After Meleager's death, Atalanta wanders alone in the forests of Calydon—in the wilderness, a terrain that is more familiar and safer for her than a castle. This is a time of mourning and grief. She will never be with Meleager again. A phase of her life is over and gone. She can not bring him or it back again. Atalanta is in a major transition. This is the time between what was and what is to come, a transition zone defined by time and place, by an ending.
Loss that changes your life comes in many forms: loss of job, loss of a belief, loss of your own health, loss of meaning, loss of a person who was central to your life. Whatever your loss, it is most important to realize that what is mourned and lost is also a sense of your old self. Who am I now that I don't have the relationship or work or beliefs or geography that defined me?
Wilderness is a metaphoric landscape; it is where you are in your life when you are in between one major phase or identity and the next. It's a time to make your own way, when you do not know what will come next or how you will change. It is a time of transition. It may be a time to trust instinct or deep curiosity. You may find an important part of yourself in this wilderness, or lose your bearings and become lost.
The wilderness phase often comes after a significant death, or when a relationship ends, or after leaving a community. Maybe it happens when the college degree that promised employment turns out not to be a ticket to the first rung of a career, or when you have lost your job, your title, or your reputation. You are in the wilderness when you have left “who” you were, and there is no turning back. When there is no definite course to take and other people may have opinions, but don't know. It may be a time to pay attention to your inner compass of intuition, as you go in the direction toward which your soul is drawn, or sense how your body-psyche responds to each next step, or let the “soft animal of your body, love what it loves” (from Mary Oliver's poem, “Wild Geese”). Paying attention, pausing as you might from time to time, as if in an unfamiliar neighborhood, moving on when something instinctual in you knows that all is well.
The first loss and uncertainty about what happens next begins at birth, when we leave the comfort of the womb for the world, struggling through the birth canal or being suddenly lifted out via Caesarian. Everything is new and most everything new is uncomfortable—our first act is often a cry of distress as we take a first breath. I remember hearing Jungian analyst Marion Woodman, who saw the connection between body and psyche, comment that how we emerge from the womb becomes the model for later transitions. With my own two children, this proved to be true. My daughter came out headfirst in a normal and on-time delivery. My son's birth was a breech delivery, feet first, more difficult—as if he were reluctant to plunge headfirst into the world and would try an entry that took more effort on everybody's part, which a breech birth certainly does. This theme was repeated at subsequent transitions in his life. I wonder about C-section babies: Do they expect to be helped out by others and not struggle through transitions? If there is a pattern that begins at birth that may be repeated in life, then recognizing the pattern is the first step in altering it if it does not serve us or appreciating it if it makes the passage from one stage to the next easier. This is true of all significant patterns we may unconsciously repeat.
Something to ponder: What is your usual response to unwanted loss or unexpected change? When you find yourself in a transition zone, how do you react? The specific details or landscape of this new wilderness may differ, but how you respond—how you think, feel, and cope in the midst of it—may be the same. And dysfunctionally so, if you have not learned from past experience. There is a famous quote from philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (Reason in Common Sense). While he was commenting on history, this clearly applies to how we live our lives as well.
Shortly after she is born, Atalanta is abandoned and left to die in the wilderness. She is under the protection of Artemis, however, who sees to it that a mother bear comes along at the crucial moment. She survives abandonment and exposure because the mother bear finds her, suckles her, and raises her like a cub. Thus from the beginning, the wilderness is kinder to Atalanta than the castle where she was born. After Meleager's death, Atalanta returns to the forest wilderness, to nature, which has proven more trustworthy than her experience with people.
Wandering through this landscape by herself, Atalanta can do the emotional work of mourning and healing from her loss of Meleager. Nature is a good place for her to do this inner work—perhaps not for every woman, but for those with Artemis as an active archetype. Out in nature, examples abound about life and death, about cycles and seasons. Everything becomes compost. Nature has a vastness about it; a human being is small next to big trees and mountains. Living in the wilderness means being under the sky during the day and the starlit heavens at night. Outdoors, proportion affects us and shows us that our particular loss is not the center of the universe. When a grieving person starts to notice beauty, which can be seen all around in nature, and hears the song of birds and the sound of water, or enjoys the light and warmth of the sun, then healing has begun. Trees help. There is solace in sitting in the shade of a tree, listening to the wind through its leaves, or putting your arms around its trunk or your cheek against its bark.
