To Mother,
your mother-
who carried you in her own ocean
for 9 whole human months
and for 9 indescribable eons
in some other pre-human meter of time.
You who were formed from her bones-
formed from the minerals of the mountains
of your ancestors
for as long back as we can remember.
To this place,
​where blood holds memory
beyond language, beyond calendar,
beyond any fear.
To the ocean that remains with you-
ebbing & flowing within your spine,
echoing salt-water pholyphonies​ of the eternal wombtime.
To the mother who birthed you-
your great-great-great grandmother's grandchild-
who greeted the ecstasy & shock of your arrival
​and first song.
We remember you. We thank you.

To The Living Womb which holds or releases life,
our second heart,
a sacrificial offering.
To the wombman who's place it is to choose
as Sovereign-
To give birth or give death
as it's due.
We honor you. 

To the placental twin who once resided there with you,
though only one of you stayed to live in this topside world.
To all the ones who never made it here-
because it wasn't yet time,
because we said no,
because it wasn't safe,
because it was a mystery.
Or to the ones -
who came and then left,
or arrived stillborn-
taking with them some part of us.
To all those who came from The Nothing, and all those who returned-
as we will all return someday,
And come back
through the womb of a woman.
We love you.

To the ovaries of our mother that once held us as a tiny miracle
waiting patiently, an infinity within her
as she lived & grew inside our grandmother's womb.
To the plushness that eventually welcomed each of us,
a soft velvet cushion to rest into,
as we drank in the elixir of mortality through our bellies.
To the blood that nourished us through that cord-
made up of water & iron & prayers
flowed down from our mother's heart,
through her liver, her kidneys - miles to reach us.
To her heartbeat on which we learned to dance-
from that undifferentiated darkness
into ears, eyes, mouth & hands to one-day hear/ see/ speak/ hold.
To the warmth that incubated us from seed to embryo-
from a hope or a dream or a fear-
into a fully-fledged, fully-four-limbed creature,
with no effort on our part.
To that place & time when our heart-brain-sex were all one organ,
and we were identical to any fish-amphibian-bird-mammal on this earth-
when we knew what it was to be kin with all.
Before the word came to be,
and made a demarcation between woman and man, between "me" and "you",
between possibility and impossibility.
We offer you our awe.

To the hundreds of cycles each wombman has lived & witnessed-
the ripening of this crimson fruit & its dissolution,
the red rivers & tides which christened our fertile years.
To the ones who now hold their blood.
To the ones who have surrendered their wombs.
To the Womb that always was.
And always will be.
Portal,
Chalice,
Palace
of re-membering formless into form.

To all the creations - human and non-human -
that have been birthed from this place.
To the primordial magic that lives within & beyond us.
To woman who is a channel for Creation.
Through the centuries, and centuries and centuries... she has loved,
and gestated,
and grown a full moon in her belly,
and birthed-
with the tears & perspiration of millennia-
the new generations of humanity-
Through all the wars, through every displacement, through every forgotten dark age,
Through the annihilation of rainforests, mountain valleys, and whole villages-
Woman continues.
Life continues
Thanks to woman.

Though they have tried, and though they will keep trying-
to strip you of your fertile power,
to kill or take away your children,
to deny you the right to choose, to birth, to feed, to fuck, to bleed, to breathe, to exist.
Though they have told you: you are a sinner, a whore, a burden, a worker, a liability.
Though they have attempted to re-write the symphony of your internal orchestra,
to convince you your Nature was defective, misdirected or simply inefficient,
that you were broken, or barren-
They were wrong.
Though they are working to engineer their own mechanical wombs,
to modify your heirloom​ seeds,
to steal your inheritance-the one passed down
​for unknowable human lifetimes.
Though they may try
to make you obsolete,
They will not win.

To womban, to all those with wombs-
who have endured the losses, aches & betrayals
of this world of forgetting,
May your womb yet hold the memory of sweetness
before any wounding or shame.
May you be always the preserver of our Legacy-
of all the fecund things
that grow up and sing and renew themselves
forever and beyond the grasp of man.
Above all things,
May you live.


-Pooja Prema
©2022

So much of what I had believed only years ago to be future probabilities, are revealing themselves to be present-day realities. There is so much I’ve felt I wanted to say before it’s too late – like the whole world is burning, and yet I know that things happen in the time they need to. It reminds me of a saying I once heard: “There is not much time; We must go slowly.”

