“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

— Joseph Campbell

That’s scary stuff.

Caves, the underground.

I remember a time when I got stuck in a cave. Not for very long, but it was damn scary. I was trapped tight, pressed between two huge, clammy, dusty, gritty slabs of rock.

Others had to come along and describe to me how I might move my body, joint by joint, so that I could maneuver out.

That particular cave is permanently closed now, due to another awful entrapment, which makes the memory of my own experience even more creepy.

And when I go into that memory as a metaphor, and imagine the metaphorical cave I fear to enter? The one where I’m that stuck, the one where people far better equipped than myself are now tragically entombed?

Damn scary.

Still, I can’t deny it—those metaphorical caves of my past appear to have been something else. More like the outer levels of a vast treasure network…

Filed in: Feeling /64/ | Anxiety /32/ | Depression /12/ | Relationships /78/