Marilyn Steele has been in practice as a Jungian psychologist for over 25 years and has taught extensively on the psychology of women, the feminine archetype, and the "revisioning” of the self. Her work, be it poetry, prose, or painting, focuses on the wisdom and power of dreams and the transformative power of creativity to heal the soul and the world—both are wounded, both need to heal, and in restoring the sacred bond, we will come alive again.She has published academic articles in Family Therapy Newsletter and a book review and poetry in Psychological Perspectives. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lalitamba, Sage Woman, and Zone 3 as well as the Madrone Avenue Press anthologies in 2005 and 2007. Marilyn is currently working on a new book, Life and Leadership in the Round: The Wild Feminine and an Ecology of Self, a revisioning of the self, grounded in both science and spirituality.

Uncharted Waters (July 20, 2011. Issue 29.)

Everything you see has its roots
in the unseen world
—Rumi

The week before Thanksgiving in 2009, I sat in my car at a stoplight after a yoga class, considering the imminent loss of my home. My 26-year-old business as a psychologist in private practice was dying after a two-year downward slide. For a year, the bank that had taken over my loan sent me certified "Intent to Foreclose" notices, after I let my mortgage payments get two months behind as recommended by a bank representative in order to qualify me for a loan modification. Two intensive loan modification attempts went into the black hole of "lost" paperwork, silence, and stalling, until finally an honest clerk asked me if I had any equity in my home. "Yes," I answered, estimating secretly an abundant $250,000 according to an appraisal in 2007.

"The bank will never approve your loan modification then," he responded.

After pulling rabbits out of hats for many last-minute saves in the past, it was really time to let go. Washed up, washed away, an unexpected road opened. It was time to sell while I still had the option.

Out the car window, I watched a black crow tuck her wings and dive toward the street. Just in the nick of time, she would swoop straight up to the sky, stretch her wings, do it again. What was she doing? Then I noticed she had a berry in her beak. She would toss her head before she dove, throwing the berry up high, then catch it before it hit the ground. Playing with the moment. I would need to feel my way into the pause between berry and no berry, the in-between of the in-breath and out-breath. Perhaps I could delight in living there too. Moment by moment.

In order to show the house, the real estate agents strongly recommended I move out with everything, as quickly as possible to avoid the rainy winter lull in sales. After the garage sale, an intensive cleanup, and renting storage space, I squeezed two suitcases, journals, and a box of books into my old BMW convertible. I moved into the unheated art studio of an old high school friend. Six weeks later, the house still unsold, I moved in with my son, his fiancée, her daughter, and two large dogs who kept me company on my twin bed in the spare room. As my worldly life got smaller and smaller, a surprising stillness and peace expanded.

This was, in fact, a dream coming true. A terrifying dream that I'd had four years before:

Trapeze Artist (2005) I am walking down the corridors of a hospital, then into a large ward where there are rows and rows of beds on either side of the aisle. Patients lie with broken bones, legs held up in traction, bandaged, bloody heads, IV drips. A woman is being prepared for surgery. I keep walking without stopping at any of the beds, murmuring, "Sorry, sorry, I can't stop." I have to ignore their cries and moans. As I pass through the ward into an intersecting hallway I see a large yellow EXIT sign on the door. I push down on the handle to walk out, but instead of a floor, or stairs, there is nothing. Nothing. I am hundreds of feet up on the threshold of open space and there is no way back. The skyline looks like an old European city with steeples and carved gargoyles in the cathedrals, buildings, palaces around me. I close my eyes in terror, praying to God to just kill me. This fear is unbearable. But when I open my eyes, not only am I still alive, but there is a handsome, dark-haired man with a handlebar moustache hanging by his knees off of the metal fold-down fire escape. He has on bright red tights. He is a trapeze artist. And he smiles with his arms outstretched, telling me without words how to fling myself into his arms and flip over his shoulders to the ground. There seems to be no other choice, so I leap, somersault over his shoulders, jumping the last few feet between the bottom of the fire escape and the sidewalk with a triumphant "Ta da!"