To navigate alone through grief and mourning is common when society's values assume that you have no right to grieve at all. Or that it is a weakness. Or is offensive to someone who can't tolerate either grief or grief for this particular loss. If you are under the protection of Artemis and the one-in-yourself virgin goddess archetypes, you have inner support to be yourself, but in private. The wilderness into which you can retreat will be with nature, or into your inner world. Without this protection, especially in childhood—you are likely to accept the judgments of others that your reaction is bad or that you are bad, or don't have the right to feel the way you do. The seeds of feeling something is wrong with you are planted or fertilized by this. (Boys raised in patriarchy learn to suppress grief by transforming it into anger, blame, or getting even someday unless they have a strong connection to this same goddess in themselves). Go into your own wilderness to express the love and the loss through something you do or create, through words in a journal, art, ritual, or poetry, or go into nature to build a cairn or labyrinth out of stones; make sacred spaces on beaches, under trees, on hilltops or mountains. This is what Artemis people do in the wilderness of loss. Which, as I think of the image of Artemis with her dog and those I have known who grieved for animals, is how in privacy and in nature they grieved for a beloved animal instead of feeling ashamed—which others feel who have internalized the view that “It's only a dog!” (Marohn, What The Animals Taught Me).
Real people whose lives become engrossing tales can be seen as mythic role models themselves when they touch on archetypal imagery or themes. This certainly is true for Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012). Cheryl wrote about the thousand-mile, three-month trek she took on her own—an idea/impulse/determination/calling/compulsion that she followed. I feel that she enacted the spirit in the poem “Artemis” by Olga Broumas:
I am a woman
who understands
the necessity of an impulse whose goal or origin
still lie beyond me.
The “necessity of an impulse” is what Stayed heeded. She remembered hearing of the Pacific Crest Trail and was intrigued when it came up again. There were no logical reasons for her being so drawn to it, much less for her walking it by herself. It was beyond her to know why, but within her there was this compelling necessity.
It's true that we define ourselves through our decisions and actions. Cheryl took defining herself one step further when she chose a name for herself. “Strayed” is not her real name, and she never tells her readers the name that she was born with in her book. When she was contemplating divorce, she realized that she could not continue using the hyphenated married name that she shared with her husband, nor could she go back to using the name she had before, any more than she could be the girl she used to be. She tried on many last names that sounded good with Cheryl. Nothing fit until the word “strayed” came to mind. She looked up the meaning in the dictionary and knew it was hers: “to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress.”
By emphasizing that Cheryl was following an inner knowing, I am bringing up once again what I have said in many of my previous books, because this is crucial to living an authentic life—one that is your own and not a map you are expected to follow. To recognize gnosis, which is intuitively felt knowledge, is to know what feels true for you. Then comes the next significant question: Will you follow where it leads?
For Cheryl Strayed, the recent death of her mother, the long-past death of her father, the end of her marriage, and bad decisions made in the aftermath were precursors to her decision to follow her inner knowing. The trek she embarked on took her from the Mojave Desert to the Cascades and into meditative reflections on her life, calling upon perseverance and heart when the going was rough and finding grace and gratitude for what she experienced and found in herself. I imagine that when Cheryl decided to write a book, what she learned through walking the Pacific Crest Trail carried over into her writing. Both were decisions that grew out of a belief that this—the trek, then the book—was important to do. Then came the commitment to do it. She stuck with that commitment as she took one step at a time, one page at a time, until so many miles and pages later, she had done what she set out to do. And I suspect that, in the doing, she found herself fully absorbed in the present moment—and, on the trail, fully in her body as well. It is soul-nourishing to do whatever it is that gives you this experience.
