There are paths that lead deeper than thought, paths that give no answers – and yet change everything …
How does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home,
A complete unknown, like a rolling stone.
Bob Dylan
There are paths that lead deeper than thought,
paths that give no answers – and yet change everything –
paths to the source, the beginning, to Mothers.
To walk them, one needs courage;
the courage to lose what once seemed safe,
the courage to love what is dark,
the courage to become what was never dared.
These paths wind through birth and parting,
through doubt, death, and light,
to the place where drama ends,
and true life begins.
Eve – Mother of the Living
Eve[1] crossed a boundary —
boldly, perhaps overconfidently.
She wanted more: to know, to live, to awaken.
Like a child stepping into a vast unknown,
she sometimes went too far,
and yet she dared –
and bore the consequences.
Eve, has countless children.
They, too, cross boundaries;
out of longing, out of defiance, out of unknowing.
They destroy, they fight, they forget.
And they, too, bear the consequences.
Yet Eve suffers with all her children.
She is the one who gives birth,
the one who aches with their every wound,
the one who holds them still –
not to possess,
but to let life flow freely through her,
giving without end.
Faust
Faust[2], hungry for all the world’s knowledge,
stands at the threshold from which there is no return –
the same threshold every seeker of truth will face one day.
He descends,
not into spaces, not into times,
but beyond: to the Mothers.
There is no ground there, no shape, no foothold,
only origin.
Not form, but possibility.
Not light, but darkness that cradles all.
Not truth, but the womb from which truth is born.
He descends;
knowing he could lose everything.
To walk upright here takes courage:
the courage to loosen the grip of ego, of mastery, of fear.
For there are the Mothers —
the silent trinity,
who do not rule, do not judge, do not speak —
but hold.
Carry.
Give birth.
Faust strides through a nothingness
greater than all he has ever imagined —
and he finds no answer,
but a key:
the key to the deep heart of life and of himself.
Inanna — The Loving One
Inanna[3], Queen of Heaven,
drapes herself in power, in splendour, in song.
She wears the crown, the ring, the robe,
the mirror of beauty, the dignity of life.
And she descends,
not out of defiance, not out of pride,
but out of love.
Downward – to her sister,
to the earth,
to death.
Seven gates she passes, and at each she surrenders:
crown, ring, robe,
self-image, control, speech, breath –
until she stands naked before death.
Dead is she for three days.
And the world holds its breath.
But love, real love, follows her.
And she rises:
wounded, changed, knowing:
no longer a moon, but a star;
no longer reigning, but blessing;
no longer apart, but one
with all that is.
Hannah[4] – In Luck
Hannah has served, worked and learned
for seven years and gold is her reward.
Now she journeys home.
On the way, she trades what she carries:
The Gold for a car, to move with the times;
the car for a garden, to nourish her children
the garden for a library, so they might find true inspiration;
the library for a laptop, to give voice to the message of her heart;
the laptop for a cell phone,
because that’s what people do nowadays.
Then she sets the phone on a stone
beside the fountain of infinity
and watches as it glides and disappears.
Her steps grow light.
Her heart unburdened,
free from drama,
free from the endless chase of wanting and becoming.
She walks home,
back into the womb of life,
to her mother,
back to herself.
And she laughs.
For nothing is missing.
Everything is already there.
[1] Genesis 3,20: Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
[2] Cf. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, Act 1. Faust’s walk to the “Mothers” is one of the most mysterious scenes in world literature. It is a symbol of spiritual transformation in the womb of the world, in the mythical uterus of being, in which forms not yet manifested rest. Whoever goes to the Mothers enters the plane of pure possibility – a place of emptiness, of depth, of the not-yet. Goethe’s “Mothers” are a poetic vision of the primordial space of all being:
philosophically: a kind of Platonic primordial plane where ideas exist “before” the world,
psychologically: an image for the collective unconscious (C. G. Jung saw here an archetypal reference to the Great Mother, the Anima, the source of the soul) and mystically seen: a kind of inner abyss in which all outer form disappears – so that new life can emerge.
[3] Mesopotamian myth. The Sumerian goddess Inanna, goddess of love, fertility and war, descends into the underworld to her sister Ereshkigal. At each of the seven gates, she takes off a piece of her clothing – then she is naked, unconscious, dead. But in the end, Inanna survives and is transformed. Through death and sacrifice, an eternal cycle begins. Every end is a beginning – in the cosmic balance of life and death.
[4] Freely adapted from the fairy tale Hans in Luck by the Brothers Grimm
