Sometimes one can’t tell – is it a departure? or is it a return? It is often both – a return involves a departure. Persephone leaves one world to return to another; always it is so. Sometimes She is escaping miraculously from oppression of some kind, yet other times it seems She is simply making a change, stepping into something new, following a call; and perhaps in the bigger scheme of things the Return is all of that – a multifaceted thing, joy and grief never separate.

Recently I have returned to my mother country, the Place of my childhood and teenage years; I connect again with this young one. I have returned with new wisdom from the depths … who would have thought I would make it? When I departed some four decades ago I felt my life like an uncut gem – I needed to hold it to the light, sense it, cut it for myself, shape it, to take it in my hands and breathe life into it.

returning to the self, departing from beloveds

The photo is the young mother who has left these children to cut this gem: it involved a terrible journey that appeared sometimes to be glorious. and it was a glorious journey that was terrible. But now – I have made it back to the mother country with new wisdom, and the children have returned too. It is indeed a Spring Equinox. And the full story of the flower’s emergence is that its roots are in the mud. Persephone remembers as She steps through the threshold, what it has taken, what it takes … this is what makes Her a Hera.

the full story of Equinox

Wishing you heraic returns and courage in your journeys at this time of Equinox.

the long awaited One returns

… the long awaited buds appear; Demeter waits and watches, and then the Beloved One emerges … there are whispers in the warm breeze “Persephone returns! Persephone returns!”[i] May it be so in our hearts and minds.

Glenys Livingstone 2017 C.E.

NOTES:

[i] Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992/1978, p.118.