IV. The Caves

Joseph Campbell said, “The two, the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found— are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known.

What a fiery quest to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known. A self-mirrored mystery confronts us and confounds us and informs us with its outside and its inside—a mystery identical with the mystery of the manifest world.

Consider the caverns buried in mountains—their hidden clefts and cramped crawl spaces and great wombs of viscous, disorienting darkness sealing out all aspects of behind or ahead, of above or below. Caverns where the individual is so seamed into the darkness that the end of the hand and the beginning of the nothingness are indistinguishable. Caverns where potent drafts of chalky dampness waft in and you feel as if you have been swallowed into the esophagus of a great beast and pushed through narrow passages and shoved into one of its many bellies. Then, when the lights go on, it is less like a belly and more like the gapping palate of a saber-toothed tiger with sharp shards of teeth hanging from above or pushing upright from below. And in the cavity walls: sculpted gargoyles and figures emerging from the flowstones and thin stone straws. And in slowest of motions, the artistry of a drop of water as it forms the tiniest of calcite rings at the edge of a rock only growing one inch every 200 years. More disorienting than the absoluteness of the darkness is the near infinity of time that it has taken to sculpt the limestone innards and shape the rock into cave bacon and taffy-like waves of stone and sheer white shafts jutting up from the cave floor and the eternity it took for one stalagmite to unite with one stalactite to form a single column. In the very pitch of the pitch blackness: a diorama that took millions of years to unfold, one drip at a time. Such beauty and life in what we can see when illuminated in the arresting beauty of these sharp incisors of calcium carbonate and these ribbons of flowstones and such beauty and life hidden in their profound message of sheer darkness and the glacial rate of artistry to create this Holy Here now.