Personally, I’ve realized the profound need for me to slow down and tend deeply to my own body, heart and mind after having given so much outwardly towards this last birth. As much as I’ve felt a pull to “do more” for the world at this time, I have had to see that perhaps the most radical act of service would be for me to let myself R E C I E V E. It’s been a long process of closing up all the Rites of Passage...and now as I prepare to go inward and away from the world, I have to trust that the few missing pieces will land as I begin to land back within myself. I also need to trust that “the world” will continue to do its thing as it always has – and as much pain and forgetting as that involves – it’s not up to me to save or awaken anyone but myself.

These are indeed dim times. I say dim and not dark. Dim in the sense that the light of truth is dim. Because for me the dark is fecund, rich, alive - like fertile soil and melanated skin – not something to be feared as colonization taught us. And so these are also dark times – if we let them be. Many of us are waking up in this darkness.

As many of our great ones have passed away in the past few months - Malidoma Somé, bell hooks, & Thich Nhat Hanh (each major influences on my own life and work), and also the beautiful Tibetan master with whom I took refuge – Khenchen Trinley Paljor Rinpoche - it is not a question of when change will happen, but of how we choose to show up in this Turning of the Ages. The end of 4,000 years of patriarchy/ dominator culture takes time, just as it takes time for our own bodies, hearts & minds to heal and re-member themselves. And it often gets worse before it can get better.

​In some ways, I have felt I've been in hiding these past years – protecting the baby that was Rites of Passage, and also my own heart. I know I am not alone in this as I’ve watched fellow visionaries & warriors also living with caution in an era of witch burning led most devoutly by those who declare that such things must never happen again. And yet they are. To speak is an act of defiance, and yet to stay quiet is a kind of self-betrayal that makes the soul small & weak.

I have watched with great sadness over the past 2 years as our innate human drive to care for each other has been co-opted by those with power to separate and control us under the guise of our safety. Meanwhile our collective anxiety has been manipulated toward agendas immune to democratic scrutiny, and critical discourse pushed out of the public sphere all together. At the same time I have experienced waves of powerless & heartbreak and also waves of fortitude & determination as I’ve been uncovering deeper layers of the neo-colonial extraction that’s happening in our world - from the nature around us to the nature inside of us. ​

Underpinning my work and worldview for 2 decades now, has been storytelling as the primary means of shaping our personal & collective future. Who's story do we choose to tell? The dominator's? Or our own? And how do we know the difference? In my view, there are really only two paths. One is an indigenous or ancestral path. The other is the dominator's. It can be very hard to discern between the two because we've all been deeply colonized, and carry the weight of grief, fear and trauma. The process of decolonization is arduous and long, and requires tremendous discernment, devotion and tenderness. But once we see the truth, we can't go back. And once we are willing to feel it all, we can't keep choosing fear.

In the power-over paradigm, nature and human life are seen not for their intrinsic value and inter-being, but as extractable commodities and markets. And the "truth" matters not so much as what's most convenient to those wielding power. The biggest resource to be mined for profit is no longer just inside Mother Earth, but within our own minds... In this context, I'm increasingly wary of any dogma or establishment that demands our trust without having earned it. Narratives which claim to advocate for our well being are indeed penned by the very same powers who have always made us - women & BIPOC (and all living beings) - unwell since the disease of colonialism first spread through the planet. Where I choose to put my faith instead is in a re-membered & whole way of being with ourselves, each other and this home of ours - Gaia; one simultaneously new & ancient.

In contrast to a world ruled by a technocratic 1% with their Icarian promises of never-ending progress, in Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision, we offered beautiful, precious and life-giving embodied visions of what's possible for us as women and human beings when we hold the value of soil, water, seeds, flower & fruit above what's man-made - in the way our wise ancestors did - when we value connection over separation, love over fear - our sovereign True Nature. I will continue to stand for and live into those visions, and continue to challenge the dominant narrative with the aliveness of this much older and more fertile story. Now more than ever, I encourage us to cultivate deeper knowing, and stay open, heart-centered, compassionate, curious and critical. Stay connected to what's real.

I will be taking a sabbatical year to dream into how best I can be of service during this Great Turning, and prepare for a fresh gestational cycle. As ever, my personal mission continues to be to preserve a whole transmission from my ancestors for the future generations. To do this I must embody it more fully in order to be able to serve others - especially women and BIPOC - who are ready & willing to release the colonial paradigm of fear and control over our bodies & minds, and step fully into a re-membered way of being. This will take time, more than 10 intensely-packed days of transformation. It will take our lifetimes.​

​I often talk about "The Village" in relation to Rites of Passage and in general... It can sound abstract to most folks - or romantic or antiquated. But birthing a village is really giving birth to a whole way of life. In 20/20 Vision, we came home to a village we created for 10 days, and found sense of belonging that few of us had ever imagined possible...

