1.1 The Huluppu

Inanna's Path. An archetypal journey of descent, shedding, facing, transforming, and returning.

Welcome back, wanderer. We spent yesterday simply acknowledging our own shadow and making room for its excavation. That alone is something that often takes time, humility, and a sheer willingness to settle into the soft lining of the archetypal Mother’s underbelly. I want you to know that there isn’t going to be a single moment on this journey when I am not leaning over the edge and roaring in solidarity with your courage. Well. Fucking. Done. You’re still here and that’s not nothin’.

This morning I want to tell you about your inner territory. If you’re a part of the Wild Soul community this is a language you are already well acquainted with. We’ve traversed the terrain of our souls through vivid community meditations at least once a month for over 2 years now. But if this idea is new to you, I’m simply talking about the sacred landscape of your soul - the part of you that is vast, endless, expansive, and fed by both your long story¹ and by the rich soil of imagination. It can look like anything. It can embody impossible things. It can terraform, shapeshift, and meet you in ways no one else ever has or could. There are no limits to learning the terrain of your soul.

The journey of descent is not an external one, although it might sometimes flood other areas of our lives. I see it more like a well-worn road that leads into the underworld of our beings, into the realm of shadows, monsters, and exiles, but also into the soft folds of dark salt water, into angler fish bobbing just ahead, into whalebone graveyards where the libraries of our soul’s memories cling to ribs and spines and jawbones. I have discovered that what might first appear to be terrifying, bloated, decaying, or irredeemable can always be returned and reclaimed. Nothing is wasted within the life/death/rebirth miracle of Nature. Not even our mistakes, missteps, misunderstandings, and gnawing regrets.

So, with the introduction of your inner territoriy, I want to offer you something my friend

Mel Gentry Bosna

once said to me about a long, high iron wall I had found stretched across the landscape of my being.

“I can feel a part of me on the other side,” I told her while our feet crunched over desert rock. “The wall is protecting something in me, but it won’t let me pass.”