bloom underground

How strange it is to brush against death whilst still alive. To look it in the eye and out of the shadows. Revealing uncomfortably an unwillingness to live fully in this body, nor to let it die. To feel its musty breath clinging to my 35-year-old body. Rattling right beside me as I somehow keep looking toward the future. The flesh of my past peels away, the future I imagined crumbles before me, revealing how flimsy its foundations truly were. How devastation and grief can pull us from one path and plant us, firmly, on another.

I sit, trying to study my little interior design course. I sit in the void of existential dread, and I look at sofas. Trying to haul myself back into regular programming after years spent traversing the underworld. It feels harsh to my eyes.

Emerging from the cocoon feels fragile, unsafe. I don’t see the point, frankly. If this earthly body did not require sustenance—if I could simply compost directly into the earth—I would gladly take that path some days. But then, I remember the beauty of a flower, a butterfly, a baby laughing, someone I love, a radish.

When you’re fighting for your life, in any capacity, it is something so primal, so fierce, so raw. I want to be here. I need to be here. Love is all there is. Please, save me.

And when you’ve won the battle (for now), some days, you wonder what you were fighting for. It’s not that I want to die, but the sheer energy it takes to keep my eyes on the good ahead—when all I can feel is searing pain, heartbreak, and the weight of mortality—is immense. This is resistance.

I make up that I’ve used it all, the energy that is. Clinging dearly to life, standing up for past versions of myself who never had a voice, excavating every relentless challenge for growth. I will grow through this, I told myself every day. And I have. Yet I am so deeply tired, and there is more to embrace, I’m not done here yet.

I don’t want therapy. I don’t want to talk. I want to cry in the arms of the Mother—to lay my body down in the warmest, safest embrace and sob until my heart feels clear.

So I create that space. In the shower. On the floor. In my bed. On the dance floor. In the forest, curled at the base of an ancient tree. Screaming underwater in the ocean and rivers. I let grief heave through my gut, hear the wails of my ancestors escape from my lips, and I hold her. I hold my little girl, and theirs. I wait for the wisdom, the reverence. It always comes. If I go all the way through, it will be waiting on the other side.

I feel akin to the bud underground, searching for the light, feeling the soil grow warmer as I struggle my way to the surface. This journey is not unfamiliar to me. As Isis gathered the scattered pieces of her beloved to bring him back to life, so too am I retrieving the lost and discarded fragments of my soul.

The struggle is frustrating. It’s hard. I want to give up. But there is warmth. There is warmth.

There are friends. Humanity. Creativity. There is hope.

Like the little anglerfish who swam for weeks toward the surface, knowing only her own light in the depths of darkness—only to be embraced by the sun in her final moments. Thousands of women wept for her on the internet, because they, too, understood.

We spend our whole lives generating light—light for ourselves, light for others. Guiding our own way, absorbing the men we love, holding those around us. Until we are freed—or free ourselves—from the endless, exhausting loop of both fighting and surrendering.

Surrendering to that which holds and guides us. Fighting against the distortions and systems that have convinced us we must work to be worthy of love, when in truth, it is our birthright.

We came here to bask in and enjoy the sun—the center of our universe, the light of our hearts.

I have no doubt that in its final moments in the cocoon, the butterfly is sweating. That the seedling, trapped beneath a rock, may not expect needing more time underground before it finds its way. It’s a risk. But still, they take it.

There is space for joy. For hope. For the promise of a messy, beautiful life. Knowing this isn’t the first or last time I will journey this way, life is a cycle of birth, death, rebirth. There can be peace here, there is peace here.

I will integrate this. I must integrate this. And I will do it with the gentleness and force it requires. There is a time for grace, and a time for grit. I feel them braiding together now—the wholeness of knowing that no matter how deep we are buried in the soil, it is always worth wiggling toward the light.