The Village Soul was alive in us then, and it longs to be known in our hearts & in our communities... The village being not so much a mystical concept, so much as it is a practical way of being and loving in the world. The village becomes the place and the people with whom you build: connection, culture, memory, healing & resilience. And as human beings, we all long to belong...

At some point in history, all of our ancestors lived in villages. They breathed, bathed, grew food & harvested, grieved & celebrated, loved & lost as a village way of life. They tended the what Martín Prechtel so eloquently calls "the Village Heart" in every interaction, and in small everyday actions.

They lived lives deeply embedded in place, in season and in rhythm with the moon, the stars, the earth and water bodies. They lived lives deeply indebted to each other, inter-connected to the rite of passages of one another's lives. And ritual is what tied all of it together in a way that gave meaning, coherence and beauty to the totality.
​
To be without a village was to be bereft of soul. To have a village is to be home.
​May we each return home.

On this International Women's Day, as war continues to break out in Ukraine, I want to acknowledge that it's women & children who suffer most with the fallout of war - in Ukraine, and also in Russia... I invite you to breathe into this collective moment along with all those that lay underneath it in the rubble of Empire. Can we expand our hearts' capacity to be present with the breaking - out there, as well as in here?

True peace requires us to FEEL, and as bell hooks & Thich Nhat Hanh taught so many of us, it is not in the the binary where we learn to live & lead in love, but in holding the Both/And and staying close to the heart within us all that breaks and yearns to be free.
​
The machine of global Power wants us to do anything but be present with this heartache in a real way; to instead acquiesce to its binary answers and the "inevitable" interventions and mandates it promises will return our lives to peace & normalcy. Yet the reality is that we have not been at peace for centuries, and in some cases thousands of years. War & the fear of war has been our "normal". And the interests of governments are seldom in the real the interest of the People, but in what's most profitable, while they suffer.

What if we chose to link our hearts with both Ukrainians & Russians, and also with those in other parts of our world who are still suffering with the pain of war? Can we widen our circle of compassion to the ancestors of these peoples who's fabric of peace had been torn so very long ago?

And can we then ripple our hearts out to our own displaced ancestors; our own inherited cellular memory of war? Can we hold this much breaking? Can we be honest about the collective trauma we carry?

This is how we begin to truly mend what's been broken.

From this broken-open place, we can also more fully dream into a world without war, and what that would take. A world that values peace would also center women as life givers - not only as makers of children, but of art, healing, culture, and society.

20/20 Vision cure-ator  Cheryl R. Riley's visual language of "The Glyphs" - which were exhibited all over the walls of "SOUL KITCHEN" - offer a potent doorway into such a world. This language of a new matriarchy came to Cheryl when she read that women & children are killed the most in wars, and that matriarchal societies had no wars. In the language of The Glyphs in fact, there is no word for war. But there are many words for cooperation, creativity, and acts of sustaining Life. The Glyphs also draw inspiration from languages pre-dating the written word, thus moving beyond the binary by accessing the power of symbols, and are drawn on top of old encyclopedias which represent the patriarchal language & code of order.

Perhaps The Glyphs (seen here as a card drawn from The Glyphs Oracle Deck) can guide us in envisioning a new kind of culture & language - a new/ old way of speaking & relating to peace - which begins within ourselves and our most intimate relationships - along with an honoring of women in the deepest sense.

Armed with such a language, we might find the courage to keep believing in the victory of the flowering earth, and the ferocity to resist what threatens it.

I have been anticipating the passing of this beautiful being for some time... When I was in Peru, Thich Nhat Hanh was there too - in spirit, in consciousness. He helped me realize that we are really everywhere, for all time. As he wrote: "If you think I am only this body, then you have not truly seen me...I don’t see why we have to say “I will die,” because I can already see myself in you, in other people, and in future generations. Even when the cloud is not there, it continues as snow or rain. It is impossible for the cloud to die. It can become rain or ice, but it cannot become nothing. The cloud does not need to have a soul in order to continue. There’s no beginning and no end. I will never die. There will be a dissolution of this body, but that does not mean my death. I will continue, always."
​
And as one of his disciples paraphrased his instructions for his body after death:
“Please do not build a stupa for me. Please do not put my ashes in a vase, lock me inside and limit who I am. I know this will be difficult for some of you. If you must build a stupa though, please make sure that you put a sign on it that says, ‘I am not in here.’ In addition, you can also put another sign that says, ‘I am not out there either,’ and a third sign that says, ‘If I am anywhere, it is in your mindful breathing and in your peaceful steps.’”
​
i love that.

