What the Panther Showed Me

A descent into the Underworld—

The Obsidian Portal

I was sitting at the edge of a lake in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. It was afternoon. The light danced on water in celebration of a day spent immersed in quietude and reflection.

I had been listening to the story of Persephone as I walked from my doorstep to the waterside — how she was taken into the underworld, how she grieved it, how she learned to reign there. How it felt in some ways, connected to what Covid had done to my life. How it led me far from home, to a place I hardly knew, so that I could find the depths of my soul through the connection of body and land.

I had read somewhere that when you sit at the edge of a lake, you can ask her to visit you.

I closed my eyes. I asked.

What happened next changed how I understand the relationship between the inner world and the outer one.

But I need to take you back to the beginning of that day. Because what happened at the lake was only possible due to what happened first, in the dark, beneath the roots of an oak tree, several flights below the surface of the earth.

You cannot find what is buried by looking for it.
You have to descend.
You have to be still enough that the shadow comes to you
on its own terms.

I — THE OAK TREE

It began with drumming.

I was guided through a shamanic journey — eyes closed, drumming music as my anchor — and I found myself standing before an old oak tree. At its base was an opening. Not large. Something about the size of a fairy door, carved naturally into the wood, as if the tree had always held it there, waiting for someone to notice.

I stepped through.

Inside, a spiral staircase descended into the earth beneath the tree. I watched my bare feet find each step — one at a time, unhurried. The air inside was cool, smelling of earth, exotic foliage and the dampness of an ancient site. Above me, the sounds of the street grew faint. Then fainter. Then gone entirely.

Several flights down — more than I expected — my feet found a cold stone landing. River rock, smooth and solid. A doorway stood at its edge, opening outward into something I could not yet see.

I stepped through.

II — THE JUNGLE

The inner earth was nothing like I had imagined.

It was lush. Beautifully alive. Tall trees with leaves so dark green they almost held light rather than reflecting it. Exotic birds called from somewhere I couldn’t see — their voices echoing through the canopy like they were answering questions no one had asked aloud. The air was heavy. Tropical. A jungle.

I was standing on a dry mud path, my bare feet reading every grain of it. There was something about the contact — skin to earth, no barrier between us — that felt like the most honest thing I’d done in a long time.

I began to walk. And almost immediately, I felt it.

I was being watched.

Not threateningly. Not urgently. But with a focused, patient attention that I could feel along the back of my neck and the length of my spine. I slowed my steps. I didn’t search. I simply became aware.

Slowly, the shadows behind the leaves began to move. Something discreet. Something deliberate. Moving in a way that told me it had been there long before I arrived — that I was the one being assessed, not the other way around.

Then it stepped through the majestic layers of heavy leaves.

A panther. Black as obsidian stone. Its coat carrying the same quality of light as polished jet —deep and luminous, like something alive lived just beneath the surface of it.

It moved toward me without hurry. And as it came close — close enough that I could feel the displacement of air around it, close enough that I held perfectly still so as not to interrupt whatever was happening — I felt the silken edge of its fur brush against my leg.

I exhaled slowly. I greeted it in my mind.

The greatest initiations do not announce themselves.
They simply arrive — patient, unhurried,
watching you from the leaves
until you are still enough to be trusted.

III — THE GREETING

The panther looked up at me.

Its eyes were green. Piercing in a way that bypassed thought entirely and went somewhere older. Curious. Contemplative. It was taking me in as fully as I was taking in its energy — and I understood, in that moment, that this was a mutual recognition. Not a vision. A meeting.

Then its attention shifted. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, its gaze turned forward — as if directing mine.

I looked up.

A few feet ahead, a woman was taking shape in the space between the trees. She had been there, I sensed, since before I arrived. Watching. Waiting. She had black, silken hair — the exact quality of the panther’s coat. And green eyes that held the same piercing intelligence, the same ancient knowing.

They were counterparts. I knew it instantly, the way you know things in the inner world — not with your mind but with something deeper and faster than thought.

She looked at me for a long moment. And then she nodded.

Not a bow. Not a welcome in any language I could name. Simply: you may proceed.

The honor of it moved through me like a current. I had been seen, assessed, and accepted — not because I had done anything to earn it, but because I had been willing to descend. Because I had been still enough for the shadow to come to me. Because something ancient inside of me knew what was to come.

I knew they would stay close. I knew I was not alone here. And somehow, that knowing changed everything about how I moved through what came next.

IV — THE LAKE

The jungle held a lake at its edge.

I walked toward it — the panther moving somewhere nearby, the woman a presence at the edge of my awareness, the birds still calling from the canopy above. The water looked the way water looks at the border between evening and night. Deep. Still. Holding something.

