you can come to your fullness, wherever your path leads. Don’t be too hooked on one dream. The dream changes as opportunity knocks.

Hardship is out there. What you do with it is important. Let your song be, “I’m gonna find a way to be!” Remember, the Grail journey is a search that never gets there. It’s not finding the Grail but how you experience your life along the way that is the real goal, the real prize. To feel and to fully experience is the Grail, not anything you can put in your hand.

And when “tragedy” comes, as Whitehead says it must? Don’t run from it, as instinct will suggest. Don’t lose that energy you’ve shepherded so well. If your relationship or your career crumbles before your eyes, shift the dream, shift the energy, if all else fails. Get that passion back into your life and look for the next right step.

There’s an old Krishna story about a demon chasing Krishna, with Krishna racing to escape. It isn’t until Krishna looks back to see if he can discover anything interesting in the demon, find any passion in the chase, that new energy emerges. Krishna discovers the imagination to teach the demon how to dance with him. And then they dance, until the demon becomes a Beautiful One.

Deeper “tragedy” — losses that break the heart — demand more archetypal energy. It’s life itself that wants to dance with us, and the ticket to dance defies our understanding. Then, Dear Youth, step back into all those life-death-life stories you carry in your soul and sit until the tearing clears. Fall into the unconscious and wait for energy to stir your passion once again.

From ancient times, we’ve known that sacrifice is bedrock to the human experience. The underworld is the breaking of the bread of us, so that new energy can emerge from the broken pieces. Unbroken bread is unconsecrated bread. To be consecrated – to be blessed by life – the bread must be broken. It is in the breaking that we are transformed into something other, something sacred – transcendent in fact – a eucharist to be shared in every human story.

The underworld, the ordeal, is the threshing floor of this harvesting of youth. The “harvest of tragedy,” for Whitehead, is that all this suffering brings Youth to what he could not otherwise attain, “the Harmony of Harmonies.” It is only in the sacrifice that the fullness is realized. It is only in the loss of youthful dreams that the real dream awakes the dreamer and offers life.

Sometimes we have to let go of the life we think we have in order to embrace the life really offered us. It’s like diving for shells on the ocean floor and then realizing that rocking in the warmth of the ocean itself is the real prize.

Loss, change, happenstance – these wash away those things we first thought our living on the earth to be and carry us kicking into the full flow of whatever our life really has to teach.

For my part, divorce brought with it the challenge of discovering my real gifts and direction. A grown daughter and grandchildren moving away brought time and reason to find within myself another focus. A grown son close-by brings opportunity for a mother and son’s adult encounter. Each of these carve space in me, making room for life’s sweet teaching to hold all things loosely.

For another, it may be the loss of a dream. A middle-aged woman grieves for the child she will never bear, never hold, never name. She surrenders to the gift in her of mothering in other, more universal ways. A man grieves for the success or a specific goal he will never achieve. He opens himself to relational possibilities that career demands could never offer. This, too, is learning not to cling to maps and messages not meant for one’s particular path.

It’s as if some master craftsman has all along been stripping away layers of pre-conditioned notions of what life is until we can bask in the naked truth that life just is. Life is not for storing up in barns, Jesus said, or for overdosing on endless desires, Buddha taught. Life is now and precious and full of tangled treasures.

The only constant in life for me has been nature herself, God’s hand brushing across the horizon in strokes of color that sprinkle sunrise and sunset across my day. My pre-dawn walk, the evening quiet with its cycles of moonlight, the play of animals – these ground me. People move in and out of my life. Years whittle away what expectations I may have harbored in younger days.

Rather than less, I am filled with more: inner peace, tranquility of soul, the realization and clarity of what really matters in my life. Whatever the day offers is prize enough. When something doesn’t happen as I might expect, I look to see what the universe has planned for me that day. It points me in directions I may not have looked for the gold I find there.

As I allow the rhythms of nature to pulse my being, I find it easier to allow others to be on their path without my need to control the outcome. If others do not behave or respond in ways I think best or healthy, I know there is a teacher wiser than I to guide them in the journey seeking them.

This leaves me available to focus on my own soul adventure. The sound of the bird’s song becomes more sweet, music, more pure, touch, more precious. In the words of Pat and Tom Malone, “I am more able to live as myself in my world as it is, to live in my relationships with other people as they are, to live where I am, with whom I am, doing what we are doing together, while we are doing it.”

Life opens wide and lays before me a banquet I did not know was mine while I was so focused on what I thought my life was supposed to be about. Perhaps that’s what loss and change and happenstance bring – the opportunity to claim what was truly authentic about ourselves before we took on the roles and tasks that captured our energy.

I didn’t know in my twenties who I would be in my fifties. I thought I would marry, have children, and that would be my life.

Life is long, and lovely, and as wide as the sky.