Thank you Thich Nhat Hanh for transmitting the Essential Teachings to us with such love and benevolence. Thank you for making death and emptiness so friendly. You are everywhere with us, and in us. Now like a pitcher of water returned to the ocean of our Ancestors, in your voice and words - ever present.

There are those people who, with their words & legacy, change you for a lifetime without ever even meeting them; who reflect a part of your own future self in the generous sharing of their personal story and vision. Malidoma Patrice Somé was one of those people for me. He passed on today as a shaman, writer, way-seer and translator of Spirit for thousands of people. I lit a candle and have a bowl of water set out for him and all the members of his extended "village". I'm remembering our recent Grief Ritual as part of Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision (glimpsed here), and the eloquence of grief & grieving in indigenous cultures like the Dagara of Burkino Faso where tears were given a sacred place of belonging. Malidoma taught me that my grief has a place in creating Beauty on Earth. That my grief is part of what keeps me well; keeps me seeking for and returning Home in a world that offers us everything but real homecoming.

Knees down on the earth, my face and hands covered with tears, snot and dirt, under the canopy of trees, I am looking into a womb of green leaves and flowers made by our own communal hands, guarded on either side by two elder Black women, their faces covered in white ash. I hear the primal wailing of women to my left and right, and the joyous singing of women behind me, drums going steady in the background. I am grieving for all that I have lost in the past year, knowing this would be one of the few times when it would be OK for me to let it all go and not “hold it all together”. In that moment, I just couldn’t anymore. As I open my eyes and look to my left and my right, I see one of my apprentices on either side of me, face down on the earth. This after giving them an impossible instruction to “watch and not participate”. So much for that… They too needed this. In this humbling moment there is no hierarchy among us – we are all daughters of the Earth, come to pay our grievances, come from long lineages of people who had been betrayed, forgotten, but who still live in us. We call to them at the grief shrine with voices and tears choked since girlhood – calling for return to our truer state of being, calling for an end to suffering; no words are needed. The women around me come and go as their grief waxes and wanes. We witness each other in this raw state. There is nothing to hide. And no questions asked. Then at some point, having found the natural end to my grief that had moments before felt so all-consuming, I walked back to the “the village” behind me to be welcomed in a way I had never been before in my life. I was received by the village I had dreamed of for 3 years, and had sacrificed so much for. I entered in as the orphan I was – to the arms of dozens of women proclaiming: “Welcome Home! Welcome Home!”

This is the memory I will always have of Malidoma's legacy. A homecoming for all of us who dared to expose ourselves that day…to the tears, the laughter, the earth, the water, the fire, the stones, the flowers and the forest. As per the traditional ways, we created every aspect of the ritual from start to close in our elemental clans. What needed to rupture, was ruptured. What needed to be soothed, was soothed. This experience would set the tone collectively for Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision, and for the deep felt sense of vulnerability, belonging, love and communitas that was the plasma that unified us through those intense initiatory days. This, is how we became a village.

I first encountered Malidoma’s work 9 years ago when I read his book “Of Water and the Spirit”. In it, he wrote that until our difficult life experiences could be “ritually seen & heard”, they would “remain dimmed as traumas to cope with, instead of as powerful initiations.” This is why and how I became passionate about creating Rites of Passage as a space for initiation that we as modern, displaced, colonized people no longer had or could even imagine. Moreover, in reading his life story, I witnessed my own difficult journey back & forth between the West and my estranged homeland. Like Malidoma, I too was an orphan in my own peculiar way. Like him, I suffered not only the ravages of colonization, but also that of Christianity – resulting in the collective forgetting and condemnation of our ancestral shamanic ways. And, I too had returned home for a kind of Soul-vision quest to uncover those shamanic origins. Unlike him however, I never had a tribe to welcome me back, elders and loved ones who knew what I was here for. Yet, like him, I too returned to the West to be a bridge, and would never fully belong to any place, being always a nomad who exists in the in-between.

I never met Malidoma in person, and yet his work has inspired so much of my life and creations. While he knew about the ROP project, we never connected directly. I find that strange now, and regret that I didn’t try to reach out to him. I always figured he was too busy, and it was not yet the time, even though in the last year I had become aware that the time was closing in. Perhaps somehow, we were connected by the unseen threads of ritual, and by shared friends.

