Brigid claimed me three or four years ago. This Celtic goddess of inspiration, healing, justice, and the waters feels so familiar in essence. This year, I found myself astir with a strange energy before Her ritual. Feeling my heart, feeling the world. As I sat down for a breath, the poem I share below arrived, almost as if it had been waiting for me to pause. And listen. Here, for you, an early version.
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Visiting Brigid

​I'm almost too hot to come to you tonight, Brigid. 
Or is it cold I feel—your fire burning in a village whose 
center has retreated?

My own center is turning around & around 
& I, dervish, uncombed, undone 
in the whirling center of my world

let birds fly out of my mouth 
black birds 
whose messages may be read by our darkest skies--

surely there is light out there to read them by— 
surely the light that burns in the center of our universe is bright 
enough to bring us home.

Bright like your name, Brigid. 
Bright like your songs & spells & forge. 
Bright enough to forge darkness into home.

It is dark tonight. 
This night, night after night 
repeats & we wonder 
after light, lament, fire.

I stumble around for resolution, a neat way 
to part this hot & cold night.

For surely—it cannot but be— 
there is a place where all that draws closer 
draws the color of its own heart into light.

Surely, Brigid, you want me there tonight 
& together we will turn 
hot into cold 
then hot again.

Day after day the wheel turns 
& there is a day that will come 
when day will follow night. 
Surely, your name will draw in the bright 
stars, bright waters 
where dragons still tend to the central fire 
of our village, its linked heart.

I am ...beyond amazed... A friend living in Hazaribagh just posted that his mother left a bowl of kheer out under the harvest full moon to receive "amrit varsha" - very loosely translated as the rain of longevity. Curious and wanting to know more - this is not a ritual I was familiar with - I started watching a youtube video talking about Sharad Purnima (the Hindu name for the harvest moon).  

Less than two minutes in, I had to stop as I remembered... (because sometimes the synchronicities I see in my work with the ancestors and kontomble are so tremendous that my human mind cannot wrap itself around the cooperation, largesse, and grace of the otherworlds)... 

Sunday night, during a divination for a female client in India, I had received and prescribed to her a ritual where she was to offer cooked rice and milk to the upcoming full moon and then partake of these herself. These are the very ingredients that constitute kheer!
 
Well. This was the second incredible synchronicity that occurred during the divination - the first I had already seen transpire on Sunday night and will not repeat here. 

I am wanting to share this second one with you here because even my own mind doubts so often - finds so many wriggleholes through which to doubt the existence of magic - of the layer of coexistence and cofamiliality - and for a while all doubts get humbled when I come across these experiences. We all need to be reminded of magic!   

This is as good a time to announce that I will be beginning Ancestor Writing Circles next month around the full moon. I will send out more details about that soon. In the meantime, in case you are intrigued and/or just know you'd like to be a part of these circles (San Francisco location), please write to me. The ancestors are a-calling... they have "participated" in big, bold ways recently in my life, which is (ahem) a reminder that I can no longer shy away from bold steps myself. Beginning the Ancestor Writing Circles is one. 

Here is to the rain of blessings finding its way into every heart that needs the nectar of comfort, reassurance, belonging - or that needs, merely, the touch of love so it can remember what it is to love again. 

Living--

​It is not always easy to grow an open heart, a deep heart, a true heart—to do it in a way that is organic, authentic. That builds the strong fibers of the inner self, so that the soul grows like a bird and sings—sturdy.

I want this for myself. I want it, because that is my pact with myself.

If the nature of the universe—goddess—our whole selves is love, then surely part of our job in the universe is to be more in love. To grow more unafraid of love, and capable as receivers and transmitters. Aligned, resonant.

There is the knowing, and then we come to the practice of it. The places inside that jump too quickly to walls or judgment or blame for ourselves or others. Triggers, as they rain down, make it all too easy to take to the postures of lack.

Here within our nervous system is an entire story waiting to be retold. How do we move from betrayal and skittishness to a sense of deep intimacy?

"Into me you see"

~ always begins with a desire and willingness to turn our giraffe ears of inquiry, bringing together curiosity and deep listening, to what is at hand.

​I commit to standing my ground, taking a deep soft breath of self-empathy, to look at the mise-en-scene, the inner placement of figures.

To where my jackal guides take me when I don't voice my own needs (because I have convinced myself of my Martyr Sagedom)—as guides are wont to, instigating knowing rebellions against "no-loophole" plans, furthering us on our journeys.

