The Sorrow of Demeter and the Trickster God

My daughter isn't speaking to me again. Don't get me wrong; she answers the phone when I call. She hasn't moved away without telling me where she's going (like my son sometimes does). But she answers my questions in words of one syllable, and it seems she always has somewhere else to be after about five minutes. I haven't talked to that set of my grandkids in weeks. I know from this that there are volumes unspoken -- all the things she doesn't feel she can trust me to understand.

When she was little I used to dream of a time when I could talk to her woman to woman, a time when we would be friends. I once dreamed she would find her place in the world and glory in it and be able to share it with me. Instead she has drawn away from me, grown rigid with her insistence on our differences. The sorrow I feel is big -- and grey and dusty like ashes. This is Demeter's tale.

Remember how Demeter's daughter Persephone is bewitched and stolen away by the great god, Hades? She loses herself to the underworld, to the realm of the unconscious -- loses her connection to home and mom. My daughter does that; falling in love with first one then another stranger, leaving me over and over again for a vision as seductive as the Narcissus. I am powerless to stop her. Like Demeter, I cannot find her; she is no longer in my world.

I wander the earth, which I have made dusty with drought. Nothing grows; this suits me. I wander because I am restless, brokenhearted. Relationships with other people's children backfire when I try to make them immortal to suit my needs. Nothing works. Nothing is right.

Then I meet the Trickster God. In the Demeter story, this is Baubo, goddess of the body. Like a Venus of Willendorf, she is all breasts and hips, large and raucous, jolly and irreverent. Demeter -- the story goes -- looks into her womb. What Demeter sees there makes her laugh.

I meet the Trickster God. I look into her womb. What do I see there? The oven of life itself: puppies and kittens, gawky pelicans, smarmy little snakes, the first laborious line of poetry on a crisp new page, a brush full of color gently teasing a taut white canvas. I see a sunrise so angry it echos purple to the zenith of the sky. I see the place where stars are born. I see Wilson in all his fat-tummy, big-footed sleepiness.

This doesn't take away my sorrow. Instead it puts something else beside it. A tiny little seed sprouts fins and swims. I laugh. Then I am free to cry.