From that initial encounter with his work, it would be years until I experienced a Dagara Grief Ritual myself. My first one was led by Katja Esser at the Daughters of the Earth gathering held by ALisa Starkweather, and my last by elders Laura Gibbons-Bowman & Lula Christopher as the opening initiation into Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision this past August. When the directive for 20/20 Vision emerged 4 years ago, I knew that we needed to begin our intensive process with a full-day Dagara Grief Ritual. But it was several years from that knowing until I was connected by my friend and Rites of Passage 2013 collaborator Cindy Parrish, (also co-founder of East Coast Village, a center for Malidoma’s work), with the now-beloved elders who held space for us to grieve together in the forest at Starseed Sanctuary. A Grief Ritual of Women of Color, for Women of Color – in recognition of all the lines that have been colonized in the past 500 years – a return to our knowing, a coming Home to the Earth.

From reading about Malidoma’s native Dagara village 9 years ago, to experiencing “the village” in form – if only for a brief time, in my own small way, I’ve traveled a full circle. From the emergence of Rites of Passage, to the flowering of this past summer’s 20/20 Vision, in honoring origins, I am deeply grateful to Malidoma Somé for sharing seeds that would be planted and then harvested in that garden of shared remembrance.

A much larger circle now closes as this great soul leaves the world of the living and crosses the far shore to become an ancestor. Perhaps if we are lucky, we will have him back as one of the new brave ones who will help guide us onward into the next Passage. It is up to all of us who have been blessed by his transmission – directly and indirectly – to continue the work of honoring grief & praising life in our own unique ways, and to keep the village alive with gratitude and a full heart. Blessings to you Elder Malidoma.
​
Thank you to Nicole Combeau for the photos.

Last night during the lunar eclipse - the longest in 580 years they say, I’d been thinking about my ancestors - and all of ours - in the world that existed about 500 years ago before colonization of the global East, West, & South. Here is one of the only photos I have of my recent ancestors - my maternal grandmother & grandfather and my mother (in arms) and her older sister in Kerala, pictured only years after the formal end of British rule. 

Although earlier waves of patriarchal colonization had already swept throughout Europe, Asia and much of the world via inter-continental dynasties 3000+ years before that, the conquest of the world by Europeans would only begin in the later 1400s. Most of us can't remember what that pre-colonial world looked like, felt like, sounded like, or tasted like. The stories of those times were never passed down to us orally because the weave of who we were and the transmission carried in its fibers was broken. And yet, I believe that the memory of it lives somewhere deep within each of our DNA. That soul of who we were, and still are, is ultimately inextinguishable, though ever at threat.
​
Today we all are still deep in the grips of colonial Empire in other guises: Fear + Greed = Empire, no matter the era or the names. And yet every taste of liberation we conjure - like we did collectively in Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision this summer - is both a seeing forward to what could be, and a seeing back to what was. Who were we then? - and who are we now? - without the colonizer's story that we are not enough? Who are we - both colonized and colonizer - without centuries of intergenerational trauma and forgetting? Who are we without the fabricated fear of an "other"? Without the promise of infinite progress at the cost of infinite diversity?

Personally, I love that "who". I live my life in a devotion to that which we were, and that which we actually are... The "who" we could be if we were truly in alignment with the dreams of our ancient ancestors.
​
Today on this full moon in Taurus- my own moon, I bow to the deep truth of our enlightened ancestors - those old bright shining old wise ones who walked firmly on this earth they called home. Who knew that they were enough, that they belonged, and who knew how to love and be loved. They were both the flowers & fruit, and the gardeners of the Real. A garden in which there was enough for all. May we remember them within us today with all the compassion for what we - especially as Black & Brown-bodied people - have endured through the last 500+ years. May we all get free.

My post-partum time after birthing Rites of Passage has been so intensive – I haven’t had the time or the mind to write anything until now. Life has been full of things to do and deadlines, full of moving, and full of sadness and loss for the temporary village we created together, as well as for what I had surrendered to birth it. It wasn’t until afterward that I realized how this comparison of birthing a child and a creation like this was more than just an analogy. It was real, on so many levels. This is a deep sharing about the process I’ve been in and am in – learning to be a mama to Rites of Passage and myself, and learning about home, the village, and belonging in that spiral way we do.

