COLUMN: The Triple Goddess Trials: Syrinx and the River

Look! Beneath the rusty blue sky of early autumn, amidst beech, sycamore, and oak trees lined against the S-shaped curves of a crystalline river — look through the window of a spare one-door cabin and you’ll probably see a bright-eyed woman staring, smiling back out at you.

Her name is Syrinx.

Her gaze usually causes visitors to feel a long forgotten ache right in that hollow cavity beneath the ribs — around their lungs, a warm feeling spreads like sweet hot sipped tea. But as water starts to fill up around their shoes, her guests suddenly feel the weight of their own thoughts and when they try to form words, well, they understandably turn to panicked and unfortunate exclamations! I should tell you straight off that most people eventually run away screaming.

But, dear reader, sit down, relax. Don’t look away before the journey begins. I’m here to tell you her story so that you can understand how she made sense of her own powerful spell.

THE DREAM

Moon River: Flickr photo by John Audy

For twenty nights she had the same dream.

In the predawn dark, Syrinx wrestled with covers and swam (not uncomically) through the air of her bedroom, submerged in thick pillowed layers of sleep.

In the dream, a shadow chased her into the river… running, running, oh running until she glided into the silk of water… the splash where she felt her limbs melt in open darkness, and she lost track of her heartbeat, her feet, her fingers.

In cool night water, she dove beneath — under and under where sticks lay against huge stones and things turned and turned inside, even if the surface looked the same from a distance.

She flew (as only dreams allow) directly to that wide bend in the river, where the surrounding hills bloomed like a bouquet of flowers — half glossy mirror, half bottomless well and the image soothed her in the middle, exactly where she breathed and wept and laughed.

How could she explain such things with words, when words were not her body?

Consonants and vowels lacked the river’s vocabulary. It was a language she could understand, yes, but not yet speak on that early autumn night when muddy trees drooped like giant drunkards in the moonlight. In the dream, she saw how each ripple of water changed upon reflection, depending upon how and where you looked. And nothing was ever really as it seemed….

So it shouldn’t have shocked her one morning when she realized (though hardly admitted out loud) her favorite part of the dream — that seemingly unimportant episode before she even reached the water bank, when a certain God approached her. She loved to run circles around him in the thick darkness. You know who? Oh, of course you do — Pan.

Pan, pleasure puppy/goat (deeply philosophical) sensual scholar of the Gods who thought (correctly) that he sensed a good warm feeling coming from Syrinx (after all, she kept putting herself directly in his line of vision….)

But by the tenth night he thought Syrinx a little crazy and perhaps more than a little cruel…. Let her run and swim like a wild animal, he thought. I’m not showing up much longer for this!

Yet the next night he’d invariably say, “Oh, what the hell. I’ll go try to actually talk to her one last time.”

And so it was on the twentieth night of her fateful dream (the very second Pan approached her, the muscles of her calves tensed, poised to go…) that an unexpected mix of emotions shifted her expression and slowed her steps…. Something serious and heavy as concrete suddenly held her back from her wise, playful river.

Panicking, in a moment of deep confusion and alarm, she raised her hands to her chest in a barely comprehensible prayer. And you know what they say, “careful what you wish for…” Soon, the sleepy river nymphs, confused by her strange mumbled request, turned her body into the hollow reeds of the river, and that is exactly where she woke up.

A TEXTUAL MUD-WRESTLE WITH THE ANCIENTS

I’m afraid I’ll have to take issue with the ancient tomes. You see, Syrinx wished herself into the reeds, yes, and found herself strangely enchanted with hollow brooding music there, okay, okay…. But what little you know of her heart from those abbreviated pages of myth! And Pan, representing all of our desires at once (don’t ever let them tell you she didn’t shudder at the very thought of him) symbolized far more than lust (only one form of desire, no?) but all those things that you really want, and yet incessantly run and hide from out of fear, panic, self doubt, and maybe even nervous playfulness?…How little the sages are willing to record!

Let’s turn again to the woman in the cabin and the strange lessons of her river.

Have you ever ruined a perfectly good conversation for no reason? Listened to yourself with horror as a torrent of ridiculously spiraling words proceeded to drown you…words that you know will have less than ideal consequences…Or conversely, wondered why you couldn’t speak…when you really wanted to…so full were your thoughts and feelings that you became paralyzed with emotion.

