Where the Light Touches Down
Thirty Days of Radical Acceptance & Reclamation
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Last Updated: June 30, 2025
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Final Word
Shadow work and spiritual reflection can be powerful, transformative, and deeply healing; but they are not a replacement for trauma-informed, professional care.
Please take good care of yourself. If anything you read here resonates in a way that feels overwhelming or destabilizing, pause and seek appropriate support. You are not alone.
With respect and care,
Terrance LaCrosse
The Descent Is Holy
How“Romancing the Shadow” by Connie Zweig, PH.D. and Steve Wolf, PH.D. Helped Me
Day 18: Journaling Chapter 9: Midlife as Descent to the Underworld and Ascent of the Lost Gods
5 And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see.
And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
6 And I heard a voice… saying, A measure of wheat for a penny… and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
Revelation 6:5–6
Four years ago, I didn’t know I was beginning a descent. I thought I was just trying to survive.
I had lost my job. My health was fraying. Old anchors of identity, every role I had worked decades to embody had started unraveling. At first, I did what I always did: I tried to fix it, explain it, spiritualize it, outperform it. But nothing worked. Not the affirmations. Not the over-functioning. Not the procrastination. Not the resume rewrites or the self-help podcasts or the “I’m fine, just tired” rehearsals.
One night in that hollow season, I journaled something simple, almost flippant:
“I think I’m being dismantled.”
That’s when Romancing the Shadow came back into my life. I had read it a couple years earlier, but now Chapter 9 hit with the weight of scripture. Titled Midlife as Descent to the Underworld and Ascent of the Lost Gods, it reframed my unraveling entirely. This wasn’t collapse. This was consecration. This wasn’t exile; it was pilgrimage.
The Black Rider’s Last Ride
I was nearing the close of what I called “the Black Rider” week, the third horse of Revelation’s vision:
“And lo, a black horse… and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand…” (Rev. 6:5)
The Rider in Black had come to weigh. He showed up not with a sword, but with scales. At this point in my shadow work, I was being asked to weigh the cost of my survival strategies, to include all the masks, the martyrdom, the perfectionism, the quiet rage, the chronic over-giving. They had all worked, in a way. But at what price?
This was no longer about slaying dragons. This was about measuring grief. Measuring loss. Measuring me.
And the myths were waiting.
Descent of Persephone: What Was Taken
The first figure to rise from the depths of my reading and my soul, was Persephone. We all know the story, or at least its sanitized version: a maiden picking flowers is abducted by Hades, lord of the underworld, and taken to be his queen. Her mother, Demeter, the goddess of harvest, mourns until the earth withers. Eventually, a deal is struck: Persephone will return to the surface for part of the year, and descend for the rest.
What isn’t always emphasized is this: Persephone becomes Queen of the Underworld. Not hostage. Not ornament. Queen.
When I read that again, through the lens of this chapter, I saw my own story in hers. There had been parts of me, my wildness, intuition, sensuality, sacred rage, that were stolen away when I was young. I didn’t give them up consciously. They were taken by shame, silence, religion, rejection. And when I went looking for them later in life, I had to go down. Into memory. Into grief. Into places no one else could walk with me.
But like Persephone, I wasn’t just a victim of descent; I became sovereign in it. I started to reclaim the pieces I had once felt ashamed of. And maybe, just maybe, I started to feed the soil of my life with those seeds I’d swallowed.
Inanna: What Was Surrendered
Then came Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, who chooses to descend.
Unlike Persephone, Inanna’s journey is not forced. She descends into the underworld to visit her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead. But to enter, she must pass through seven gates. And at each gate, she must give up something: her crown, her jewelry, her robes, her symbols of power. She arrives naked, stripped of everything.
Eventually, she is struck dead. Hung on a hook like meat. And yet, she returns. Changed. Deepened. A fuller embodiment of both life and death, love and shadow.
This myth undid me. Because I had been trying to descend while clinging to all my ego’s ornaments: my titles, my cleverness, my spiritual insights, my social masks. But real shadow work doesn’t let you accessorize. It asks for all of it. All your ideas of control, all your trophies, all your image.
Inanna’s descent mirrored my own slow, painful surrender of identity. The masks I’d worn to protect myself in the corporate world, the hyper-functioning I clung to in my marriage, the parts of me I refused to mourn. One by one, they were taken. And I was hung on the hook of my own undoing. But somehow… I lived.
A Journal Post From The Past
If I am to honest, when I lost my job, my health, and parts of my identity during the pandemic, it felt like death.
Not just of a career. Not just of certainty. But of a whole way of being. I thought I was falling apart.
Turns out, I was falling in.
Into the well. Into the wound. Into the parts of me I’d left behind to be loved, accepted, praised, or passed over.
What I thought was the end was actually the door.
Midlife didn’t ruin me. It ruined my illusions. And now, I’m writing from the place where the stories I buried are finding their way back home.
Midlife Is Myth Breaking Through
Chapter 9 taught me that the midlife “crisis” isn’t a malfunction; it’s a myth trying to break through. A personal myth. A deep invitation to stop playing the story I inherited and to begin living the one my soul has been aching to tell.
The authors write:
“The shadow that rises in midlife is not here to ruin you. It’s here to reunite you with yourself.”
And they are right.
I didn’t need to fix myself. I needed to remember who I was before I buried those sacred parts. I needed to meet the gods I had hidden.