Rites of Passage was the hardest labor of my life. And though I was around incredible women for those final weeks, I also felt alone - particularly afterwards. That loneliness, and the sadness afterward is one known by those who have been the village chief, as Martin Prechtel writes about so beautifully, and also known by many mothers. Despite how much I knew about post-partum dos & don’ts for new mamas, like so many, I set my self up so poorly. This “setting oneself up” is only required because there is no village to hold us in the aftermath, or the lead up to birthing. It should have been no surprise that after the massive birth of Rites of Passage, I struggled with my own kind of post-partum depression.

Following Rites of Passage and 10 days of cleaning up, I returned to not to a village, tribe, or family but to an empty house I soon had to move out of. People kept asking me whether had I rested, when the reality was no – there was no time for real rest until very recently. I was starkly alone, and woke up again to the heart of sadness in me that for the past year I would wake to every morning. This kind of loneliness is a mirage that has us wishing for something that can never wholly be. This world is not set up in a sane way to nurture healthy mothers. There are so many reason why our ancestors lived in villages, and somewhere in our blood and bones we long for this like an echo.

Rites of Passage brought to life what I and so many others had been longing for since forever – a living village that offered us a sense of belonging that's so rare for most of us, especially as Women of Color. This is inherently healing. But as a temporary village, it was a moment in space and time, not the reality most of us live in every day or would return to. And that truth is such a deep heartbreak for me – for all the villages and jungles lost to us and to my own people – for my own room “Sustenance” that literally disappeared overnight – echoing back to that first primordial abandonment, all to remind me eventually- that it’s all inside. This beauty and belonging are seeds we carry that can’t be lost - just waiting for the right conditions to sprout again into the blossoms of our basic sanity and at-one-ness with everything. Rites of Passage was a season in the garden of our ancestors remembered. And what a beautiful garden it was. But I wonder: Is it possible, in this time, for it to live beyond just one season? I don’t just mean a ritual house. I mean a way of life. A way of being, with Life.

It wasn’t until now that I finally had a breath to even begin to integrate what we had created together – all the beauty and all the learnings by trial and error in the process of the last 2.5 years. I finally had two weeks alone in a cabin by a pond – with no running water, no electricity, no WIFI, and no distractions except my own mind. I allowed my whole nervous system to begin to settle, and the message was simply “Come Home. Let your heart rest.” On my way there, I stopped by to see my dear friend Mama Lula Christopher and saw this quote on her wall by James Baldwin: “Perhaps home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition.” There, I also started reading the Belonging book by Toko Pa Turner, and proceeded to do a slow recap of my whole last 39 years till now over those 2 weeks, turning so many moments of love and pain, and so many mistakes over and over again in the hands of my mind like stones until they became a little softer and smoother. I did a lot of grieving and forgiving and realized that I needed months of this, not just 2 weeks. Being alone, truly for the first time in a while with my whole self, I caught a glimpse for how much I had changed. How much I had begun to truly learn what being home actually means, and what being of service does and doesn’t look and feel like, and what being a mother to oneself and others means.

Home for me will always be a chord of feelings: melancholy mixed with sweetness because life is so beautiful and so temporary. And as Toko Pa writes, my path is about offering belonging to everything in myself, and yet on the outside sometimes this means saying no - to people, to possibilities, to dreams.

Creating a home for 45 women and myself was a massive stretch for me; for all of us. It was an imperfect and exquisite experiment in learning Love and creating Home. By definition, initiation is a passage into a new way of being – a more expanded, more true way of being. Much in the way that being pregnant reveals to a mother how healthy or resourced she is or isn't, Rites of Passage revealed to many of us our own places of depletion or under-resourced-ness, along with the ways in which we were willing to be opened, or not. My own unresolved feelings of abandonment along with the accumulated stress and resentment of living without a real community, had its own impacts. Yet the house wasn’t a place for only our beauty to belong, but also our shadows. This was a hard learning, at least for me. It meant loving within me and also outside of me – all the ways that we may feel unseen, unappreciated or unknown. For so many of us, our childhood home was not a safe place, maybe not a place at all. We don’t know what family is, let alone a village. Myself along with all those other beautiful women – we made it up as we went along – making literal rooms for all the places in us that the colonized world at large, and also our families of origin - had discounted, ignored, or exiled. This was a place our souls could be at home in kinship. That’s why we loved it so much.

