The Cave is Calling

"Farther up is farther in" - Meggan Watterson

photo by @sralph.l

There is a Cave in the South of France that marks where it is believed that Mary Magdalene spent the last years of her life.

This cave is known as Le Grotte aux Ouefs, or the cave of eggs, and in her life changing work, Mary Magdalene Revealed, Meggan Wattterson shares her experience at the cave — what she heard in Mary’s voice, and what the power of the pilgrimage offered her.

I’ve been on a few pilgrimages in my own life — moments to journey to a physical place that carries a sacred frequency, a history in the land and in. the heart tof anyone who visits. It’s not a retreat necessarily — rather a journey. to an external physical location that mirrors the journey we take within our own journeys, within the energy of our own hearts.

So when the cave of eggs called so clearly at the start of this year, I knew two things with absolute certainty:

1. I’m going

2. I’m not going alone

How utterly terrifying, and utterly exhilarating.

The cave has called to me — it’s echoed in my dreams, beckoned from within and without — and has presented me with one of the most challenging and grounding offerings in my time working with Mary Magdalene — to take that journey from he internal world to the external.

Oftentimes, when I sit in the work of a Magdalene Priestess, I feel frustrated and unclear, I feel terrified and sure, I feel angry and alive, and a lot of times I feel like a failure.

In fact, I’d say that if I had to pick one aspect of my experience of the last few years it’s been a feeling of deep, resolute, and unyielding failure. And while I don’t think that failure is an inherently bad thing — I’d argue that failure is an inherent part of life, it’s not a feeling that I enjoy — and it’s been a big part of my deconstructing and decolonial journey to understand and take apart the pieces of myself that internalize failure as a bad thing — and also internalize that failure as though it’s something that is a full moral platitude.

This work feels risky, it feels uncertain, and at times it feels deeply personal. I’m someone who sits incredibly comfortably in the realm of ideas — and execution, for a variety of reasons can feel stuck and stagnant. So while the Cave of Eggs has called to me I haven’t been sure, before now, if I had the nervous system resourcing to make it happen.

Until it hit me — that I have spent the lsat few years excavating the cave that lives within my own consciousness. I’ve scoured the underworld that lives within my won heart. I’ve familiarized myself with the wisdom of my own wounding. I’ve brought time, attention and care to my own unconscious. And perhaps it isn’t something that I need to make happen — and instead it gets to be something that I allow to happen.

And if I (we) can manage all of this magic within — if I can sit with the demons, navigate the unknown terrain of my own heart, can I not also do that in the external world?

Isn’t the alchemical adage “as above, so below, as within, so without” this exact moment? And isn’t the call of the cave a reflection of a call that’s lived at the center of my own heart — the center of my own womb — the connective webbing of my own breath?

Instead of a strange pilgrimage, to s strange land, is it not the external reflection of my own internal landscape — of our internal landscape?

Is it not a path directly home? A path we know by heart?

Let’s find out together — more details on the 2024 pilgrimage to come —

Edit: dearest gentle reader, I’m writing this update months later after the pilgrimage, and you can find the link to those reflections here: