Kali Red

On going down, coming back, and going down again

A few months ago, I painted the built-in bookshelves in my living room red.

Not burgundy. Not brick. The kind of red that makes no apology for itself. The red of cardinals against fresh snow. Of blood beneath the skin.

Kali red.

The shelves stretch across an entire wall, climb over the door to my backyard, then continue down the other side. They hold more than a hundred books collected over decades. Yoga. Mysticism. Jung. Christian contemplation. Poetry. Consciousness. Shelf after shelf of seekers who have devoted their lives to mystery.

I’ve thought many times about reorganizing them. By author. By tradition. By subject. As if there might be some arrangement in which all those voices would begin speaking to one another and, together, finally make everything make sense.

This impulse goes back a long way. When I was sixteen or seventeen, long before I understood why a girl like me would be interested in such things, I became enthralled with Joseph Campbell. I read his books on mythology and listened over and over to his conversations with Bill Moyers. I was captivated by the journey Campbell saw repeating itself across centuries and cultures.

The call.
The departure.
The descent.
The ordeal.
The treasure.
The return.

I loved the idea that we humans could leave the familiar world, travel into the darkness, encounter whatever waited for us there, and come home changed. I still love it. It is a beautiful story. And I think I have spent much of my life trying to make it mine.

Again and again, I have gone looking for the next passage that would take me deeper. I have followed teachers, practices, relationships, losses, endings, beginnings. I have descended willingly sometimes and been dragged there others. Somewhere underneath all of it was the hope that if I stayed faithful to the journey, eventually I would get somewhere.

There would be a destination. Some home shore on the other side of all this seeking where the pieces would finally fit together. Where I would understand who I am, why I am here, what all of this has been for.

But another old story has been finding me for years, even while I kept trying to live the first.

The heroine descends too. She enters the underworld. She loses what she thought she knew. She encounters what cannot be encountered in the bright light of ordinary life. But she does not conquer the underworld and leave it behind.

She learns the way between worlds.

She comes back carrying something from below and returns to the people she loves, to her work, her kitchen, her garden, the thousand ordinary things that make up a human life. And then, eventually, she descends again. Not because she failed the first time, but because there is more. There is always more.

The underworld becomes not the terrible place she once survived, but one of the places she knows how to go.

When I look back now, this is the current I recognize in my own life. Down and back. Down and back. Every homecoming has eventually revealed another threshold. Every answer has opened another question. Every certainty I have held tightly enough has, sooner or later, loosened in my hands.

Which brings me back to the red bookshelves.

They are full of treasures carried home by seekers who made their own descents, and they have given me answers. Answers that carried me through divorce. Answers that helped me get sober and stay sober. Answers that taught me how to stay, when to leave, and how to begin again.

Real answers. Necessary answers. Answers that met me precisely where I was and sometimes changed the course of my life.

They just never deposited me on some final shore where I could plant a flag and declare the journey complete, even though I think that is what I have been waiting for all these years.

A destination.

But I no longer believe this is what a human life is for. I don’t think there is a map that finally gets us home. I think life is for learning how to cross. How to move between what we know and what we don’t. Between the visible world and the invisible one. Between the life we can touch and the mystery moving beneath it.

And then to return carrying something. Something that changes the way we love. The way we create. The way we participate in the ordinary world. Something that might even change the world around us.

Now when I look at my red bookshelves, I love them just as much. Maybe more now because I no longer imagine there is some final piece hidden among them that I somehow missed. Now they remind me that generation after generation, human being after human being, we are making crossings and returning with whatever we can carry.

A story.

A practice.

A poem.

A prayer.

A little more light.

An answer. But not a destination.