Elated to have nine poems here, in this unparalleled anthology bringing together 94 poets across India—that imagined geography stretching across ancestral spoors & diasporas-- Thank you to Jeet Thayil for listening to that beat, and to Penguin Random House for bringing us the book. Get it here.
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One Sunday in early November of 2021, my friend Alka invited me to come visit her in Chicago. We had just taken a walk through SF's Japanese Tea Garden. In a few days, she was moving to Chicago. I found myself saying—quickly, without premeditation--I'll come if Notre Dame invites me. Can you imagine my delight and amazement then to receive on Thursday a few days later Notre Dame's invite to be a part of its Creative Writing MFA Alumni Symposium. Along with Jackson Bliss, Patricia Hartland, Katie Lattari, Ae Hee Lee, and Blake Sanz, I will be back at Notre Dame on April 20th and 21st to read from my work and talk about life after the MFA. And yes, I will spend a day with my friend in Chicago afterwards. Synchronicities are curious phenomena. Their messages are sometimes less transparent than what the gullible causal mind would have us believe. In the long view, I am curious what is unfolding. Aren't you?
Lisa Dettmer, producer of KPFA's Women's Magazine, interviewed Brenda Salgado and me yesterday, for their series on feminist spirituality. You can hear a recording of the show here.
A few years ago, I picked up the Yoginis' Oracle by Stella Dupuis at the National Museum, New Delhi. I had just been to the National Crafts Museum to talk to someone about Pupul Jayakar, whose phenomenal book "The Earth Mother" had opened a new understanding for me about women as keepers of ritual art traditions in India. I was about to head to Lata Village in Uttarakhand, drawn there both by the stories of the women of Chipko that to me spoke of their holding the links between land, the sacred, and social change; and by Nanda Devi—the goddess and the mountain. In my PhD dissertation, I called this following the snake. Then last year the yoginis alighted into my life. I was entranced by the animal-headed yoginis and the animals cooccurring with yoginis. There was an intuition knocking at me through my studies in anthropology, cultural histories of women, and feminist tantric philosophy. I turned to the incredible work of scholars such as Vidya Dehejia to ground my understandings. I bring these together in my panel presentation at the Symposium of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology—this will also be appearing in print later this year. Through commentary and poetry, I will share my hypotheses and insights on the relationships between yoginis and animals. May the hidden be revealed in a way that serves the planet and our consciousness. May the links between us and all our kin be regenerated. May the memories of our pasts and imagination carry us into the future.
I am sitting with an old wound today... around losing my voice. In part ancestral, in part structural and systemic, in part because of planets in retrograde, this wound alchemizes into a place within me that has painstakingly learnt to bead together silence and words—no wonder it was poetry that first gave me voice—and, more recently, to open up to not knowing, trusting that the words will come—a path of surrender. But sometimes it appears as if the words will not come, and I am back to that old flounder/wound, looking at another layer of healing ready to emerge. So, even these moments of disconcertedness are sacred moments. I am here for it all. May both the words and the silence be true. I am remembering that it is okay to not know, to not know what to say, to speak words that are not perfect, to risk disapproval and even indifference, to not be perfect. There is permission for all of it in the void at the heart of the world. Spreadsheets are great to collect, organize information, but cannot take the place of interpersonal communication. Any collaboration that hopes to rise above the purely functional must make time for process. Information stripped of the element of interaction cannot replace, within complex systems, what Nora Bateson terms "warm data"—data that keeps the nest of relations intact. It is a testament to the influence of the machine paradigm that we have come to see giving time to the uncertainty, emergence, and complexity that experiencing the relational process brings us face-to-face with as unnecessary to co-creating with each other. Co-creation—as the instinct of play—asks of us eye-gazing—the ability to connect and synchronize and align with how each of us partnering is moving. Anything else is a low-value offering that is operating in a paradigm that sees us as discrete entities, and promotes disconnection as well as low trust.
While I have worked in a variety of settings, I acknowledge I have different expectations from people who come to me speaking the language of wanting to challenge white cultural norms. I confess to having my heart broken a little when, even there, I see characteristics such as transactional communication, perfectionism, individualism, and fears of open conflict play out. (See characteristics of a white supremacy culture, as adapted from Tema Okun.) AND To acknowledge the other's sovereignty. To acknowledge that Spirit is always steering me in the right direction, and if a collaboration constructed on apparently similar values collapses, it is not a bad thing at all. I move into the knowing of my own commitments, contribution, and values. It is upon the other to know how they did or did not show up—where they turned rigid. I move into taking in the learning that I would like more clarity from potential collaborators early on about how resilient they are when intentions and stated values come face to face with the "slippery mess of variables, changes, and ambiguities." I take in the reminder that I find it hard to move well with rigid people, and that this speaks to hidden forces within myself that, for now, come into play to founder my own equanimity. How do we dive into the depths and go beyond the reach of naysaying inner/outer voices to access our creative knowing? What surprising wisdom already lies within us? Or images? How do we expand the notion of family to include the Earth, ancestors? These were among the questions we looked at in today's writing class.