My inner Hermes.
My lost Dionysus.
My exiled Artemis.
I was to ask them what they needed from me now. Not to dominate, but to integrate.
It wasn’t a breakdown. It was a return.
Reclaiming the Lost Gods
In my journals from that time, I listed all the “gods” I had suppressed in order to be accepted:
• My creativity, deemed impractical
• My intuition, dismissed as naïve
• My sensuality, shamed and feared
• My grief, avoided like the plague
• My rebellion, punished and repressed
I’d left them in the cellar of my psyche, hoping they’d stop making noise. But midlife opened the door and they came out hungry.
Welcoming them back wasn’t tidy. It didn’t happen overnight or with a single prayer. It happened through writing. Through crying. Through letting myself know who I was not anymore. And in that space of unknowing, something holy began to bloom.
The Promise of Renewal
I didn’t know I was meeting my shadow at midlife. I thought I was losing my edge. Losing time. Losing traction. What I didn’t see yet was the promise beneath the pain. I did not know the quiet vow the soul makes when everything we built on ego starts to fall apart. The shadow wasn’t there to punish me. It showed up to return me. What I had spent decades outrunning, all the grief, longing, mystery, voice; now came with keys in its hands. Midlife was not a breakdown. It was a breaking open.
New Priorities
At first, I resisted the shift. I had lived by my calendars, my accomplishments and goals. Suddenly none of that soothed me anymore.
What used to matter didn’t.
What didn’t used to matter suddenly did.
The new priorities weren’t flashy or even nameable. They came like whispers. A quiet urge to sit still. To feel more. To tell the truth. I didn’t know it then, but the architecture of my life was rearranging itself around the soul’s priorities, not society’s.
My Descent
The descent came disguised. It didn’t announce itself like a myth. Hell , it looked like insomnia, irritability, a gnawing sense of dislocation. But when I remembered Persephone’s story, how she was taken to the underworld and emerged as Queen, I began to shift.
What if I hadn’t been cast down?
What if I’d been called?
Persephone didn’t stay a victim. She became the one who could move between worlds. And I was beginning to learn that real healing happens underground.
The Call
Then came Inanna. Her myth hit different. She wasn’t dragged, but rather, she chose to descend. Stripped of every royal adornment, Inanna reached the gates of the underworld naked and alone. And still she went.
That myth met me in the most honest way. I, too, was being stripped- of titles, personas, protections.
And something deeper in me said, yes.
This wasn’t a fall.
This was a reckoning.
A sacred initiation into the truth of who I really was beneath the roles.
The Changing of the Gods
The phrase “changing of the gods” haunted me. The book suggested that depression in midlife isn’t a failure of the psyche; it’s a reordering of it. The gods I had served were fading: approval, performance, success. And new ones were stirring: intuition, artistry, mystery, the longing for communion.
This wasn’t pathology. It was the psyche insisting on evolution. My depression wasn’t evidence of weakness. It was evidence that the old gods had died, and the new ones needed names.
Body Speaking Shadow
And then, the body spoke. Not metaphorically, literally. Dis-ease manifested physically. My sleep collapsed. I forgot names and ran out of words mid-sentence. The body became the sacred messenger of my soul’s discontent. It was shadow speaking in somatic code.
And the moment I stopped fighting my body, I started hearing it.
What needed rest?
What needed grief?
What needed to stop pretending it was fine
Reclaiming the Unlived Life
And beneath it all, there was the unlived life, the path not taken, the voice not used, the sacred thing that didn’t get to come forward when I was too busy surviving.
Midlife gave me back those fragments. Not as regrets, but as invitations.
I found creativity I’d left behind at 17.
Dreams I’d hushed in my 30s.
Parts of me that had waited years to be loved into the light. The “lost gods” weren’t just mythic figures.
They were names for my own sacred exiles.
The Rider in Black
And now, as I prepare to move beyond this chapter and this horse, I want to say something about the Black Rider. Not as judgment, not as fear, but as grace.
The Rider in Black comes when the scales no longer balance.
When the inner life demands to be weighed honestly, measured fully, restored to sacred proportion.
This rider doesn’t destroy—it reveals. It asks: what matters now? And will you let the truth cost you your illusion?
🪶Journal Prompts from My Old Notebook
The following questions were the doors upon which I once more knocked.
What has midlife (or a major transition in my life) stripped away from me? What was left when all the old names and roles fell away?
What “god” of inner force or gift, did I bury long ago in order to survive? What would it look like to welcome it back now?
What myths, fairy tales, or spiritual stories reflect my own descent? What symbols or figures do I now see in myself?
If this isn’t a crisis, but a calling, what is life asking me to become in this season? What truth is emerging from the shadow
A Final Thought
The Black Rider’s gift is perspective. He weighs my soul’s true cost. Every day. And myth, when understood not as fantasy but as soul-mapping, shows me how descent leads to depth.
I found myself somewhere in my own midlife night, losing things I thought I needed, meeting shadows I hoped never to see. Still I needed to know this:
This descent is holy.
I am not broken. I am breaking through.
And the stories and the gods I buried are not gone.
They are waiting to be remembered.
So I am letting this be the season I stop resisting the fall.
There is gold in the dark.
And where the light touches down is where I will rise… with a bouquet of life in my arms.
TW
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