Returns: Deepenings

What are we returning to this year—and what will become a deepening?

Since returning to The Hague, I’ve longed to sit down and write, yet the threads of thought have been too scattered to weave together. One thread, however, lingered longer than the others: the topic of myths and symbols—specifically, old and new stories about returns.

Every year, at this same time, we leave behind a world, a year, and step into a new one. Yet it’s always a return to day one—a “clean slate,” a time to start anew.

If you’re a close friend, I think I’ve brought up Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return quite often in our conversations. In the book, Mircea Eliade discusses how rituals and myths serve as a way to "return" to the origins of creation. Acts of repetition in ritual ensure continuity, restoring order and meaning to life.

He writes extensively about the cyclical and eternal nature of time, which he describes as “sacred.” Sacred time is experienced through rituals and religious acts, allowing participants to transcend the ordinary and reenter the mythic “time of origins” (Illud Tempus). In contrast, profane time is linear, historical, and tied to everyday existence, marked by its continuity and irreversibility. The way we choose to engage with these conceptions of time profoundly shapes how we structure our reality and the meanings we ascribe to cycles and “returns.”

In Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass, a book I read on the eve of the New Year, writer and acclaimed teacher of myth Martin Shaw writes about metaphors, stories, ways of reclaiming our wild imagination, and ways of deepening into “bone memory,” as he calls it. He describes the return as the “most perilous stage” in a story.

“It’s in this rather vulnerable atmosphere we have to remind the villagers that they are, in fact, only two-thirds of the way through the passage. That the most perilous stage is now awaiting them. The return.”

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"It could be that the return is actually when the wilderness vigil becomes the vision quest. It is certainly when - let it be so - we pray most fervently the wilderness epiphany becomes a village wisdom. That's no easy thing. Your average community usually aims to get the mystic on a spit as quickly as possible, rather than accommodate the crooked little insights the vigiler may return with. Toughen up, darlings, don't go easy."

Martin Shaw

Reading Smoke Hole reminded me of an old Romanian ballad, one that I couldn’t wrap my head around when I read it years ago in high school: Miorița (The Little Ewe Lamb). In the ballad, the shepherd protagonist learns from his sheep, Miorița, that two other shepherds plan to kill him. Rather than resisting or trying to escape, he embraces his destiny with a sense of peace. He asks Miorița to tell his mother that he has married the "princess of the world" (a poetic reference to nature or death). This depiction connects his death to a return to a harmonious existence within the natural order.

In The Myth of the Eternal Return, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass, and Miorița, deepening is a return—whether to origins, community, or natural order.

On the way to the mountains © Dmitry Gomberg

What are we returning to this year—and what will become a deepening?

This year I want to reclaim my imagination, unburdened by scattered and surface-level attention, "kicking the robbers out of the house" as Martin Shaw puts it.

I’d also love to revisit a few places that have always stirred something deep within me: a spot in the French countryside, another in the British countryside, and one in the Romanian countryside. I’ll return with stories. I promise.

I welcome your emails, notes, and stories. You can also book a call to chat about writing or just to say hi.

Onwards,

Patricia-Andra Hurducaș