TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES

Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story / by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor. – Viking, c2009.

As a lifelong devotee of the goddess Persephone, and a relatively recent devotee of Sue Monk Kidd, I couldn’t wait to read this book.  I was not disappointed.  It was like a modern day visit to the Eleusinian Mysteries.  It is a nonfiction account of alternating parallel experiences by Sue and Ann, who are mother and daughter.  I love Sue’s writing, which is deeply thoughtful, honest, original, graceful, and articulate.  The Mermaid Chair and The Secret Life of Bees were fiction; but this memoir radiates the same archetypal power.  Sue and Ann were raised Protestant, and do not claim to be Jungians, Pagans or Wiccans.  Yet they totally connected with the archetypes of underworld, grieving mother, lost daughter, and metamorphosis. They had planned an ordinary journey to Greece and France.  But because they have always taken dreams seriously and diligently record them, the journey opened levels of consciousness they did not anticipate.  They came to realize their experiences as metaphor, which allowed them to comprehend synchronous events that occurred.  Over the course of a two-year journey through a very dark Underworld, they met local people who shared stories and experiences with them, and who essentially gave them back their lives.  The trips to France and Greece do not take them to ordinary tourist venues, but to ancient places of power you will enjoy discovering through their eyes.  Especially unforgettable is the taxi driver who at first did not want to take them to Eleusis, arguing that it had become  forlorn, desolate, and disappointing.  He was reluctant despite their insistence.  But then his eyes fell on the small red glass pomegranates they wore around their necks.  He suddenly became very quiet, and agreed to take them.  The book is filled with surprising legends of miraculous madonnas and old women, icons with a will of their own, trees that tell magical stories, and more.  The magic of this book will work in your soul and show you one way in which Persephone and Demeter emerge from  the underworld and bring with them the gifts of peace and healing.