The wilderness is beautiful—nature is. Whether actually or metaphorically, there is beauty and timelessness to be found in the wilderness, and in yourself when you leave your usual life behind and follow the impulse that leads you to do what you love and be where you want to be. Doing something that is really hard is satisfying.
Women who feel a strong necessity or impulse to spend time in nature, those who take up a physical outdoor challenge, have a connection with the Artemis archetype. I think of Elizabeth Danu's decision to take a long bike trip on her own—from Seattle to San Diego, a journey of six weeks that covered over 1,600 miles (www.theliberationofpersephone.com). Like Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth was not adequately prepared. She had never biked carrying sixty pounds with her, and her legs were just not used to it. On day four, biking against headwinds, her legs not only hurt so badly that she wanted to stop, they were shaking uncontrollably. She had covered only half the miles to the campground that was the goal for this day. She stopped by the side of the road and considered her options. Should she bail and not go on with the whole thing? She was half way to the campground, so going back the way she came would take the same amount of effort as going forward. This was something she had determined to do—it was important to no one else. This was a moment of truth. With no one else involved, Elizabeth told herself: “You decided to do this!” She got back on the bike, her legs still shaking from fatigue. It seemed miraculous, but the wind died down as soon as she resumed.
Elizabeth made it to the campground after dark, only to learn that every space had been taken. Before she had to figure what her next move would be, someone called to her that there was ample space where they were camped—and they fed her well to boot. After day four, when her resolve had been tested, she found that, instead of battling headwinds, she had “wind under her wings”—one of my favorite expressions. It was as if grace accompanied her the rest of the way. This was especially true thirty miles north of Monterey, when she discovered that a bridge her guidebook told her to take was out, with no alternative route given. As she pondered what to do, she tells us, “five guys on bikes pulled up. It could have been very bad, but as it turned out they were born-again Christians from Whittier, California. They had a map and invited me to ride with them.” Ten minutes after she joined them, her last tire blew and they had a spare.
Elizabeth on her bike trip and Cheryl on the Pacific Crest Trail describe unexpected help that came their way, which I see as synchronistic events. “Synchronicity” is a word coined by Jung to describe meaningful coincidences that occur between the inner world and outer events. Whenever this happens, I feel blessed by grace and feel gratitude for it. This was the subject of my first book, The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self (1999), which supports the experience of people whose actions and intentions are motivated by a connection to the Self (archetype of meaning, divinity, the Tao, God/Goddess, higher power) and who find that they get “help from the universe.” This has been my experience, and also something I see happening to others when ego-Self and archetype are aligned. Both Cheryl and Elizabeth heeded an inner directive from the Artemis archetype and received frequent, unexpected, synchronistic help along their way. It can be said that they were “under Artemis' protection”—just as it was said of the infant Atalanta when she was saved by a mother bear.
Like Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeh Danu also chose her own last name. “Danu” is the Celtic mother/warrior goddess. “By choosing that name at thirty-three, I declared that I am a daughter of the Goddess. My own last name didn't seem relevant to me anymore. It was my Dad's name given to him by his stepfather, paternal generation after generation.”
It took grit, a combination of perseverance and passion, for both women to follow a strong impulsive decision and stick to it. From the beginning, they had to resist advice from concerned and well-meaning people against following their impulses. They had time to fulfill their commitment to themselves because they were both in a time of transition. When the journeys they undertook were over, both had been changed by doing what they set out to do; both had found strength and a belief in themselves as a result.
Years later, when she was forty-five, Elizabeth developed inflammatory breast cancer (IFC stage 3C), which is a particularly malignant form of the disease that has to be treated aggressively. In this crisis, she drew on the same proven grit that had gotten her back on her bike—this time in order to go through the chemotherapy that wiped her out with each treatment. Her children were seven and nine at the time; she had been through a “horrific” divorce. She was determined to raise her children; to do this, it was imperative that she live. She was not going to leave the planet! This meant to her that she would not miss a single chemo treatment, no matter what. To help her get through this, the bike trip became her own mythic story. She has since passed the five-year marker. Still cancer-free in 2014, she created a resource website for cancer survivors—The Liberation of Persephone (www.theliberationofpersephone.com).
