There is a part of the Persephone myth I find myself returning to: the moment before she is taken.

She is in a meadow with her companions, reaching for a flower she has never seen before. The ground opens, and Hades carries her away. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the narcissus has been made to bloom as a snare for her. She doesn’t know that as she reaches for it.

The moment itself is so ordinary. Persephone isn’t careless, and she hasn’t wandered somewhere she shouldn’t be. She is picking flowers. Then, without warning, the shape of her life changes.

We often tell stories about change as if they begin with a decision: a door someone chose to walk through, a risk they knowingly took. But some changes arrive while we are doing something familiar. We find ourselves in a life we didn’t choose, trying to understand what happened and what can still be done.

Persephone doesn’t choose the arrangement that follows, either. Her year is divided by decisions made among the gods, and she has to live within the terms they set. The story gives her a place in the underworld, but it doesn’t undo the way she got there.

And then there’s the question of who returns. Persephone comes back to the world above, but the story doesn’t suggest that she simply becomes the girl who was gathering flowers again.

I write about her in The Intimate Afterlife of Myth, and I’d be interested to hear how you read this part of the story: does her return feel like a return to her former life, or the beginning of a life she has to inhabit differently? The Intimate Afterlife of Myth: Ancient Stories for the Inner Life