Leap. Fall into the mystery of life.

Thresholds are liminal spaces, an in-between of time and space, taking us to the outskirts of what we know, beyond the borders and boundaries of familiar ground. Stepping into this void acknowledges a dissolution of the old order, a turning upside down of your life. It is a profound dislocation, terrifying but also a sacred space that makes room for new energies to enter and transform. At times like this, recurring throughout life, we need every ounce of courage, every helpful ally, human, animal, spirit.

I had been poised on this threshold for a long time, stressed and struggling, too cloistered in my upstairs office, imprisoned by economic forces beyond my control, too introverted in my depth psychology work. My soul yearned for more freedom. Hungered for beauty, renewal, joy. For a life I would love that did not yet have a name.

How do you want to live?

The closest I could come to an answer was I wanted to feel at home in the world and to love my life. I would need to become indigenous, born from within, to find my natural wild self, my place of belonging. I decided, once the house sold, $200,000 under that 2007 appraisal, to travel to a place I'd never been before in hope of finding some clues to a life I'd never lived before. A wild country, a peaceful country, where I could be immersed in nature and wildlife. Maybe I could learn to trust my intuition again, and wake up my soul. Costa Rica, the land of pura vida. A country that designates a greater percentage of its land to natural parks and wilderness reserves than any other country in the world, where there is no standing army and obsession with violence, where 38% of the legislature is women, perhaps I could feel at home.

As I read on a brochure: La vida es una sola. Sumergete en ella. Vivela profundamente. There is only one life. Dive into it. Live it deeply.

Cultivating courage, I went zip-lining. Then bird-watching in Monteverde Cloud Forest. Aided by an attentive native guide, our small group spotted six magical and rare quetzals. Green and aquamarine feathers around a crimson breast. Their haunting one, two, three-note songs soar to heaven, long turquoise tail feathers drape toward earth. Visiting a beach park the next day, we spot a three-toed sloth, only a few feet away in a palm tree next to the path. Draped over a palm frond, she sleeps. Considers. In her gentle, deliberate way, stretches out farther on the palm frond, which, in a synchronizing slowness, bends toward the ground. The sloth, her flowing gray-brown mane tinged a faint green from the algae that, slowly, grow there, is unconcerned. She is used to life lived upside down. I study the sloth.

The maps of my psyche and the possibilities for my life begin to unfurl like the rain forest canopy.

We travel to Tortuguero on a long, slow bus toward the most stunning experience of the trip. Once over the mountains to the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, the air softens and falls like a moist, silken drape. Hibiscus openhearted in orange, coral, shocking pink. Orchid giants on six-foot-tall stems, a froth of lavender, violet, and white. It is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the bus, and we are so relieved to move to the flat canal boat for the trip into Parque Nacional Tortuguero. Ribbons of water weave through the lagoons as we listen to the bellows of the howler monkeys, spot a river otter, which follows us for a while. Egrets and a striped tiger heron. A small turtle suns herself on a log lush with scarlet bromeliads. The periscope eyes of a caiman bulge from the river grasses. The air is damp and fertile with river mulch.

A banner strung across the river welcomes us, "Bienvenido," but it is the toucan, with her green-blue-yellow-red beak, and the rat-a-tat-tat of the woodpecker who welcome us in grander fashion to the magic of this place.

It is late April, too late to see the green turtles and the arribada, the mass nesting of thousands of olive ridley turtles. The guides say most of the turtles have left. But part of my dream trip to Costa Rica is to see a turtle nesting. At 10 p.m. on our first night in the village, our guide tells us about the turtles, drawing in the sand of our lodge with his bare feet the different shapes, sizes, and behaviors of the species of sea turtles. I feel he is invoking them, the way ancient peoples used to sing the turtles in from the sea. We cannot use our flashlights, which disorient the turtles, but the guides have special red lights that do not disturb. I am asked to change out of my thin white T-shirt because it might reflect too much moonlight. In a hurry to start walking the beach, I slip on a waterproof, hooded turquoise jacket over my jeans. We are to be quiet, to walk, fast, in double lines. Only if we see a turtle will we each pay the guide $20.

