March 27, 2017 Dear Community, The ancestors sometimes send me signs in dramatic ways. For instance, when they wanted me to go see The Dinner Party

     
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March 27, 2017

Dear Community,

The ancestors sometimes send me signs in dramatic ways. For instance, when they wanted me to go see The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum, they made sure I heard about it thrice in 24 hours. This, after I'd planned a visit to the museum to attend a talk by an Egyptologist that I was finally not able to attend!

There was a reason the ancestors wanted me to visit the installation. I needed to meet the ocean of memories circulating between, connecting us, contained within the radiating center of our yonis. I was filled with awe and reverence for Chicago's own reverence and adoration for these ancestresses, amazons, leaders, creatrixes from her western civilization. I realized she/they were pointing a way for me—a trail that had, with hard work and sustained love, been opened. I've set out, too, to reclaim the sea of female lineages in South Asia. My walk is my own, but these images in the collective waters of memory feed me.

2007 The Dinner Party DIG E2007 Dinner Party 05 PS2 1536x1132
Chicago  Primordian Goddess

Then there was the time when—moonbathing by a glinting, silvered ocean—I felt myself in complete alignment with Nature. I felt myself alive in an immense, intelligent, loving cosmos—right there with Yemaya. I let the ocean submerse my womb. Then we walked towards the embers of a dying fire on the beach: two witches gleaming in this new time, time of possibility. And an ember leapt into a small fire. The ancestors came alive for us and warmed us.

lr-bee-goddess

Bee goddess by Lydia Ruyle

Like in the book, Uprooted—which I first thought was about a wizard named Dragon—the story really turns out to be that of the witch learning to find her way amidst the brambles, in the forest. It does not serve her to follow rigid instructions detailing "proper" magic. She teaches the wizard how to work together, she reminds him that he can collaborate with the more "feminine" ways that are messier, synchronistic, guided, intuitive—and bring about a shift that is somehow more in touch with the whole.

There is always a way. It may take faith. It may take cunning. It nearly always takes the help of our benevolent, protective ancestors—and our own faith in ourselves when we don't hear them responding well to get us to call out to them to do their job. It takes wisdom. Wisdom is the wheel of the goddess, always turning, always in rhythm.

Of course, finding the story(ies) of the witch, the mother(s), motherlines is just the beginning. The task of changing inner and outer structures (and flows) begins now. That we may live as the highest and most fully expressed embodiment of the values of justice, nurturing, healing, self-sovereignty, and love. She would say, I want that.

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Capacity for Will

A few days ago, I was struck anew by Persian and Urdu poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal's radical summons to coming into our own power:

khudi ko kar

In Bal-e-Jibril (Gabriel's Wing), Iqbal writes of khudi again, and my intuition is caught by this fragment, in translation:

"What is Khudi (self)? The inmost secret of life,
What is Khudi (self)? The awakening of creation.
Eternity behind it, eternity before it,
No limit behind it, no limit before it.
Flowing along with the tide of time,
Enduring the suffering of its waves."

Finding my own way into the vast, mystical forest of Islamic philosophy, here is how I translate the Allama's exhortation:

Exalt the secret self such that before every Fate

the Divine asks the Human, What do you consent to?

Saba Taj

Khuwailah, Queen of Swords by Saba Taj

Does the divine lie outside us? Is the divine separate from the human?

Is the call to bring them together in exaltation, in exultation?

—such that the secret self where they meet is where we birth our true power, our true will.

With that, this is

yours,

मोनिका \Monica

P.S.

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Monica Mody is a poet, writer, transdisciplinary theorist, and diviner blending West African Dagara-inspired medicine with earth-ecstatic ancestral teachings. She has been merged with the kontomble, the elemental little people, and seeks to bring their medicine into these times of fire and crisis.
www.modymonica.com | www.artofdivinations.com

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