You stand before the opening.
Ivy drips in thick ropes from the cave ceiling into a pool of tangled tendrils upon the floor.
This is your cave,
Your trauma,
The place you created in order to survive.
But in this shadowed place your skin has become translucent,
Your sight narrowed to fit into the peripheral of a pinhead,
And you've made yourself so small and so needless that you can be satisfied by the meager.
Strange spikes sprout from where soft skin used to be.
Your bones have thinned and contorted to help withstand the pressure.
And like all fellow creatures of this big deep,
You too have developed all kinds of peculiar ways to survive in this barren place.
But there is a call,
One from far beyond the thickness of your own shell,
That pulls you from the inward out.
It is something else,
Not a memory,
And knowing that there is another way to live,
To feel,
To meet the world.
Perhaps the child within calls for you not to live her life unlived,
Untouched by beauty,
Bereft of hope.
And you can feel this pull like a deep undercurrent that tugs away at your feet,
Like a relentless but gentle love that bathes in unwashed grief.
Something broad,
Hip and steady and unquestionably loving invites you to step outside of this place,
In order to return you to what is still untouched and innocent within.
You know that you cannot give one good enough reason to stay,
And because of this surrender you pull close that which has been abandoned into the soft cleft of your shoulder as a good mother would to a hurt child.
Mammals in fear seek their kin,
They curl up against another whose blood runs the same way as their own,
Whose bones and matter weave a cradle to which you can be held.
It is the reptile in fear who fights,
Who shows their teeth,
Who hides in caves,
Protecting what has been severed.
How much of your soft-bodied life has been spent in scales,
Split-eyed,
Hiding in the undergrowth rather than reaching out for the folds of another?
How often have you snuck past the song sung around fire pits and into the lonely brambles that help you protect your silence?
You will leave this place,
Oh beloved,
By pulling back the ivy,
By becoming more of what you truly are,
By surrendering to what you cannot do alone because your tender mammal form wasn't made to.
Exposing yourself slowly to the light that turns this hollow skin into blood-filled,
Plumped-out flesh flushed with color and senses.
And out there in the unknown,
Webbed feet turn into taproots,
Digging deeper down into the soil of your self-love because the body outside of its own protection is much safer than the one that relentlessly keeps it at war with ghosts.
You are mammal kin to the wild,
Who may walk scarred by their past but who are unburdened by them in the present.
You know that caves can be safe houses for a moment,
But they're meant to be left behind as you walk cold and as you answer the soft meadows and trees that nourish you.
You know caves are where you leave your hands and not your hearts.
You belong,
Oh beloved,
Where the wild things grow,
Where your intimate relationship with the seasons teach you of your own capacity to continuously expand,
Integrate and let go.
The deep forest and its creatures remember you,
The raven remembers you.
She sat outside your cave calling.
So know that you are not lost,
That you have never left your homeland.
And because of your cave,
Because of who you had to become,
You have an inner kind of bioluminescence,
That incomprehensible ability to create light where there was none.
And now you know,
Dear one,
Dear warm-blooded wanderer,
Whose soul's journey into the wise and wild wilderness is about to begin.
Now you know how to see in the dark.
