One overcast spring Sunday during my first year of college, my friend Steve called (on my dorm room phone, not a cell phone, because those didn’t exist in 1992) and asked if I’d be interested in going cave exploring with a bunch of friends. “Hell yeah!” I said, having only a vague idea of what that meant but also a persistent case of FOMO. Steve told me to put on some clothes I didn’t mind getting dirty, bring a flashlight, and see if any of my girlfriends wanted to join us. “OK!” I exclaimed, sure that everyone I asked would be on board with such an outside-the-box adventure. I was dead wrong.
An hour later, there I was with nine of my guy friends hiking through an overgrown field and scrabbling up a rock face, hoping, as the lone female, that I could hold my own. Steve led us to a long pipe about 30 feet up from the bottom of an old quarry. Inside the pipe we could see nothing, and for the first time it occurred to me that we might be entering something’s home, and if so I doubted we’d be welcome guests.
No matter. When you’re the only girl in a crowd of dudes, you don’t chicken out. I swallowed my nerves and twisted my expression into one that I hoped conveyed a confident nonchalance. An “I wiggle my way through pitch-black pipes that might contain snakes all the time, no big deal” type of look. Luckily, when you’re the only female on an adventure that involves some expectation of chivalry, you’re not asked to go first—or last, for that matter. Safely placed in the middle of the pack, we shimmied one by one through the pipe head first, then dropped out of another pipe—feet first this time—into blackness. My apprehension faded quickly as we squeezed through a crack in the limestone walls in single file until the space widened a bit. There, crowded together and buzzing with adrenaline, we tried to get our bearings.
I didn’t really know what to expect. The only time I’d been inside a cave was during a grade school field trip to Howe Caverns in New York. But that tourist attraction had well-lit guided paths and spotlights showcasing layered limestone walls and shiny stalactites and stalagmites. There were knowledgeable tour guides there, and a gift shop that sold polished rocks and stuffed animals.
This was decidedly different. It was the first time I experienced darkness as an actual entity, filling the tunnels and rock-walled rooms, pressing into my chest with its disorienting, heavy presence. Within about 2 feet from the pipe opening, the darkness swallowed me. My flashlight was a joke, a butter knife cutting through a coconut. The beams from others’ flashlights, equally feeble, bounced around me in all directions, everyone desperate to see what was directly above, below, and in front of us. We crept forward, climbing over and between boulders, as the space grew narrower, then wider, until it split in different directions. A true “choose your own adventure.” I kept widening my eyes as if practicing my “surprised” look in a mirror; it didn’t make any difference in what I could see.
We’d made the decision to stick together, with Steve—the only one among us wearing a headlamp—in the lead. He’d been in the cave before and had a slightly better grasp on where we were and where we were going. The rest of us inched along behind him, holding one another’s flashlights or hands when we reached a spot we needed to climb up, through or under. There were passageways with no discernable bottom; we shimmied across them with our feet against one wall and our backs against the other.
All the while we cracked jokes about getting lost forever, and took bets on who was surely moments away from a grisly injury. Our laughter bounced off the dusty walls and echoed into the abyss. Sometimes a tunnel would open up and we’d stand around and marvel inside a room formed a millennia ago, all flashlights pointed at a monstrous rock formation or stalagmite, like the one dubbed The Wedding Cake for its resemblance to a larger-than-life multi-tiered confection.
I don’t know how, with no caving equipment or any real experience, the 10 of us managed to spend hours climbing around the inside of a mountain without getting lost (for too long) or injured. Dumb luck, I suppose. We returned that evening grimy, hungry and exhilarated, charging into the dining hall with minutes to spare before dinner was over. We got more than a few sideways looks at our filthy clothes and flashlights, which was just fine with us. Because several miles away in an abandoned quarry, a cave’s walls were now smudged with our fingerprints. We’d been somewhere that day that hadn’t existed to us before the moment we’d slid through a small steel tube into an illuminating darkness.
More often than not, that’s how it is in life. We notice the flora and fauna of a place, but we don’t think much about where the roots go or what else is beneath our feet. We know something’s there, mostly because others have told us. We “know” because we’ve read books, listened to scientists and spiritual leaders, seen movies, or heard stories about it.
The terrible fact is that many of us live as if we’re on field trips to sanitized, monetized versions of the wildness and beauty of our own existence. We go about our business guided by the cultural norms of the day, adhering to the beliefs handed to us by our parents and religious leaders, striving to check off the boxes of what comprises a “good life”—marriage, family, professional success, social standing—without pausing to consider who made the boxes, or whether they truly fit us.