At the same time, the reality of village life is that it’s often messy, busy, and intense. For Western/ modern folks not acquainted with village life, and even for those of us who are – it can be overwhelming. And fast-track one-time villages (like Burning Man and Rites of Passage) are exhausting to create, even though they are breathtaking and immensely healing. I wish we had had a month, not just 10 days, and I know I’m not alone in that. Re-indigenizing our minds & hearts & relationships takes time, maybe lifetimes. As a collective, I think we all recognized through the rush and the push – how time allows for greater peace, and how profoundly we each needed that. We squeezed 20/20 Vision into 10 days, not because we wanted to, but because we weren’t able to give ourselves the time and space needed. Rites of Passage bloomed & lived within the larger context of our shared reality – of patriarchy, of capitalism, of grind culture – or what we call simply: “modern life”. After 39 years of close observation, I have concluded that this modern life just isn’t conducive to us being fully human, or sane. Still, Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision showed us the potential for something far more whole. And, as a new friend recently said to me, and which I had been reflecting on myself – there’s no escape from this matrix – it’s everywhere and it’s inside of us. So after all this village-making and dismantling, these essential questions remain: How do I choose to be fully human & wholly sane? How will I nurture home & belonging in a long-term, sustainable way?

These past 3+ years has been a lot of letting go: living rootless with no fixed home, moving every few months, and surrendering a relationship in which I had confused dependency for belonging. Home was not a given for me, not a constant. It always felt like a big mystery inheritance that other people get to have and hold onto, but never me. For a while, I subconsciously believed that I had irretrievably fucked up my chance at having a home, and was being punished for all time by God or whatever we wish to call this tremendous unfathomable universe; that home would never be a place for me or a people. I have spent most of my life this way. Maybe, deep inside, on some level, most of us have. Then I realized what an unfriendly god that is. Not god at all. And that I get to choose... No one else will open the door back from our exile. We’re the ones.
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The rootlessness of the past few years has been a blessing too, because it’s teaching me what home actually is beyond just a place. When so many of the women in Rites of Passage shared how “at home” they felt, and how much love permeated that space, I knew that that's one of the gifts of being an orphan (literal or otherwise). We want home so much, we carry it wherever we go without even knowing it.

Coming home isn’t linear. We may make the journey dozens of times in this life before we finally return home, and then even then, its just momentary, because we are always arriving and departing in these dream permutations of what it is to be here.

Life is spiralic, and I must follow the pattern. I have never had more clear and yet more mysterious directions. All I can do is follow one step and a time. I’m looking to land at home in a yet deeper way – home in the body, home with everything, every person – knowing that its fundamentally an inner thing reflected in outer environs. And even though home is not so much a place, but an irrevocable condition, as James Baldwin wrote, I’m looking to find the place where that friendly God wants me to be for a while. A little pocket in time & space. Nestled so I could nestle a little life within. I’m looking for a place where I can sit by a fire with tea and broth and write a book while gestating the next big offering. Some of us need to stay sane if humanity is going to survive. And I’m getting clearer on what’s required to embody sanity in myself, and a sense of belonging that could sustain me, and therefore those around me. I realized that perhaps the greatest act of service at this next juncture of my life, would be to receive. In creating sanctuary for myself, perhaps I could offer that to others. So I’m open to receiving all the support to realize a vision I have held for almost 20 years. My true sanity is ultimately the best and only thing I can legitimately offer the world. Without it, I’m lost. And what is it to be sane, but to be be truly at home?

Meanwhile for all of you who wanted to see the beauty and belonging we weaved in Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision but were unable to, we are offering a "Virtual House Screening" - a filmed walk-through of the house on Friday November 5th at 8pm - on FB and on YouTube.

*Photo by Nicole Combeau

Nine months ago, I was told that I had to choose: between being in a marriage and having a child, or continuing to create the work of my life— Rites of Passage. I was given an ultimatum to either serve a man, or continue serving the liberation of the Feminine in the form of dozens of Women of Color artists, healers, doulas, grandmothers, mothers and daughters - sisters and siblings who were becoming family to me. Faced with a dichotomy that had been living inside me for years— one that throughout patriarchy has been thrust onto women devoted to missions other than child-rearing - priestesses, witches, and community servants - I was ultimately forced to choose between being in my own integrity, and being compromised.

I think you know which one I chose.
I chose myself.

A woman ought to bring a child into this world out of her own wholeness, her Yes. Instead of being split in half by what should never have to be a choice. There are many ways to be a woman. And many ways to mother.
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So here I am again: the solo witch. Mothering a vision. In many ways alone. In many ways held. I have often wondered in these last months— whether I had made the right decision. These last few years, it seems that almost every woman around me is having a baby. I’ve been pregnant too, but with a vision— the twin of my first child. This kind of mothering is not really recognized, appreciated or understood by the world. It takes as much mineral out of my bones, and nights of not sleeping. I am birthing a whole house— a commitment I had made to the Ancestors.