Syrinx, my dear readers, would identify with many such moments. Infinitely wise in her intuition, a dreamer, and, on good days, a visionary, she is also nevertheless eternally sixteen-years-old on the inside. Thus, she feels everything — the glow of the moon buoyant as a million feathers in her heart, the smell of honeysuckle wide and sweet in her throat — but is often arrogant enough to trust that her “emotion of the moment” will guide her appropriately in action.

In short, she is about as reactive as a nuclear power plant.

Syrinx is the type who, after a good friend listens to her problems for hours offering sympathy and advice, instead of saying thanks, might instead (defensively!) unleash a litany of cold accusations only to immediately well up in a fit of apologies and tears.

You get the picture. Syrinx engages in a swirl of actions and requests that span all directions and seemingly couldn’t possibly reside in one body (but do! do!). Yet, let us not fail to see her mix of emotions for what they really are: the fresh nurturing moisture of water ameliorating the most crippling of droughts. Without the girlish whims of Syrinx in our hearts, we lose touch with a vital life source….

PAN, PANORAMA AND PANIC: AN ETYMOLOGICAL RIFF

But before we return to Syrinx stuck deep down in the reeds, waterlogged, tired, annoyed at herself, cursing dark wet flowers, swaying to utterly addictive music…. I’d like to turn to Pan, the adorable and much maligned God himself.

Pan means ALL and when placed before the Greek root orama (meaning dizzying mountaintops) the result is one hell of a view — panorama  — and may I remind you that such a view involves seeing everything all at once…Yet, there’s another word —panic — that can also be traced back to Pan’s neck of the woods.

For good reason!

Long long ago, inside the hazy golden clouds of Olympus, Pan was granted a momentous power over mortals. With a flash of mud and lightning, our hoofed king was given the ability to elicit two of the blackest and most terrifying of human fears — wide open spaces and loneliness — those daunting blank slates behind symphonies and longing, sadness and wonder.

So, perhaps we should think again about the emotion that caused Syrinx to freeze like a statue before her river.

Consider for a moment that Syrinx was not afraid of Pan’s or her own lust but of the way he exposed a warm full curiosity followed by bottomless emptiness deep within the pit of her stomach. Oh, the world of Pan — lush towering trees, infinite night blue sky, black diamond stars, so many unknown creatures (which she might grow overly fond of in the moonlight)…. And wouldn’t it look ridiculous in the daylight!? Can you blame her for foolish prayers and curses?

For nothing is more terrifying, nothing sends us screaming for our old habits (and mental traps) more than opening ourselves up to Pan and his insanely unknown horizons.

LETTING GO AND HOLDING ON 
THE ART OF ABSORPTION

So there Syrinx was, cursing, weeping, kicking at the weeds, feeling more trapped than ever.

But then something which can only be described as magic happened inside of her.

At the edge of her breath, where silence begins, before she unleashed another note of the swampy morning, Syrinx began to listen. And I can tell you she heard the most wonderful things. She heard distant birds announcing the coming of dawn, the electric buzz of insects, snakes slithering upon stones, frogs plopping over mud, turtles sliding off branches, and because she believed herself unable to move, she slowed her heartbeat down to a mild soft drum.

And just when she ceased to hear her own loud voice raised in moody song, she noticed Pan’s thick eyebrows, smelled his fur and hooves…The source of her sorrow…The source of her wonder…The source beneath her breath, she realized, could always be found — not in each individual note leaving her lips, but in the deep absorption of the river. That place where loose ends would never ever be wholly tied, but could always (must always) be swallowed and digested. And maybe it was not the reeds, but that which she hadn’t fully absorbed and experienced that held her most captive….

So, I leave to your precious imagination, dear readers, what happened when Syrinx swam away from her own haunted spell and welcomed Pan. The way that everything that had been buried inside and underneath — flowers, soot, algae, bark, the stone weight of her heart beneath her skin — suddenly floated to the surface without discrimination, thought, or effort. For had not the river demonstrated each and every way she might let go, in order to hold on, in the same fluid movement? Into that sparkling flow of wild refreshment and reflection, she could pour out (and take in) her own heart.

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River 2: Flickr photo by anonymous.