The black sea gleams with the pearl of a full moon. It is so humid and hot I am beginning to stream sweat into my eyes, glasses fogging. Then, a half mile down the beach, a red light blinks. Once, twice, then fast three times. A turtle is digging her nest. We break into a trot. There is a swearing from the two thirty-year-old men behind me. I am on a mission and surge forward. Then, unable to see, I trip into an old turtle nest and hit the ground hard. I am the oldest member of the group by twenty years, and if I have broken something… But I am okay, now coated in sweat and sand, and setting a pace for the group that repairs my pride. When we get there, the turtle is still digging and we keep our distance. It's a leatherback. Huge. Four and a half feet long, close to 1,000 pounds, the guide estimates she is thirty years old. She has a great rounded back with seven ridges, but no shell.

The leatherback's front flippers are expansive like a great bird, a third the size of her body, and she labors to dig a hole up to her shoulder. Then she begins to shovel the sand behind her, with round flippers that look like paddles. Smoothing. Shoveling and throwing the sand aside. The flippers flowing over each other in an alternating synchrony. She pats the egg chamber one last time. She begins to drop her eggs, deepen in a trance. We approach. The guide shines his red flashlight under her rear flippers so we can see the eggs drop, several at a time, the size of racquetballs, soft and rubbery without shells. She sighs. A tear slides out of her eye. I remember naturalist Carl Safina's words and look them up later that night:

The leatherback is one of the few original sentient beings. That it is a kind of human is indicated by its propensity to shed tears.

She continues until ninety-five or a hundred eggs are dropped. A glistening mound of possibilities. Then she lays some smaller eggs, which are not fertile, on top. The scientists do not know why, but I think she is doing what she can to protect the living eggs by planting imposter eggs for the raccoons, dogs, coyote, jaguar, seagull, human poachers. She then swivels her flat rear flippers, like sensitive paddles. First one then the other, overlapping. Pats down the surface, and scatters sand all around to disguise the nest. To be certain, she moves slowly down the beach a ways and makes a shallow pretend nest, again scattering sand. When she has done all she knows to do, she turns toward the sea. Dragging herself along the sand, she makes deep furrows in the sand like a tractor. We, silent, move into a column alongside her, like a parade, salute her by doing our version of a turtle dance, hands crossed and alternating in front of our bellies, swaying. We call out softly, congratulations and blessings. "Well done, Mama!" "Safe travel, Mother!" Streaming our tears, our hopes for a future for her, the hatchlings, and for all our children.

In thirty-five to forty days, when the hatchlings, tortuguitas, emerge, they find their way following the light, into the vast, deep mystery of the sea. Their tribe has swum the seas of the earth for two hundred million years. With a great deal of luck, some will find their way back to this nesting beach.

For nesting, the leatherbacks prefer ruggedly pounded shores, dynamic beaches, which these days means many will lose their nests to erosion. Because their beaches are not reliable, they spread out their eggs, four or five clutches of perhaps one hundred eggs, in different nests. Eventually, the nesting females will find their way back to this beach, if they survive. The odds are not high. Perhaps they find the way back to this beach to nest by the signature sounds of the surf breaking on the beach with their exquisite sensitivity to sound and vibration.

I imagine they are comfortable with the turbulence of chaos and change, that this is something I can learn in facing the innumerable thresholds of change in this life. The borders between water and earth are places where the spirits can enter. Turtles are the Keepers of the Doorways between the seen and the unseen.