A close sister & collaborator reminded me last fall that Rites of Passage had already been my baby— to which my partner could have been a step-father. Instead he wanted me to give up my first born, for him. But I couldn’t do that; couldn’t give up the child I had birthed, had labored so hard for. Meanwhile, he chose to have an affair with a much younger woman, and have a baby with her. A familiar story taken out of the 4,000 year-old book of patriarchy, but one that still stings deep.

Throughout these months, I’ve been confronted over and over again with the places of my deepest wounding around mothering and partnership. So much of why I had not wanted to bring a child into the world had to do with my fear of abandoning my own child, in the sense of not being fully present for her. As well as the fear of re-creating the traumatic childhood I grew up in with a man who was much like my own father. My mother chose that relationship - an arranged marriage - out of her desperation to have a child and avert spinsterhood. I had unwittingly been playing out a similar karma in my own (self-arranged) marriage. But this time, unlike my mother, I chose differently.

I have wanted to be a mother to another for so long now. But for me it’s not simply a matter of making a new life, but of offering up the conditions for a life of belonging, safety, beauty and joy that I never experienced. My dedication is to pass on a whole transmission, which requires that I do as much clearing of the inherited wounds of un-love as possible— before passing on my DNA to the future generations. Part of how I do this is by creating things that live like Rites of Passage. It isn’t merely a project, it is my spiritual path, and my journey as a creator in this life.

I’ve been realizing lately what a tremendous sacrifice my mother had made by bringing me into this world knowing full well that she would have to leave me. There is a way she loves me, that no one else in the world ever will; that’s why they call it a mother’s love. There is a way I love my future child - my mother’s grandchild - who has been carried as a seed within my ovaries since I was an infant in my mother’s womb 38 years ago. My sacrifice has been to wait. To wait for my own ripening.

This child who I call my spirit daughter— I have known for a long time now. 20 years of holding an energetic possibility, a dream seed, a prayer. Of longing for her. Of speaking with her. Of saying no, it is not yet time. She is in no rush. This child is also a gift of the Ancestors. And I do not take that gift for granted. She is everything I am here for. But she is not all.

In this House of the Collective Feminine Soul, there is one room – the final room – that is dedicated to my future daughter. Somehow, this room, as well as this whole house— is my own rite of passage before I have her in the flesh. Temporarily sacrificing the dream of being a mother to her has been an unrelenting heartbreak this past year. How fitting then that the “Rooms of Cure” I am cure-ating (or co-cure-ating) for Rites of Passage are: The Grief Room, Divorce, Re-Membering My Father, The Apothecary, Sustenance, and the final room - V is for Victory. A total of 5 rooms; 5 being the number of Change. Changing the story, changing the inheritance. Each of the rooms, created in relationship with multiple other artists, is a testament to the journey I have been on for 3 years now, and particularly within these last 9 months.

This house is an offering for the world I long for— where women who love as big as I do are not forced to choose within patriarchal structures which attempt to own and misuse our fertile power. Are not trapped in relationships with wounded men who demand our mothering to quell their own insecurities. A world where we don’t have to choose anymore between being a mother and being a leader. Between having a child and nurturing our work in the world. Between being all of who we are, versus a portion.

I want the whole thing. For all of us.

I want a partner who will be in reverence of me as I unravel centuries of patriarchal conditioning, and as I grieve what needs to be grieved— for long enough without ever needing to be the center of my attention. Who will earn my trust, not demand it. Who will wait patiently for as long as needed for this child to come forth into the world – the way I have – because she really is ALL THAT. Who will never diminish me. Never make me choose between my sacred service in the world, and being a mother to another. After all, I want to be a mother who can show her child strength, integrity and wholeness embodied. A child with dozens of beloved aunties, brought up in a new matrilineal lineage, a partnership culture.

If I had to choose again, I would still choose my soul over what tried to hold it ransom. My mother did not birth me, and leave me, in order for me to leave my own creations. I hold claim to all that I am and all I desire as a creative womb-man, a mother on this Earth, through each breathtaking and sometimes devastating cycle of creation & loss in the garden that is being here.

Gratitude in this Mother’s Day portal to all those who mother others & their creations. May we recognize the fertile power we hold in its many womanifestations.

And, if you would like to support the birthing of this current child - Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision - please do: https://chuffed.org/project/ritesofpassage-2020vision