The abduction of Persephone is one of the most familiar Greek myths, one with which everyone—men as well as women—can identify once the analogy hits home. Persephone is gathering flowers in a meadow when the earth opens and, out of the deep dark chasm, Hades comes to abduct her into the underworld. One day, everything is as usual, and then . . . the underworld—you get a cancer diagnosis; you are fired; your child is missing; you have been left or betrayed by someone you counted on. Suddenly, you find yourself in a world full of uncertainties, fears, and possibilities—and this new terrain is a wilderness.
Atalanta begins her life in the wilderness; after Meleager's death, she finds herself alone in another kind of wildness. Just as she is rejected and abandoned at the beginning of her life for being a girl, she is rejected as unsuitable for Meleager by his mother and, regardless of her ability and courage as a hunter, is rejected as a female by the other hunters.
Atalanta's story resonates with women—especially those from past generations who, like her, excelled in accomplishments but, instead of being rewarded with the trophy and cheered, had it snatched away just as Meleager's uncles tried to do with the pelt. Many learned firsthand that rules are changed when “the wrong type” or “wrong gender” person qualifies to win the prize. Awards that should go to the student with the best grades or the one who does the best work go to someone else “more appropriate” to represent the school or the town. At least this was true before the empowerment of members of a wronged group made such actions indefensible or politically incorrect, before justice or fairness became the standard.
There are plenty of women who remember times when they deserved an honor or recognition that went to someone else. They were expected to be good sports or be understanding. Candace Pert, the immunologist whose discovery of opiate receptors was critical to the success of the research, was left off the all-male team of investigators nominated for the Albert Lasker Award that leads to the Nobel Prize. Likewise, Rosalind Franklin, the woman scientist who should have been credited with discovering the molecular structure of DNA and the double-helix structure of the chromosome, never received recognition for her work. James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins published their work, which was based on her discovery, and received the Nobel Prize in physiology (1953). Franklin died from cancer five years later. Pert, knowing of the relationship between depression and a depressed immune system that can lead to the development of cancer, drew a lesson from Franklin's experience that led her to speak out, instead of being “a good sport or team player,” which she was urged to do.
Candace Pert protested rather than remain silent, which is what a woman with a strong Artemis archetype would do. She sent a letter to the head of the foundation that awards the Lasker Award describing her contribution to the discovery (she had not even been cited in the submission). That she dared to do so caused a sensation in the field. The 1979 award nonetheless went to Solomon H. Snyder, who headed the lab. Snyder did laud her in his acceptance speech, however, and did not go on to win the Nobel Prize, both consequences of her action. He was also quoted as saying: “That's how the game is played.” And he went on to say that, when she became head of her own lab, Pert would do the same (Schwartz, New York Times, 2013). Instead, following her Artemis archetype, Pert went into new areas of research in neuroscience, immunology, and mind-body concepts. She set her sights on research targets of her own choosing—to make discoveries in “wilderness” areas of knowledge—and went on a hunt for scientific evidence for what she intuitively knew.
Women who respond to the invitation to join the armed forces heed a call to adventure. They are promised the opportunity to travel and to be part of a team, to serve their country and receive training and education, and to get away from the limitations of their normal lives, if only they have the courage and grit to do so. Just like Atalanta, who would have joined up as an Argonaut—which Robert Graves says she did in his version of The Golden Fleece (2003). A woman who joins up to fight often has had very positive experiences with brothers or with male friends. Because of this, if a man (or men) with whom she serves sexually assaults her and others stand by and don't intervene, she is not only raped, but also betrayed. She experiences a loss of trust and innocence. When she is violated, demeaned, and dirtied by the not-uncommon reality of rape in the military, she feels isolated and wary of the men with whom she serves, rather than feeling that she is able to count on them.
