FROM DARKNESS: THE LIGHT - A letter from Coronavirus at Spring Equinox

3/22/20 - Written for Medium

STOP. 👇 Click PLAY. 👇 ✨✨PLEASE.✨✨ 💖now💖

Only then do I ask you to read my words.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

Are you breathing deeply? Can we breathe in synchronicity for a few moments? Okay…

Remember those cave paintings I wrote about last week? The ones I’ve been channeling and smearing across the walls since I was a child? The ones nobody understood and that I didn’t fully understand myself? The ones I lacked the language to convey?

I still do. I don’t talk about it much, because it gets me branded “crazy.”

This video gives voice to one of the messages that has been overloading my system since I landed on this planet. I, too, tried to shoo it away — “I’m too busy. I don’t have time for that. I need to finally figure out how to fit myself into this grand machine so I can make green pieces of paper and finally be allowed to chomp on the carcass. Just shut up and stop bothering me! What does all that matter to me?”

Well, that message was thrust upon me with an iron fist in 2000. A drunk driver. BLAM. The reminder, when I fell back asleep, came as a literal fist to my face. BA-BLAM! “I said, ‘Are you listening?’ I didn’t think so.”

The conditions the world is experiencing right now…most of this has been my reality for decades. Not much has changed in my life over the past 3 weeks. I have a little more food here and not enough toilet paper. I’m up from 75–90% isolation to 99.9 %. Otherwise…it’s business as usual over here.

When I was younger, I didn’t listen to the whispers of the Universe. I ignored the murmurs. I told the emphatic commands to piss up a rope.

So it slammed me into the ground and I’ve never been able to get back up. Instead, I had to learn to get comfy down here in the Underworld.

I, like Persephone, do get to ascend regularly for visitation. Every time I come back, I still feel like I’m screaming in a foreign language. Like I’m standing in the middle of Shibuya Crossing, holding one wilted flower, with words and strange movements rocketing through me. The few who do notice back away in horror as though I’m having some sort of convulsive fit.

Most just push past me.

So I’ve been dancing Down There, with the other strange creatures that everybody would love to pretend don’t exist. The Cyclopses and Hundred-Handed Monstrocities. The Harpies and 3-headed Cerberus. And I dance with the Lord of the Dead, because He gets me.

When I post the pretty pictures from my photo shoots and the rare times that I dance in front of a video camera (I don’t dance on stages often anymore), oooohhhhhhhhhh all the clapping.

Yes. Persephone is the shiny Goddess of Springtime.

Spring Persephone by Candy Prudhomme

But do you forget? She is also the Queen of the Dead. She is in charge of sicking the Furies on your ass if you commit the deepest transgressions of betrayal. Few in all of history have erected temples to Her, or to Hades for that matter. The ancients rarely even uttered Their names. Instead, they used a gazillion obscuring nicknames because nobody wants to call that kind of attention to themselves.

The attention of the Underworld.

Welcome to my home. Welcome to a little taste of what it’s like to be me. I promise you, there is beauty down here, and laughter and dark chocolate cookies and a different sort of light than what everybody recognizes as the Light of the Heavens. It’s a little eerie. A little creepy. It’s all that dwells underneath the bustle. Underneath, even, the wondrous beauty of this planet’s natural world.

You’re already down here. You weren’t given a choice any more than I was. Snatched by the dark chariot against our will. But now that you’re here…take a look at the roots of all the things trying to grow up above. Truly look. Some are embedded in skeletons of animals and decomposing plants, as they should be.

But how many roots are starving because our skeletons are sealed up in handy, shiny coffins? We should be nourishing new Life with our deaths, but we’re too terrified of it. We’ve taken ourselves out of the Life Cycle and we’ve taken ourselves out of the Food Chain.

Or so we thought.

Hahahahahahahaha!!!!!!! Surprise, bitches!

No, ya didn’t.

—

I don’t know WHAT to do about all this. That’s not my calling. That’s not my gift. My calling has always been to say, “LOOK. We have a problem here, Houston. This right here: THIS IS AN ISSUE THAT NEEDS TO BE DEALT WITH.”

I am the canary in the mine shaft — and people, I’ve been gasping and choking in this world since the second I was born.

Then, when I squawked and cried about it, you smacked me on the nose, telling me, “HUSH, little girl. Dress right. Talk right. Play right. Stop splattering those weirdo paintings all over the cave walls, stop singing those eerie songs in tongues, stop acting like some kind of wild-eyed witch, naked around the fire, and would you just dance right for once? Shut the fuck up or we’ll boot you out of the tribe.”

Well.

It’s pretty quiet out there.

Isn’t it?

Come on over to my hearth if you’re lost and cold in the dark. It’s warm over here. We have succulent pomegranates as well as those cookies. I promise not to switch the labels of “Nuts” and “No Nuts”.

You know which ones I’ll be eating, right?

Autumn Persephone by Candy Prudhomme

A little wink from the King of the Dead…

I couldn’t have planned that pomegranate if I’d tried.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE:

--UP NEXT: WELCOME TO MY WORLD - how little has changed for me now that the world is on lockdown, and how little will change for me once "everything opens up again."

--OR if you'd like the pedigree of where I developed this and other tactics of stress management, here's the map outlining all MY TRIPS TO THE UNDERWORLD

--THE NAVIGATION TABLE OF CONTENTS