Twenty years after that first cave exploring trip, I started doing some spelunking inside myself. Beginning to feel the minutes and years of my life ticking down to an unknown deadline, I wrote down a list of big questions I wanted to dig into while I still had time to act on the answers: What is God? What is the soul? Why are we here? My kids had been asking me these questions for some time, and I’d mostly deferred to their dad, an impressively well-read, Methodist minister. But the older we all got, the more indignant I became about wanting to share my answers.
I just needed to figure out what they were.
I started like any journalist would: by doing research. I consumed scholarly books, religious texts, and provocative podcast episodes that unveiled fascinating theories by people far smarter than me on things like consciousness, the soul, and the meaning of life. But at some point I realized I was doing exactly what I’d set out not to do. I was still on that field trip through my own life, looking at the curated displays and informative placards created by others in hopes of learning about myself. I envisioned raising a hand and asking a tour guide what my soul feels like, and in that moment, something like resolve welled up inside.
I have my own heart. My own mind. My own life. And my own soul. What if all the answers I need are in them? What if those are gifts from the divine that I’m supposed to use to explain and deepen my time here?
What if that’s what we’re all meant to do?
Slowly, excitedly, I turned away from all the educational exhibits I’d been studying, ducked under the linked chains that had been keeping me in line, and dove into the darkness just beyond, determined to discover the inner light of my own existence. I sifted through memories, touching the walls of my past to find the answers I’d overlooked the first time I’d been down those tunnels, back when I’d been so focused on all the knowledgeable guides—clergy, scholars, parents, and partners—telling me where to look.
At first it felt daunting, not to mention vague. How do I know when I’ve experienced the soul? How do I know if it even exists?? I wasn’t sure, but I felt a confident nudge from within each time I widened my eyes in the dark and allowed myself to feel the answers, unraveling life’s quiet mysteries one memory at a time.
The answers I began feeling were not the ones that I had been handed as a child and a churchgoer, and doing away with labels I’d worn for so long was unsettling at first. But it turned out that each branch of my newly examined life was mirrored with another underground, and as soon as I opened myself up to seeing new truths in those roots, the universe responded by leading me to other clues and even deeper connections.
In the summer of 2020 I returned to the cave, this time with a man I’d been dating just a few months but with whom I was already in love. It had been 28 years since I’d first climbed up onto that small rock ledge in central Pennsylvania and shimmied through the same pipes into the great unknown.
Twenty-eight years’ difference meant that at first I was just grateful I could still fit through those frustratingly narrow pipes. It also meant that this time I was wearing a headlamp, and carrying a smartphone with a built-in flashlight. I was more mature, more cautious, and much more aware of how my knees and back would handle every next move.
Swiveling my headlamp to take in the cold emptiness, I immediately felt something akin to déja vu, as if I was in a new place that an old friend had told me about in great detail. We marveled for a moment at the near-miracle of just getting inside, then started creeping deeper into the cave. My companion—who’d gone caving there several times over the years—made careful note of which crevice we’d come from each time we maneuvered into another new space.
The slots seemed tighter than I remembered, and the drops more treacherous. The occasional flash of graffiti or garbage irked my “leave no trace” sensibilities, and poked at a deeper resentment: More people had been here than I wanted to admit. The notion of so many other bodies scrambling through those pipes over the years—many carrying cans of Busch Lite or spray paint—threatened to make my romanticized memory less special. I wondered if I would have been bothered by such things when I was 19. I doubt it.
Still, being in there again was exhilarating. The silence underground was even more serene, and the darkness more welcoming, than I’d remembered. Every once in awhile we’d turn off our lamps and just stand side by side, skin tingling. Hidden from the world yet enveloped intimately inside it.
Some of the walls had shifted, or collapsed altogether, in the decades between my visits, and even in the few years since my boyfriend had been there last. Breathtaking cave-ins had covered old passageways, so we hit a few dead-ends to rooms we’d been hoping to see. It was scary, and a little sad. Yet each shift had created new openings, remade age-old formations, and uncovered things we hadn’t seen before. It turned out the landscape that largely appeared the same on the surface was in fact ever-changing deep within.
So it is with the stuff of Life.
What I believe—about love, forgiveness, beauty, prayer, death, and all the rest of it—is an evolving, exceptionally personal thing. But what I’ve experienced about such things is a more reliable and hopefully more helpful way to share what I now understand about life’s deepest powers.
This book is for myself, for my sons, and for anyone else who might be feeling a nudge to start seeking. To set aside the maps others have given you and begin to plot your own soul’s terrain. Because you are the one who knows it best, despite what others would have you believe.
I hope you decide to dig down into the dirt and see for yourself how your roots have grown, and where, and why. It is a thrilling, hopeful and worthy endeavor.
There is so much I still don’t know. But I know your roots touch mine.
(‘Underground’ is the preface to my spiritual memoir. I’m posting it here to hold myself accountable so I can get this personal project over the finish line.)