“There’s Always Life Underground”: Homage to the underground that raised me
I walked down to the beaver pond the other day to see the landscape post-clearcut. I had been listening to them sawing and grinding and hammering for months. I had laid in bed at dawn feeling the earth literally shaking while the logging trucks came and went from the entrance across the street.
I was not shocked. I had already visited other parts and wept and stumbled through spaces I didn’t recognize anymore.
The clearcut by the pond had opened up a lot of light. The hillside was bare and some ferns had started to grow in. I studied it curiously and opened my heart to the land.
“There’s always life underground”
That’s what the land said to me. I thought of the soil, the bugs, and the mycelium. I thought of the water stored deep in the earth, and how things always grow back.
And then I was flooded with images from my teenage years and twenties, and all of the underground spaces that gave me life.
It was a rolodex of punk music, anarchist info shops, basement shows, queers, hairy women with nothing to prove, mystics, hippies, artists, zines, radical reading groups, travelers, free schools, spiritual seekers, guerilla gardens, activists, liberation movements, giant puppets, ceremonies, nettle festivals.
These things gave me LIFE. They were like a sacred well in the desert that reanimated me like a rose of jericho. When my life felt dark and dead, it was the underground that made me want to live.
Jennifer Finch from L7. 16 year old me idolized this picture.
As I pondered all this, I felt the land take me deeper and remind me of the underworld - that dark place inside of yourself you are asked to go when the above ground has lost it’s meaning.
The underworld is many things. It autumn and winter. It’s our own shadows. It’s our collective unconscious. It’s where our forgotten power lives, and our ancestors. It’s the place we walk blindy into, trusting there is something of value there for us to bring back and nourish our lives and those of our people.
I’ve been there many times, in a deep dark place after the bottom of my life feels ripped out from under me, and I just have to walk the path. It’s in these places you become mentally, emotionally, and spiritually strong. It’s here where you go to find your life.
The daylight was dwindling and I turned back towards home.
I don’t like that the land was clearcut, but I felt the resiliency and wisdom of a spirit much older than me. I felt like it was gonna be okay, and I repeated to myself,
“There’s always life underground”.