Women in the military are taught to believe in the military code of loyalty and trust. They thus suffer a profound sense of trauma and betrayal when they are sexually assaulted by a fellow soldier. That sense of betrayal deepens when they report this to superior officers and then are retaliated against and discharged under false claims that they have mental disorders. Investigative reporting in 2013 by the San Antonio Express-News into the pervasive and long-standing problem of sexual assaults in the military substantiate this. In the Annual Department of Defense Report (2012), there were 3,374 reported cases of sexual assault in the military and only 238 convictions. Indeed, the Pentagon's anonymous survey of members of the military led it to estimate that more than 26,000 women and men had been sexually assaulted. More may have been reported, in part due to the 2012 release of the Academy Award-nominated documentary film, The Invisible War, written and directed by Kirby Dick. Kirsten Gillibrand, junior senator from New York, watched this film at home, and then saw it again with her staff and decided to make the issue of sexual abuse in the military a priority. She proposed what was considered a radical solution—to have military prosecutors rather than commanding officers decide which sexual assault cases would be tried.
What if, at the end of the hunt, Meleager had not stood by Atalanta? The trophy would have been snatched away, and worse might have happened. With the adrenaline and testosterone running high among the hunters, the ego blow of being bested by a woman at a male game, resentment at her, and the need to exert their power—remember, the king had characterized these men as men who took what they wanted—a gang rape might have resulted. This happens in the armed services and whenever bullying and rape occur with no Meleager in the crowd. Perpetrators rape and bully, while other men participate in the act by watching and not doing anything to stop it.
The hunt for the boar bears an emotional and physical resemblance to the experience of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as they hunt for insurgents and the Taliban. The boar is initially hidden from the hunters behind dense cover. It suddenly emerges and charges them, trampling, goring, and throwing those nearest over its horns as others get out of its way or use their weapons ineffectively. The hunters are thus like soldiers who are splattered by blood and even body parts when their buddies take hits from improvised explosive devices. An awful experience—yet spared and still in danger. This makes both hunters and soldiers grasp their weapons more tightly and puts them on heightened alert. They are adrenalized for flight or fight, yet must not run away and be marked as cowards. When the perpetrators are hidden or disappear into the crowd (or the wilderness), there is no enemy to confront, no one appropriate upon whom to discharge their fear and aggression. This can lead to impotence and frustration that can be taken out on women. When soldiers in combat are wounded or killed by their own forces, we make the assumption that these are tragic accidents, that they are casualties of “friendly fire.” Not so when a woman is raped by a fellow soldier, and then betrayed by the military hierarchy when she reports it.
The loss of a significant relationship through death, estrangement, rejection, or betrayal—or loss of a position, financial security, or reputation; or of trust, innocence, or faith; or of health that creates a risk of dying—can take the person who suffers the loss into a psychological wilderness or underworld where there are no longer defined paths to walk or landmarks to follow. In Close to the Bone: Life-Threatening Illness as a Soul Journey (2007), I describe the inner experience of a cancer diagnosis as an abduction or descent into the underworld, with parallels to Persephone's abduction or Inanna's descent in their respective myths. There is ordinary life before the diagnosis and a very different world after it. What was important before is no longer so, and you find yourself for a time not knowing what to do or which direction to take. In either the metaphoric wilderness or the underworld, there is a loss of your usual bearings and a need for reorientation to a new and scary time and place. You are at a crossroad, and what you do matters.
The loss of a significant relationship—spouse, lover, child, parent, mentor, or friend; the loss of your home; or the loss of a position or role—often ends a phase of life and begins a period of personal crisis. Symbols for “danger” and “opportunity” are the two elements that, together, comprise the Chinese pictograph for “crisis.” In the birth process, the transition stage is the most dangerous to the life of the mother and the baby. This occurs when the head of the baby goes under the pubic bone of the mother; it is the last stage before birth. Transition and crisis do go together—with new life a possibility if you move through this phase successfully and do not give up on yourself or on life.
