ode to the wrathful goddess

grieving in an unfeeling world

Disclaimer: I wrote this piece yesterday morning, on the fourth day of the Hindu festival of Navratri, a nine-night celebration of the Goddess Shakti or Maa Durga. On the fourth day they celebrate the aspect of the Goddess known as Kushmanda. Kushmanda is credited with creating the world with her Divine smile.

“The sun gives life to the world and goddess Kushmanda herself is the power of the Sun and is the source of all energy when she resides within the core of the Sun God. It was to create a balance in the universe and provide life to all living beings from the Sun rays, her power gives the sun its capability to give life to everyone as she herself is Shakti.” (wikipedia.org)

Trigger Warning: this piece contains strong language.

I lit my candles this morning, before dawn, to the haunting echoes of howling coyotes. They are calling in the winter and snow, the cold northern winds. It was still dark when I went outside and the unshakable fucking beauty of twinkling stars made me want to cry.

This morning, all I wanted to write about was all the fracturing, rippling, body-mind heartbreak of the world. I wanted to write about the isolation of new mothers and total breakdown of the familial web, support and reliability; I wanted to write about the cries of our children, the ghosted village, the generational traumas passed on as “normal” and “cultural”, the apparently billions of humans overpopulating the earth and the simultaneous experience of total aloneness and heart-wrenching survival pains of young families in America. “I’ve basically been in survival mode since my child’s birth,” I’ve heard mothers say. I wanted to write about how often “coping” is labeled as “parenting” and how the cycle fucking continues unless we, collectively, decide to do something about it.

I wanted to write about the hundreds of thousands of birds dropping dead from the skies in Norway, Australia, Greece, Peru, Canada; I wanted to ask why the fuck the public refuses to feel and see that the world is under attack. I wanted to write about Israel. Gaza. Armenia.

I am a woman. I am a bleeding woman, in the forest. I am a bleeding woman, in the forest and I am feeling. I am feeling all the women who are bleeding on this earth, the women whose bleeding is grieving, and whose grieving is bleeding and whose children are bleeding and grieving in a country whose grandparents are missing. I wanted to write about all the stupid fucking new age people who “don’t want to get emotionally involved”. I wanted to write about the thieves of the earth, of politics, of the human heart. The thieves of the water, the sky. The thieves of Paonia politics. The thieves of Democracy. The thieves of the medical establishment. The thieves of big pharma and big agriculture. The thieves of our children, our sovereignty, our Right to Life, our right to free speech, our right to bear arms. I wanted to write about all the things that get people de-platformed from the internet these days. The videos of people shooting fiery arrows into the forests of California and Oregon. The German panel of scientists finding alarming abnormalities swimming in the liquids of the “vaccine”. The mind thieves of facebook, instagram, youtube and twitter. The Sunday morning news thieves. The war thieves. The compulsive liars and corrupt psychopaths running the world. And the stupid fucking people that still believe it all and carry on buying shit from China, who owns us, and watching Netflix, who programs our thinking and our complacency.

I wanted to write about all of this bitterness and heartbreak and what-the-fuck-ness.

And then I took the stupid fucking goats for a walk in the wilderness.

The sun was coming down so fucking beautifully though the junipers. It illuminated the mullein seed heads and all the webs connecting the juniper branches to the cattails, to the saplings, to the sage leaves; the webs connecting fucking everything to everything. The goats nibbling on some wild aster, the puffy seed pods bursting open and flying all over them in the still and quiet forest. The still-green willows. The puddles of water. The shafts of light beaming down through the forest. My sleeping daughter on my back. My soft weeping self.

(Everything you say, think and do, the Timekeeper told me, is seeding reality for the next 26,000 years.)

Stupid fucking goats, so beautiful in the morning light. Webs connecting everything. Women feeling women across the earth. Feeling the aliveness of the next generation on my back. Watering the forest. Staying alive.

Sometimes, I don’t know what to do, or say, or think.

It’s a tall order to BE CONSCIOUS in these times. To be aware of the fucking atrocities, the lies and corruption, EVERYWHERE (how come the US government was able to send out an “emergency test” to every fucking phone in America, but no emergency responders were available to save children from burning alive in their homes on Maui??). To simultaneously stay centered in the heart. To stay centered in the breath, breathing in the fucking pain and lies and corruption of the faceless cowards behind the scenes, and to stay calm, in love, in faith to Life, breathing out Trust in the Good. To keep holding to the Vision.

It doesn’t mean we don’t grieve. 

We are stupid to think we can’t or shouldn’t grieve. My auntie once said, “We wouldn’t have tear ducts if we weren’t supposed to cry.” Most of us are dealing with many generations of repressed grief and trauma. Fucking cry. Bleed and cry. Weep for humanity. Weep for the earth. Weep for the women and children whose daily experience is hell. Weep for the government-sponsored drug drops in the cold cement streets of LA. Weep for the fathers who can’t see their children. Weep for the disappearing children. Weep for the laboring women in prison who never get to hold their babies. Weep for the people who think they can own the earth and her people. Weep for the birds.

How are we supposed to move through to the next 26,000 years without weeping? If we are to transform from one world to the next, how are we to do so without breaking? We must break. We must crack the fuck open to SEE the truth of this world, so we can acknowledge the extent of the wreckage. We must break and grieve and sink to the deepest depths so that we can reach that truest, oldest, endless source of compassion and love that fills the eyes of Sages across the Earth. 

So we can transform. So we can move on.

So we can mend the heart of humanity from the toxic ash of this dark age.

In reverence to the Sun and unapologetically wrathful,

I love you.