Duality of Caves

Linda Hogan, author of Dwellings

I had separate conversations recently with two women.  Both women used "cave" as a metaphor for their situation.  One had something to tell me; something terrible that had happened in her past.  She felt she needed to get it out into the open, that she wanted me to know about this thing before she "shoved it back" into her "cave."  Here, the cave is a fearsome place, the place that is the repository of our awful memories and thoughts.  In mythology, this is the cave that the dragon sits in, or the cyclops, murderous, thieving monsters.  I think, too, of Star Wars, which is deeply mythological, of Luke going into the cave to battle with that he most fears.

The other woman was Beth, who came to the Tim O'Brien presentation and sat with me, my husband, and one of my students, a bright and talented young man named Michael.  After the presentation, which was spiritually uplifting and thought-provoking, Beth took a long, deep breath and said, "Now I just want to go home and be in my cave."  Since that day, she has used the metaphor several times.  She can't wait, she says, to be in her cave. 

I know what she means.  In "Caves," an essay by Linda Hogan in her book Dwellings, Hogan speaks of caves as the "land's quiet temples."  She writes of visiting a cave that is a "sacred place," where there is a "constant warm dripping of water" and warm-water pools where people bathe. 

Hogan writes:  "Barefoot, naked, I go down the stone pathway and lower myself into the hot water.  Surrounded by stone, this body of mine is seen in the dim light for what it is, fragile and brief."

She then evokes the womb/tomb imagery of the earth (the same imagery suggested in the Persephone myth), saying:  "Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone?  I do.  I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves."

Hogan calls caves "a feminine world, a womb of earth, a germinal place of brooding."  She points out that many creation stories involve caves.  Many recreation stories do, too.  Hogan tells of an old Japanese woman who, after America dropped the Atomic bomb and she found her home and family ravenged, journeyed into the hills and retreated for a year into a cave. 

Hogan writes, "She remained in a cave, alone, for over a year before she entered again the world of people.  She returned bony and wise.  From her eyes shone a light.  She was the first woman to become a Shinto priest.  What she knew she had learned from the cave, heard spoken by it, she had seen in the darkness."

As with the gods and goddesses, who represent dual concepts, the cave represents dual concepts:  the darkness can be fearsome or it can be nurturing.  It can be the respository of "monsters" that seek to devour us, robbing us of our journey toward individuation, of our ability to regenerate ourselves, to transform into "something new."

Or it can be a womb in which we can hear the "murmuring heartbeat" of the Earth.

When I write, I also must retreat in "my cave."  In many instances, I experience the cave in both its meanings.  While writing, I often must confront what I fear.  But I also find the act of writing to be nurturing and regenerative.