Harmony in our inner/outer worlds depends on our ability to listen and be kind. In that willingness, we find the jewel, the spark of divinity, that only humans encode within. Em-body. This is how we meet our collective destiny.

For we are all flying together.

Which is why, the game is not about transcending our needs but about embracing them. It is about loving them—loving the very humanness that enshrines the possibility of reaching to another, so that the need may become the divine bridge across which we may walk and find ourselves, each other. Crown each other.

What a beautiful game we have chosen to play. Lila.

To share the fullness of ourselves with another requires that instinct to play, and also skills. A willingness to continually upgrade our wayfinding technology as we fall deeper down the rabbit hole. Meet those hardened places within ourselves that want to snag or break our descent, but only: have we willed it--
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​This is a rite of passage ritual that came through for a sister-friend whose daughter is just completing high school - but I can imagine it being useful for our daughters and youth needing seeing and recognition at any stage. Or indeed, by our inner children needing recognition, in and as a loving act of self-parenting. As often as needed! It is also a good ritual for those co-celebrating their birthdays, with the birthday honorees in the center.

The ritual itself is straightforward (and may include other elements you bring into rituals, such as adornment, drums, songs or chants, altars or tableaux, invocation). Each participant in turn comes forward and speaks what they know to be their gifts and strengths into the circle. If they are shy about this, the community encourages them to take space! To get bigger! To go deeper and wider! 

Then they receive. Becoming the center, they are showered with the attention and seeing and recognition of community. They are feted. 

In fullness, the circle transitions to the next participant. ​

​In the hyperindividualist yet paradoxically homogenizing culture of modernity, many of us carry wounds around our gifts not being fully seen. To speak and claim our gifts and to be seen within the subspace of a nested community can be tremendously healing. It can also resource us for times when such seeing may be particularly lacking: we can, in those moments, draw upon the somatic and energetic remembering of a time when we were held in our knowing within community and celebrated. By imprinting in our brains and hearts these relational moments of being recognized for our deepest, most authentic self-revelations, we can allow them to recharge us when needed. This is medicine for our indigenous selves: the part of us that aches to be vulnerable in community. 

​I see the medicine of community as particularly potent for young women and adolescent girls who are just beginning to grapple with how to embody femininity in a culture whose mainstream is marked by misogyny and sexism. In a culture that teaches women to be in competition with each other. It is not only their being seen and celebrated for their gifts that constitutes the medicine: it is also their seeing and celebrating each other! Setting into motion cycles of reciprocity, of mutuality, of deepening trust. 

I would love to hear from you if you or any youth, women, loved ones in your life meet in ritual trying out this format. Send me a note, send me photographs! Kisses to you and to the fabric of relationality we are reweaving.

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.

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.​

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.

The West Coast Village was at Pantheacon, introducing kontomble medicine and offering a community voice divination ritual. Many of us kontomble diviners are finding that the little people are coming in more strongly than ever before, responding to the urgency of these times. The medicine of memory is awakening. The sweet, sacred waters are so needed: water is life itself, but water is also memory. To never forget that there is a stream of continuity we are riding upon: the love and courage and resistance and resilience of our ancestors. Of the goodness of our very hearts! For in our hearts we center again and again the entirety of all times: all the pasts, presents, and futures that arise for us.
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Let us continue to trust that there is deep healing to be released in going through the current crises. Let us continue to build evidence -- and actions -- that support and engender and announce that healing.
This grid of the earth, wherever we are: may we offer a drop of water to get in touch with the never-drying, always-replenishing wells of healing.

Holding a banner at the NoDAPL Standing Rock Action in San Francisco, I found my body involuntarily gathering herself in a warrior stance, a stance as old as the warrior ancestors of history and myth.

​To be a warrior is to always be circulating between the inner and the outer, bringing back from the reaches of the heart the spill of the truth that shows up in the world ardent and potent.

It is about finding the alchemy where our vision is guiding the certainty of our steps: the borderlands where we give birth to the world we have always known in our hearts is possible. May we long for it. May we act for it. May we flow towards it.

It is with delight that we are introducing kontomble medicine at this year's PantheaCon!

Who are the kontomble? The little people of course! Kontomble are elemental beings that brought culture to the Dagara of Burkina Faso. They wake us up to remembering purpose and gifts, bringing wisdom from Otherworlds. There will be a short talk on kontomble - who they are in Dagara cosmology, how we experience them in the West, and how we work with them. Those gathered will then have an opportunity to speak with kontomble during a community voice divination ritual, bringing questions for which guidance is desired.