The Descent and the Waiting

There comes a time when life stops cooperating with our plans. What was once steady begins to unravel — work, love, direction — and the ground itself seems to shift. You try to hold on, but the tighter the grip, the faster it all slips away. Suddenly, you’re there — suspended in the pause between what was and what will be.

The old Greeks had a story for this place. Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, was gathering flowers when the earth split open and Hades pulled her into the underworld. One moment she was bathed in sunlight; the next, surrounded by silence and shadow. Her mother’s grief turned the world barren — winter — until Persephone eventually resurfaced, changed, carrying traces of both darkness and light.

That story isn’t just about seasons. It’s about what happens to all of us when we’re pulled into our own underworld — when something in life demands that we stop growing upward and instead descend inward. We resist, thinking we’re being undone, but descent is rarely destruction. It’s the slow, unseen forming of a new self.

The liminal space — the waiting — asks for faith without evidence. It teaches us to stay present when the light is gone, to trust that spring always remembers how to return.

I’ve learned that resisting that descent only keeps us in winter longer. The courage lies in letting the dark do its work — in believing that even here, something is quietly rooting beneath the surface.