Postojna caves
A poem written in Slovenia, July 2025
We stooped into the hush, where limestone dreams
drip in slow syllables. A train pulled us
like penitents through wet cathedral dark;
each wall a psalm etched in calcareous time.
The air, monkish. Cool with remembering.
Drops fell from the ceiling, lucent, slow,
tapping rock like a Morse of the old gods.
Above us, stalactites reached down
like fingers frozen mid-blessing,
and underfoot, their kin rose up;
stalagmites thick as thigh-bones,
rooting blind in eons’ hush,
unsure which way was light.
Seventy million years of drip and patience.
When they began, tyrants with teeth like scythes
trod fern-murk above. Now humans in Gore-Tex
scurry past; chattering, lens-eyed,
a flashbulb century of carbon ghosts,
leaving nothing but breath and ticket stubs.
In the black pools, proteus drifts;
the olm, pale as unspoken thought,
limbless prophet, sightless archivist
of wet underworlds. Its gills flower like memory
of a different ancestry. We are all
micros of the same time,
carried in a swirl of our Solaris,
immigrants of stardust and mistake.
There is a river too: Pivka,
churning in the vein of the cave,
like the unconscious itself,
running slick and silent through us,
moist with old longing.
This is hell. A heaven too.
An absence to be imagined,
as Stevens said, the cave of the cave.
It is Dante’s descent with Virgil
and Blake’s ascent by tongue of flame.
It is Tarkovsky’s ‘zona’,
wet with knowing, where time
slips its watch and dreams in real.
No nation here.
No ego holds in such silence.
All things return:
the carbon breath,
the heat we’ve made,
the earth beneath
pulsing, volcanic, waiting.
And yet:
we sit on benches carved
by dripstone hands,
and feel, in the chill,
a kind of balm.
Not escape but reminder:
the cave is alive.
So are we.
For now.
The Cave as Mirror: What the Depths Reveal
There are places where metaphor becomes mineral. The cave is one of them. It is not simply a space; it is an idea with weight. Plato began the tradition with his famous allegory, where prisoners watch shadows and mistake them for truth. In that image, the cave is delusion. But in other stories, the cave is sanctuary. In Wagner’s Ring, it is the hoarded heart of power and renunciation. In Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, written after visiting Fingal’s Cave, the sea surges through basalt chambers like breath through a lung. In Kubla Khan, Coleridge’s vision of a “cavern measureless to man” gave rise to poetry itself.
When I descended into Slovenia’s Postojna cave this summer, I carried all these echoes with me. But what I met was something simpler, and stranger: time itself, shaped by water.
1. The cave is patient
Stalactites do not hurry. They do not perform. They form drop by drop, molecule by molecule. Every inch is a journal of time. Looking up at the high limestone arches, I thought of other caves I have visited. The sea-gouged caverns in Greece, alive with light. The hidden caves of Northumberland, mossy and wind-carved. Each one a slow undoing. A reminder that endurance is not passive; it is an art.
2. The cave is mind
Freud saw the unconscious as a place of darkness and buried desire. Jung imagined it as a reservoir of symbol and myth. In the cave, both visions converge. The river Pivka, threading through the Postojna system, felt like a metaphor made literal. It hummed like thought just beneath hearing. As Paramananda writes in The Myth of Meditation, true awareness is not an escape from the self, but a grounding in what is already moving within us. The cave holds that truth in stone.
3. The cave is both tomb and womb
Jesus was re-born in a cave. Or so the Gospel says. His burial place was a rock-hewn chamber, sealed and then revealed. This dual symbolism recurs across religions and myths. The cave is the underworld — Hades, Hel, the realm of the dead — and also the birthplace of vision. In Blake’s illustrations of Dante, the descent into Hell is also a journey through the self. The darkness is necessary. In creative practice too, we must go down before we come up.
4. Caves teach us humility
When I visited caves in off the coast of St Vincent in the Caribbean, I stood at the mouth and felt the Atlantic breathing. I felt small. At Postojna, I felt the same. It is easy to treat caves as tourist spectacles, but they are not exhibits. They are elders. They are indifferent to us, and this is freeing. They teach us humility. As I explore in The Mindful Creative Writing Teacher, the best writing emerges when we relinquish control, when we listen more than we declare. The cave models this. It says: you do not need to own meaning. You only need to dwell in it.
5. The cave is always with us
Even now, back on the surface, in the whizz and puff of modern life, I carry the cave. Not as memory, but as method. The cave teaches slowness, depth, patience, unknowing. These are not just poetic ideals; they are psychological necessities. They protect us from a surface life that moves too quickly and thinks too narrowly.
Sometimes when I meditate, I try to imagine the cave again: not as escape, but as a return. I picture its hush, its patience, its cool breath against my skin. I sit and remember that stillness is not emptiness, but a kind of presence. That darkness is not the opposite of knowing, but a condition of it. The cave reminds me to soften, to listen, to let meaning emerge slowly, if at all.
The cave does not explain. It holds. It remembers. It waits. It alters itself over centuries, by water, by silence. In its quiet, I hear the long murmur beneath everything: the world beneath the world, the sound of time dissolving stone.
And the cave is not only in the landscape. It is in us. Each of us carries interior chambers: stomach, gut, lungs, skull. We are hollowed and inhabited, full of microbes, moisture, echoes. Inside us, a whole ecosystem pulses, unseen and essential. Our bodies are not separate from the earth, but versions of it: soft caverns of breath and memory, shaped by time and sensation. We are made of the same elements — calcium, carbon, mineral, salt– and we forget this at our peril.
Reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, the Booker-prize winning novel about astronauts on a space-station, reminded me how profoundly alive the planet is, and how intimate its workings are with our own. The earth turns, breathes, adjusts, and dreams, just as we do. It is not background, but body. The cave is not other; it is our own interior mirrored in stone.
We do not need to solve the cave. We need only to sit with it. To feel how it holds us, and how we hold it, in return. To remember that silence can be a teacher, and darkness a kind of balm.
If you like, you might try this:
Sit somewhere quiet.
Close your eyes.
Imagine the cool of stone around you.
Feel the breath of the cave enter your chest.
Let thoughts drip slowly, like water from the ceiling.
Stay awhile in that inner chamber.
Do not hurry to the light.
Let the dark show you what it knows.
We are all returning, slowly, to the source. And the source, perhaps, is already within us.
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