You’re descending into yourself, as if there is a trapdoor at the bottom of your heart. You lift it up. Is there supposed to be a ladder, steps, a rope? It’s all missing. You have to lower yourself down, letting your legs dangle, holding yourself with the strength of your arms. Your breath puffs. It’s different here, at the essence of things. It would be a lot easier to go back up.
But your legs are swinging now. Foliage tickles your toes. The air of another place, the place within, is rising around you. You’re passing the threshold where it would have been easier to pull back up; now the weight of your body is sending you down.
Your toes touch the ground. Your arms are overhead, and then your fingers release, all at once. You land with a soft thud in the forest of your heart.
It’s different here than you remember, maybe because you haven’t been here for a while, maybe because memory is a tricky thing. You have to reorient yourself to the path, to the angle and quality of the light. Everything is stronger here: the smells, the feel of the wind upon your skin, the taste of small berries fresh from the brambles. You’re alive here in a way that’s different than “above.” What does it feel like to be back?
You follow the familiar trail, your feet caressing the earth, the soft duff of layered leaves, the rise of tree roots. You know the way, and yet something has changed. You greet all that you pass with fresh eyes.
You hear it before you see it: the soft rush of the river, a stream really, tumbling out of the well. The river too is different than you remember. Perhaps it has rerouted itself; perhaps the water is low, or high; perhaps the footbridge has washed out.
You continue deeper into the heart of the forest, and there it is, your holy well, your inner sanctuary, the place where the ideas and that fickle thing called inspiration, and maybe even that whimsical being, your muse—this is the place, the gate, the portal, through which all these things pass through. The place where they are held until you are ready, or the world is ready; the place where they drift softly away into the river when you choose to answer another call.
This place—this well, this inner spring—too has been altered. Perhaps new flowers grow between the stones, or soft moss carpets spots once bare. You note all these changes. They are welcome, because even if you go back to the same inner place, it cannot be the same as it once was; every passage of your life alters this space, too, shaping this interior, intimate landscape to fit who you are constantly in the process of becoming.
You kneel before the well, feeling the cool ground beneath you, the texture and temperature and clarity of the water. There is no going back now. You are here, fully arrived in this moment. You lean in, and you drink.