The retreat to the cave is primal; the cave is refuge, shelter.  Going into it is returning to the womb, negating birth, submerging into shadow and the nocturnal world of nondifferentiation... In the cave there is no time, neither yesterday nor tomorrow, for day and night they are as one.

Mircea Eliade, in Dictionary of Symbolism (Hans Bidermann)

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(4) The Cave  For months after the stent was implanted I felt stunned and out of sorts, not knowing what to do with my life -- or how much life I had left. I felt only half in this world, and half in some ethereal, other-worldly place. In August, six months after my emergency flight to San Francisco, I impulsively decided that it was time to build an underground room, a stone cave. I wanted a quiet, meditative place where I could retreat, out of the intense daylight of the Alaskan summer and away from the noises of the everyday world. I called a friend who worked as a heavy equipment operator, and suddenly, within four hours, there was a deep, gaping hole in my back yard where the lawn used to be. According to my plan, the underground room would be about 10 feet wide by 15 feet long, with half of it in a semi-circular shape. I had never built anything out of stone and concrete before, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Over the next eight weeks, I hauled twelve pick-up loads of rocks, hauled about the same number of loads of sand and gravel, and mixed endless batches of concrete.  Every morning I wondered what I had gotten myself into, and then I worked each day until it was too dark to continue. It was close to the craziest thing I had ever done in my life, and it also felt like exactly the right thing to do. In mid-September, 2001, I went to Spenard Builders Supply, a local hardware store, where I ran into Tom, one of the employees I knew there. Tom was shaking his head in dismay and talking about the events of September 11. “What are you going to do,” he said to me rhetorically, “build a cave?” We poured the concrete ceiling just before the first snow fell in Fairbanks, in early October. The building of this sacred space brought me back to the concrete world; being in the cave is both literally and figuratively a very grounding experience.   February 16, 2007