To find yourself psychologically in a metaphoric wilderness or underworld is to cross into your own interior world—a world that may contain painful memories you have put aside and feelings you have suppressed. When bad things happen to you—like Meleager dying at the height of Atalanta's accomplishments—there is a danger of seeing yourself as a victim, of becoming depressed and stuck, or full of blame and rage. Better to explore this new terrain, to see what is there, than to give up. In the metaphoric wilderness, there are vast unexplored regions. In the underworld, there are buried riches. These are your own undeveloped talents and archetypes, qualities that were not approved of or valued by others that can become sources of meaning. The good and bad, gold and dross, that are found can contribute to the next stage of your life, enabling you to become more of who you really are and can be.
If, like Atalanta, you are on your own and have past experience and survival skills to call on—psychological and spiritual, as well as practical, knowledge—you may experience hardship and loneliness, but trust that this is part of your soul path that gives it meaning. And this makes all the difference. When you are in the midst of a wilderness or a dark wood and trust that this is terrain you must go through, it will have meaning. It may feel like a maze full of dead ends, but it will turn out to be a labyrinthine path full of U-turns. “This, too, shall pass.” This Sufi saying, at the darkest moments, helps you endure painful uncertainty without giving in to fear and hopelessness. It echoes the wisdom of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes known as the I Ching, which observes that change is the only certainty. To be discerning about what to do next and maintain hope are essential. Vaclav Havel, poet and playwright, and first president of a free Czechoslovakia after the oppressive Soviet occupation, expressed it thus in his book Disturbing the Peace (1986):
Hope is an orientation of spirit; hope is an orientation of the heart. It is not the certainty that something will turn out well but the conviction that something makes sense no matter how it turns out.
Most women who identify with the Artemis archetype are not susceptible to prolonged wanderings in the wilderness of depression or obsessions brought on by deep personal loss. This archetype predisposes people to independence and autonomy, which lessens the impact of the loss of a person, unlike the archetypes that are fulfilled through being a mother (Demeter) or a wife (Hera). For these archetypes, the loss of a relationship, the loss of a role, and the loss of meaning compound the personal loss and can make it psychologically disabling.
The ability to get over a loss and move on seems to be an archetypal characteristic, yet this can be misleading—like camouflage—for it would be just like an Atalanta/Artemis woman to hide her grief from the view of others instinctively. However, Artemis women don't usually get stuck in or become passive captives in the underworld; this is a Persephone journey. Demeter's response to loss is to become seriously depressed; Hera's reaction is to avoid knowing how bad she feels and instead to blame and seek revenge on others. These are patterns that can take possession of women who lose someone important to them through death, infidelity, or estrangement. An emotional abduction into a cult or by a controlling person is a Persephone story.
Atalanta's time in the wilderness is not accounted for in Greek mythology. Meleager dies at the end of the hunt; at some indeterminate time later, Atalanta turns up in Arcadia where she was born. To get from the forests of Calydon to Arcadia to meet the father who rejected her at birth, she has to travel the distance on foot through the forests that covered most of Greece. This would have been a journey through a real wilderness measured in miles, some of which may also have been spent in grief or anger—out of sight of anyone.
Once you are on your own, once you can't return to who you were and who you were with, once you are in a new landscape—in a place and among people who are new to you, and you new to them—then who you used to be no longer defines you. There is no beaten path or broad well-traveled road to follow. In this new wilderness of mind and reality, if you follow your own instincts—which may be a strong impulse, intuition, or curiosity—you can make a path where there is no path, one that becomes truly your own.
In our lives, two forces shape who we become: outer expectations that are conventional and often limiting that we succeed (or not) at meeting, and traits of character and instinct that are ingrained or archetypal. When circumstances—what happens to you—bring you into uncharted terrain, what is in you is tested. Once you are in the wilderness, there are questions whose answers you can only find through living the experience. How will you respond? Are you resilient? Will you have the courage to follow what feels true or right for you? Will you be able to say “no” to what others would have you do or be? Can you wait until you become clear about what you will do next? Will you trust that you will recognize a whole-hearted “yes”?