Writing is not therapy—but in this class I do hold writing within a psychospiritual container. Which is why it warmed me to get this message from a student as we were wrapping up: "This class is like therapy tonight, only useful therapy, gut deep." El cenote is available to us to redream the world! In preparation for tomorrow's lecture for the Writing Spiritual Memoir class, I have been struck by the following definition of culture from Seneca First Nation member and psychologist Terry Cross: "culture is one group or people’s preferred way of meeting their basic human needs.” I wonder what basic needs a dominator culture tries to meet—the authoritarian, repressive, warring strands that have been showing up in culture. Retaliation is not a basic human need. Love is. Excluding is not a basic human need. Belonging is. Punishment is not a basic human need. Understanding is. How do we meet the deeper needs for love, belonging, acceptance, and peace that are foundational to being human—or, shall we say, to having a human experience in a sentient, interdependent universe—when there is fear around claiming them? How do we return to a remembering of our interconnectedness when the paradigm we inhabit emphasizes cool individualism, and our lives have only partially retrieved our true relational embeddedness? Without such a relational paradigm to uphold us, we are all trying to survive—having arrived into a canny illusion of such lack, such incompleteness--sometimes striving merely to complete the picture, close the gaps. I feel the grief. And then something rises up: a memory, a welling up. Even if it seems that the world is constantly trying to take away or push back on our wholeness, it is a good thing wholeness is there, always—without beginning or end—sourced in a stream that resembles most closely, perhaps, love. Even with all the unresolved/unaddressed grief from the illusion of alienation, this is our inalienable right—beyond any frameworks of knowledge. Can we shape our cultures to reflect it? My talk from #2021PoWR. The video of the talk is here. On the panel with me were Dr. Alka Arora, Kimberly J. Davis, and Kris Malone Grossman. In 1893, Swami Vivekananda started his opening speech at the 1st Parliament of World Religions thanking the sisters and brothers of America. And, I was thinking, how amazing it is that this interfaith convening has been happening since then, recognizing that the solutions to the problems that the world faces will not come from any single entity or tradition, but from the space of dialogue and collaboration. In the face of what we are facing globally today, there is often a tremendous pressure to act. And, what’s needed right now is being able to act from our inner guidance—that our actions be vitalized by knowing rooted in embodied, holistic modes of cognition. Women’s spirituality emphasizes multiple ways of knowing. For too long, the dominant, often androcentric verbal/intellectual/analytical modes have been seen as having all the answers. We can see that these give only incomplete answers. Acknowledging this, we need to practice and get comfortable moving differently, from a place of embodied, depth-based intuition. Instead of letting ourselves be pressured by external codifiers that signal we behave in certain expected ways, it time we find, grow, trust our inner authority. The old pacts that divided our world into camps of right and wrong—us and them—have proven to be inadequate. Insofar as they are affiliated with models of justice that are often rooted in a colonial/western metaphysics, they have divisive aftereffects. We need to break these pacts, and realign ourselves with a different way of moving in the world, seeing me/us/them not as right or wrong, but holding the recognition of our deep interconnectedness—that we are part of the same becoming--stream—that the same energy that created every other form of the world made us, and vice versa. Any real influence we can have on each other’s thinking and actions must also come from this place—this confluence—of interconnectedness. Such a notion of activism sees us as braided—not only with other humans, collectives, tribes—but also with the nonhuman and more-than-human elements embedded in our pluriverses. The remembering of our interconnectedness is a remembering of who we are. When we know who we are, we can draw on the power to create change from a story that stretches back and forward across generations, across cultural/geopolitical formations, across the membrane of memory, across species. It is time, also, to look at all the ways in which we have been socialized to see ourselves as powerless; to ask ourselves, who is invested in keeping us powerless, who benefits from our experiencing powerlessness? Which systems? It’s time to divest from those systems, and to create new systems that come together not as linearities—as blocks—but as movements. Borders of movements are continually shifting—making possible crossovers into heretofore unknown/unborn freedoms. It’s time to revision dualistic philosophies—every ecological node where the imperative of perceiving phenomena through an either/or lens created splits in our own being. In Saktic Tantric philosophy, it is the dance of the still and the active principle—Shiva and Shakti—continuing since time immemorial—that gives birth to life as process. This dance is the mystery at the core of All-That-Is, it is the story of wholeness—the incipient, in potentia, unformed, as well as the potentiated, the formed, at different stages of dissolution. Shakti—as the primordial cosmogenetic energy—forms the ground of the Absolute. Every wave or vibration emanating from the ground re-creates the pluriverses. The Absolute is eternal, and changing. Every activation—creative action—mirrors the inexhaustible stores of possibility and energy in the Void, the dark face/phase of the Mother. Every ripple of energy arises from the desire-body of Shakti, aspecting three forms of the Goddess: sthula (material), sukshma (subtle), para (supreme). In the tremendous need of the world, it is not the size of the action that matters—it is how we open our hearts to the world, embodying the mutability—the seasonality—that is an intrinsic part of our arising from the Source. Sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michaelangelo (photographed today at the Sistine Chapel Exhibition).
The first Sibyls—the "Black Doves"—came from a long lineage of African prophetesses. A decolonial perspective on art history would talk about the bodies in Renaissance art. Decolonizing herstory would mean bringing the story back of women whose prophecies were appropriated by the Church. |
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