Part 1: Power in Depth

Finding home in the space between the surface and the deep.

This is part of a three-year exploration of the Siren archetype involving moving from survival to stillness, and finally, to sovereignty.

The Siren has been an archetype that I’ve been dancing with for a while. More recently, I’ve been trying to embody her not as a myth of seduction, but as a master of the depths.

She doesn’t fear the deep water because she knows that the depth is where her power is rooted.

But even the Siren has moments where the surface feels very far away.

That’s where I’ve been living. Between leaving and arriving. Between depth and surface.

I’ve held this with gratitude, but also impatience, fear, longing, and a quiet kind of grief.

Floating here, I’ve realized how often I orient toward loss—even when I am standing in the center of possibility.

It is a survival reflex. When hope has historically been the precursor to disappointment, protection becomes a default frequency. I scan the horizon not for sunrise, but for storm, and using past hurt like a lens that tints everything it touches.

It is confirmation bias trying to look like safety.

We are taught that growth is alchemy: turning leaden pain into golden hope, or forcing grief into meaning.

We are told to heal so the bruises fade, to let go so our hands are empty enough to receive something new.

But what if I stopped trying to fix this feeling?

Maybe I don’t need to force hope and pain into resolution just yet. I don’t need to reconcile expansion with protection.

Like the Siren, who knows both the pressure of the deep and the pull of the shallows, I can learn to hold both without forcing them into agreement. I am learning not to flee either.

She doesn’t resolve contradiction. She inhabits it.

I can give grief a place at the table. Let it speak without becoming prophecy. There is space for intuition here, too, which is felt without needing a conclusion. The bruise can exist without meaning it is permanent.

I so often rush to assign meaning, to decide the ending of a chapter before I’ve finished the page. I want to know: is this a tragedy or a triumph?

But the Siren knows the ocean is both and does not ask it to be otherwise.

Right now, I am practicing the art of receiving what is actually here.

Not what fear predicts. Not what memory repeats. Not what trauma expects.

Just this. Just now.

Staying in the water I’m in, without forcing it to become anything else.

Always,
Your Trusted Friend ❤

The Siren Trilogy: The Original Archetype (2023) | Part I: Power in Depth | Part II: The Physics of the Rise | Conclusion: The Sovereign Siren