Meanwhile, when you are on your own in a wilderness phase, the decisions you make are often about the small steps. Yet each one is significant, an opportunity to practice discernment. Which is the next right step? When you awake to find yourself in a dark wood—what will you do next?
In my forty-ninth year, I found myself echoing Dante's words: “In the mid-point of my life, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood.” I had left a twenty-year marriage and was now in my own wilderness, wondering: What next? The answer arrived in the mail—an invitation to visit sacred sites in Europe. In timing and meaning, this was a remarkable synchronicity. My acceptance of the invitation was an initiation into pilgrimage, which deepened my spiritual intuition and led me to write Crossing to Avalon: A Woman's Midlife Pilgrimage (1994), now subtitled A Woman's Search for the Sacred Feminine. This was a next step on my soul path.
To travel while paying attention to your dreams, memories, synchronicities, sensations, and images can make any journey an inner pilgrimage to sources of meaning. Spending time in the wilderness of nature is a pilgrimage to the sacred feminine for many Atalanta/Artemis women, especially those who journal each day, taking the time to write and reflect upon the journey. Travel is an attractive and intriguing option for Artemis women who are in a transition and have the means to set off on an adventure that is also a journey of self-discovery. This was true for Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia (2006).
Another metaphoric wilderness resides in your own creativity, where thoughts, feelings, and images are stirred into new forms or expressed in new ways, which can lead to discoveries and creative works. Any artist, writer, musician, creative thinker, or researcher whose creative process takes him or her into virgin territory is in this wilderness. This often requries moving away from institutions and the usual crowd of like-minded people—whether therapists, artists, or academicians—to find different eyes with which to see. Georgia O'Keeffe is an example of an artist whose distinctive style emerged after she experienced and incorporated the effects of living for a time on the Great Plains of the United States. After one visit to New Mexico, she recognized that this was the landscape that most evoked and inspired her; so this was where she moved after her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, died. To Artemis, the land of the soul is in the natural world.
Atalanta has to make her way there through a forested terrain where there are no paths other than animal tracks, where obstacles like steep ravines or rivers challenge her. She has to forage or hunt for food, and find shelter at night. She travels light and stays only briefly in any one place. This is not unlike the situation for women who no longer have the work, school, or relationship that previously defined their lives and may now have financial concerns as well. Temporary shelter with parents, relatives, or friends—shared housing—may be necessary, especially when there is unemployment and a recession economy.
Atalanta comes to the decision to return to Arcadia where she was born, not knowing how she will be received. This takes courage of a different kind than that required to face the boar. While she can count on her physical courage and her skill as a hunter, she feels no certainty about being welcomed home. That is a decision made by the heart, with hope that there will be a place for her now that she has proven herself. This is a hope held by daughters who have been rejected by their fathers who then go into the world and excel. They hope that their accomplishments will make their fathers proud of them. Under this hope lies the bigger hope that their fathers will love them. Wanting this while knowing that it may not be exposes their vulnerability, which is an act of courage. It's the same for the young woman who is adopted and later in life seeks her birth mother. Likewise for the mother who gave up her baby for adoption and then seeks to meet her child as an adult. It takes courage to love someone who may not reciprocate, to want to be loved or want to be forgiven. And while this requires courage of a different kind, courage is like a muscle that grows with exercise. Moreover, courage in one part of our lives does carry over to other parts.
However it turns out, the “return home”—seeking to find a birth mother or a child given up for adoption, or seeking out people who were once very important with whom connection was severed or lost, especially when you did the leaving (which is typically Artemis)—is a reunion fraught with the possibility of rejection and anger, or of seeing consequences for which you may have been responsible, at least in part. Yet this return is also potentially healing and revealing, even or especially so when it is your shadow that is revealed to you. Then you may receive unsought lessons in humility or grow in compassion for yourself and others. The timing and the decision for doing this often arise during a time of transition. Moving on psychologically may require returning to past relationships, which can be done in person, as Atalanta sets out to do. However, returning home psychologically is the work of psychotherapy and analysis, which, for many people, means finding their own inner abandoned child.