Among all the sea turtles, leatherbacks are the strongest swimmers, especially fond of the open seas and deep water. They dive deeper than most whales. Only sperm whales and elephant seals dive deeper. As highly pelagic animals, which make migrations of thousands of miles, from icy northern seas to the tropics, they come into contact with people of many nations, reminding us how connected we all are. Their habitat spans from the North Atlantic near the Arctic Circle to the South Pacific around New Zealand. Insulated by a fatty layer of tissue, leatherbacks can also regulate their metabolism, almost like mammals, to avoid overheating or chilling. One additional sense they have is the ability to orient themselves to not only the grid but the intensity of the Earth's magnetic fields. They eat mainly jellyfish for sustenance. Jellyfish, which are 95% water and look like light.

They do not lose their way.

As the oldest vertebrate animal in the world, a symbol around the world of Mother Earth, the leatherback follows a songline of memory, appears as a blessing and a warning: Listen. Our future is at stake. In the Pacific Ocean, along the Mexico-Costa Rica shorelines, the population of leatherbacks has fallen 95% in just the last two decades. They have been on Earth twenty-five times longer than humans, but they could be gone forever in ten or fifteen years due to longline fishing, shrimp trawler nets, destruction by encroaching development of nesting sites, egg poaching, and the ubiquitous plastic debris that looks similar to the jellyfish they survive on.

During the three weeks I was in Costa Rica, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, primary home to the critically endangered green turtle called Kemp's ridley. Their hatchlings were about to emerge and head for the sea. An oiled, poisonous sea. Young turtles were already being burned alive with desperate and ineffective attempts to contain the oil. Such short-term thinking, speed and greed, compared to the long life and wisdom of the turtle. It has not always been this way.

There was a time when Turtle had a starring role in many legends and creation myths of cultures and religions around the world. The ancient Maya imagined a circular earth as a great turtle afloat in a containing sea. In stories and myths from India, China, Japan, North America, she bears the weight of the world and has done so as Mother Earth for millions of years. The sea turtle was also sacred to Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty.

In the Lakota creation story, there was another world before this one. But the people of that world did not behave themselves. Displeased, the Creative Power set out to make a new world. He sang several songs to bring rain, which poured stronger with each song. The earth split apart as water gushed up through the many cracks, causing a flood. By the time the rain stopped, all of the people and nearly all the animals had drowned. Only the turtle could dive deep enough and stay under long enough to retrieve a lump of mud from beneath the floodwaters. Singing, the Creative Power shaped the mud and spread it on the water. He named the new land Turtle Continent and promised that all would be well if all living things learned to live in harmony. But the world would be destroyed again if they made it bad or ugly. We stand on Turtle Island. We have not learned to live in harmony. We are living in a turbulent time of transformation. What is our role in making the world well and whole again?

As a symbol of Mother Earth and the sacred feminine, the leatherback has an urgent message for all of us. She carries millions of years of memory and magic. So do we, newcomers to this earth. Can we tune into our own deep wisdom, creativity, intuition?

Dive deep.

Take the long view.

Know we are all connected.

Offer your creativity extravagantly.

Persevere.

Open to mystery, trust your inner navigator.

Feast on light.

Become the world.

I returned from Costa Rica changed. My head quiet, my core humming. Certain that I could not figure out my future by thinking but would need to sink more deeply into blood wisdom, heart knowing. Awake to how we are all connected, continents by oceans, peoples by stories, and how the rhythms of nature are our own.

In surrender, my heart opened. Wiped out, I stepped into the void and found new ground. I have fallen in love with the new place.

My new home in California is a beautiful apartment on the water in Marin County, first seen in a meditation. I gather pictures of the leatherback for paintings, seeing in photographs her pink heated neck skin after laying her eggs, her blue-black back sprinkled with white dots like stars. Even the baby hatchlings are already strung with little pearls over their seven miniature ridges summoned by starlight. To paint these animals I buy larger canvases, the largest I have ever used.

Let the drop of water that is you
become a hundred seas.
But do not think that the drop alone becomes the ocean.
The ocean, too, becomes the drop.
—Rumi