I found a rock at the water’s edge and sat.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. That was perhaps the most honest thing I could say about that moment. I had no agenda. No question. No list of things I was hoping the underworld might hand me.

I simply sat. With the water. With the land. With the impossibly alive quiet of a place that operated by entirely different rules than the surface I’d left behind.

And that was enough. More than enough.

I felt welcome. I felt held. I felt — for the first time in longer than I could name — that I was sitting exactly where I was supposed to be. On the edge of the unknown, but never alone. My guides were nearby. I could feel them. The panther somewhere in the trees. The woman somewhere close. Both of them patient. Both of them certain I would find what I needed.

When I felt ready to return, I didn’t need to be told how. I simply rose, walked back through the jungle, found the doorway, and climbed the stone stairs — one flight, then another, then several more — until I stepped back out through the base of the oak tree into the room I’d been sitting in.

At the threshold, I bowed.

They stood there. Both of them. Still. Watching me go with an ease that told me they had always known I would return when I was ready. That they would be there when I did.

What they gave me was not a message. Not an instruction. Not an answer to any question I had thought to bring.

They gave me an image. The panther and its counterpart — seared into my mind so completely that they have accompanied me on every journey I’ve taken since. Not as memories. As presences.

The underworld does not give you what you think you need.
It gives you what you’ve buried.
And sometimes what you’ve buried
is the very thing that was trying to protect you all along.

V — LAKE GENEVA

That afternoon, I walked to the lake.

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Real water. Real rock. Real light moving across a real surface in the way that light does in late afternoon when it’s decided to be generous.

I had been listening to the story of Persephone. The myth of her descent — how she was taken into the underworld, how she learned its geography, how she came to understand that what had been done to her without her consent had nonetheless given her a power nothing on the surface could have offered. She knew both worlds. She moved between them. She reigned.

I had read that if you sit at the edge of a lake, you can ask her. That the water is a liminal space — a threshold between what is seen and what is not — and that she is at home in liminal spaces.

I found a rock at the water’s edge. It looked like steps leading into the lake — naturally formed, as if the land had arranged itself into an invitation. I recognized it immediately. It was the rock from the journey that morning. The same quality. The same feeling. The inner world and the outer one, rhyming.

I closed my eyes. I asked.

What came was not dramatic. It was precise.

I felt a tunnel of energy form between myself and the water’s edge — a corridor of presence, narrow and specific, like a channel that had always been there but required asking to open. And through it, she came.

Her frequency was different from my jungle guide. Where the woman in the inner earth had been fierce and certain — green-eyed, direct, testing — Persephone arrived softly. Almost gently. There was a regality to her that didn’t announce itself. It simply was. The way old power tends to be.

She met me in the liminal space between the rock and the water. And when she was close enough, she reached forward and placed something around my neck.

I looked down.

An amulet. The shape of a cone, tapering to a point that rested directly over my heart. Metal detailing around its edges, intricate and ancient-feeling. And inside it, something. A vessel. Something held within it that felt like it carried intention, like it had been made to contain.

She didn’t speak in words. She communicated in the way of the inner world — in knowing, in felt sense, in the kind of understanding that arrives whole rather than being assembled piece by piece.

She was showing me what I was going to make.

I had been exploring sacred jewelry — drawn to it, circling it, feeling that there was something there I hadn’t yet reached. She was reaching it for me. Showing me how to infuse an object with the energy of an intention. How to make something that carried a frequency. How to create a vessel that held, the way her amulet held, the way the hive holds honey — containing something precious so that it can be carried and offered.

She placed it around my neck and told me, in the language of the liminal: take it with you.

So I did.

This is what the Obsidian Portal teaches, if you are willing to descend into it.

Not the confrontation you imagine — the one where you face your darkness alone, where the shadow is something to be defeated or integrated or managed. The real confrontation is quieter than that. It is the moment you stop performing the search and simply become still enough to be found.

The panther was always there. The guide was always watching. Persephone was always at the water’s edge, waiting for someone to ask.


The buried power the Obsidian Portal promises is not something taken from you that you have to fight to recover. It is something that has been waiting — patient, unhurried, tending itself in the dark — for you to be ready to receive it.


You don’t descend to confront your shadow.


You descend to be introduced to it.


And when you are — when the shadow steps out of the leaves and brushes against your leg and looks up at you with green eyes that see everything you’ve tried to hide — you will understand that it was never your enemy.


It was your guide.


It has always been your guide.

It was simply waiting for you to come down far enough to meet it.

Arrive. Remember. Rise.
— Martine Wareham

Photo By: Thomas Williams