I am going to fuck Shiva in flesh.
The Goddess’s presence is most nourishing, most fulfilling, when it is unexpected. When She shows up while I am following my own instincts. Today I found myself praying vehemently for my hearts deepest desire, the desire for sacred partnership. For sex within the container of trust and love as a form of sacred worship and radical human joy, play and co-creation.* Sex between spiritual and sapien equals. It has been a while since I have allowed my body this basic need. As a vow to live my intention of wanting this in a container of true union. I asked the Goddess to now bring me my Shivalinga, the blessing I have been preparing for my whole life it seems. The Shiva She has chosen for me. I prayed for this between messy sobs, my body shaking in deep yearning.
My face turns towards the mirror and I see the truth of this prayer all over it. Eyes moist and red. Face covered in rivulets left by my tears and other fluids, some still making their way to kiss gravity. Instinctively, I collected my tears on my finger and drink them. Charnamrit (Nectar of the feet of the divine). My tears to me are like the elixir of faith made manifest through my own body. My tears to me are liquid devotion. The prasad post ceremony of silent heart whispers. The tears also represent how alive this prayer is, how deeply I feel it, how messily I hold the skirt helm of my Ma in this human moment.
After consuming the liquid devotion made by my heart and body, I step into the shower and my desire is to pour on myself my moon-blood. I squat and pull out my menstrual cup, see the beautiful scarlet liquid and pour it over my forehead. The water gushing in front of my eyes turns red. I close my eyes. In the background the voice of the overculture is present. “This is gross. This is wrong. You are broken.” But I pay it no heed through grace or practice or both. The water is warm and my body feels anointed, sanctified. Until February of this year, I had used my menstrual blood as a way of releasing all that no longer served my field. Pouring it into the earth as an offering of release. This bathing myself in it, was newer. It feels like an integration of my ‘messiness’ as worthy. Even my most messy parts, most exiled desires, invisible needs, unknown wants, wild instincts, especially those infested with oppressive taboo, patriarchal toxic shame was holy sacrament. Worthy of bathing in, enjoying the warmth of. My own moon-blood the quintessential symbol of my womanhood was like a healing spring water, like the many all over the world that people in need have sought in every religion in far off places. My healing spring lives inside of my body and comes through every month.
I dressed myself and grabbed the book “God is a Black Woman” and stepped into the only room in the house I could be alone. My nephew’s bedroom. I squat on the floor and look at the trees outside the window. I look out at the Goddess adorned in Green, dancing with the wind. I get still. Soon everything becomes translucent. Light. Everything fades into a pristine holy white. Everything is light. Everything is holy. All is one and the same. Before I know it, my hands have picked up the book and opened a page. I start reading with a learnt reverence of randomness and my instincts.
As I read Christina affirm how culture of whitemalegod has made me disown my own needs, I weep from the moments before of my asking the Goddess to fulfil my need for sex. A part of me felt dirty. Felt like in the world of prayers, my prayer is unholy. That I was tarnishing the act of prayer by praying for a desire that feels like a fire in my yoni. I wept deeper, fuller releasing the dehumanising constraints of what is holy and what is not swirling in my head without consent. And then come words to my being as if love took the nature of lightening. “We need a god who bleeds, [who] spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet thick & warm like the breath of her.”1.
These lines undo me as much as they do me whole. They exonerate me from the chains of shame inside me. Their synchronicity screams the sanctity of my instincts. The potency of natural impulse as divinely guided. I needed to find myself. I needed this. My life’s recent events had tarnished my faith, my capacities, my interpretations, my KNOWINGS, I felt groundless, lost, if She is not my polestar, what is? Where do I go if not to Her? The sacred relationship between me and my Ma, had shuddered. And here in the most simplest yet profound ways, the Goddess was telling me “I am your instincts. Your instincts are my winks. Keep on little goddess.”
I weep now in feeling filled, feeling connected, feeling seen, feeling free, feeling understood, feeling found. As I continue to read as if to leave no stone unturned, no part of me forgotten by the depth of Her love, a fresh set of words come as soothing balm on my being “Our lady of the sick beautifully represents the relatable and reliable Divine Feminine that inspired the famous fifteenth-century Catholic prayer, “…."never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided,”3
My vehement prayers for intercession were already answered, before I even prayed for it. I knew it. This prayer need not be said ever again. It was done. And then my mind became ready to step into wonder. If this prayer is answered, what would I like to spend my energy on? And like an unfurling, my wants become clear. A surety that is sumptuous and sustainable.
It is done. I hear again and again. It is done. I get up from the floor and without even thinking find myself to my computer writing the email I know I need to.
We have a tendency to overcomplicate the Goddess. Moralise the divine. She is about this and that. But really She is about reclaiming our instincts as divine. Our needs as holy. Our desires as sacred. Her infinite skirt helm has enough room for the hands of all sapiens, who are tired, broken by the overculture in the garb of their own loved ones, family, friends and relatives. She takes a stand on this for not just women, but all humans. To be a primordial feminist, is to be a humanist as much as a womanist. To be a primordial feminist, is about being a naturalist, as much as a mystic. To be divine, is to be radically and unapologetically human.
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Operating definitions
Trust: “Making something important to you vulnerable to someone else’s choices.” Charles Feltman
Distrust: “What I have shared with you that is important to me is not safe with you.” Charles Feltman
Love: “Is choosing to take someone else’s best interests as yours during and after rupture”
Fear: “Is the feeling of separateness”
Union/sex: “The ecstatic felt perception of the divine through embodied experience of non-seperation.”
Photo by Yeshas M P on Unsplash