The Mouth of the Cave
Living with disaster risk
In 2022 I started to notice a motif of caves popping up in my life repeatedly. When I notice a pattern I tend to cast a wide net in order to look at the theme from multiple angles. I honed in on Plato’s Cave allegory, the concept of the heroine’s journey and the archetypical passage into the underworld as depicted in myths like Persephone’s abduction by Hades and the Eleusinian mystery rites. I also listened to podcasts like Pennyroyal, which looks at the Mammoth Cave System and other facets of Kentucky’s geology from an esoteric perspective. I visited the cave myself, exploring just the mouth of the longest cave system in the world, and got a taste for the sense of awe that comes from recognizing just how much there is beneath the surface. I watched horror movies like the Descent, documentaries like the Cave of Forgotten Dreams. At one point, I went to a theatrical grief-ceremony in a local artificial cave called Widow Jane mine, and happened to run into my therapist, who was performing a fire ritual wearing a mask of leaves. During this ceremony we did a visualization where we imagined a red thread extending backwards in time through past generations of our lineage. We were asked to give voice to what went unexpressed by those who went before, and all screamed together. I felt into the numbed voices of the women of my patrilineal ancestry, and I hollered in a way that rattled my skull. Something certainly came through that was beyond my own, individual voice. I felt the way the cave seemed to focus and intensify the ceremony. Being on the earth feels different than being in the earth.
Interest in that patrilineal red thread brought me to Naples in 2023. My father’s father, born in Brooklyn, had always told us we were from Northern Italy. But my early-pandemic research on Ancestry.com said otherwise; we were from outside Naples. I started learning the foodways of that area, making pasta by hand felt like an old somatic memory. In 2023 my wife and I went to Naples for a food and cooking tour, led by a local with extensive archeological knowledge and a really dark sense of humor that felt familiar. Like, she literally felt like we could have been related, her warmth and gestures reminding my of my own aunts. When the tour group first met and we discussed what we do in the world, I told the group that I was a disaster researcher. I would then get a lesson in what I had regarded as superstition growing up but which our tour guide described as “being folkloric.” I was jokingly (?? sort of) warned to come up with another job, as they gestured to Mount Vesuvius in the distance. The whole area was an active volcanic field, for miles, and it could all blow at any time. So, it was considered bad luck to have a disaster researcher in the group. Hell, it was bad luck to *be* a disaster researcher. But I get a thrill from tempting fate.
Our first night in Naples, there was an earthquake. It happened at night, and as a very deep sleeper, I missed it. In the morning there were aftershocks and the ground felt like liquid. A sulphur smell lingered and we were all reminded that the land was dynamic and alive. And boy did I get it at breakfast with the group, the disaster researcher from New York who brought the earthquake with her. The earth shaking and releasing fumes did seem to break up the seriousness of the day before, and our tour guide shifted into teaching us to really appreciate every individual baked good we would sample that day (the sfogliatelle was *bonkers*) since Mama Supervolcano could make it her business to explode any time she felt moved. I was fascinated with this capacity for living with risk and allowing it to actually refine one’s enjoyment of the present. I knew this perspective through years of practicing Buddhism but now I was encountering it through my own heritage and in a much funnier, darker, and more playful way. When I cried at a painting, something I was always a little embarrassed about in the US, our tour guide started jumping up and down. “I love you, Carolina,” she yelled. “You understand!” It was also pretty typical to see people conversing with artwork, some of it very ancient. Between the gestural language, the sense of humor forged by living on the cusp of potential disaster at all times, the movement of the very ground under our feet, I felt like I made sense. It was a sense of complete relief combined with an upwelling of warmth that I now identify as somatic safety. That rising up feeling didn’t just come from me, it came up from the ground, which held a charge. This sense of home was something that came from connecting with this context of land and people but it was now something that belonged to me and that I could take home with me. Being from a broken lineage that denied its connection to Southern Italy and repressed some of the gifts involved had created a lot of confusion for me and some of my other relatives. Drinking had become a way to numb the grief of that disconnection. Restoring that sense of belonging to place had given me back a lost ability to attune to myself, like the fabric of self-belonging had been re-weaved.
I continued to trace that patrilineal line back to Sicily, where my ancestors had been sailors in the 18th century. When a spot opened up on a trip to Sicily hosted by Radici Siciliane, it synchronized perfectly with the end of a job, and I jumped at the chance to join a group who would be doing ceremonial work around Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano. We’ll be using Italian frame drums, guided by mythologist, researcher, teacher & ritualist Barbara Crescimanno and hosted by fellow Substacker Marybeth Bonfiglio. I’m interested in the ways group drumming helps us weave our ways into natural rhythms outside the authority of Kronos, or clock time, helping us collectively find Kairos, sacred time. And we’ll be finding these collective rhythms in caves! In places where oracles, healers and other liminal people have practiced visiting the underworld to reap magical benefits for thousands of years. The volcano itself is considered an entry to the underworld, a source of light that emerges underground and can only be borne in darkness. We’ll also be visiting the Valley of the Muses, and learning about prehistoric water cults. With guidance, we’ll be learning the rituals of living between realms, guarding thresholds and keeping time.
My main intention is just to feel what happens when my body is permitted to recover these practices in the company of other people who are also drawn to this kind of remembering. I am also interested in getting an even deeper understanding of what it is to live in relationship to risk: not to try to manage the volcano or to lessen its impact but to have practices around reverence and witnessing without suppression. As a disaster researcher, especially working in mental health, this perspective of how we live with increased disaster risk feels really important as climate change intensifies. According to the heroine’s journey described by Maureen Murdock, which extends several steps past the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell described and which includes an underworld initiation that is absent from the hero’s journey, results in an integration of one’s dual nature as one comes back to the surface after time spent underground. When you realize just how much is below the surface you might be hit with vertigo, or awe, like when I reached the true entrance to Mammoth Cave. I am feeling like I am at just such a juncture, where I am realizing that all my research has just been the anteroom to the real plunge, and that there is so much more beneath my feet than I expected. In about a month I’ll be making that deeper descent with the guidance of other liminal people and the community of fellow seekers. I don’t know what the result will be but I’m sure it will be beautiful and strange.