On Story Water
Rumi has a poem that reads:
A story is like water/ that you heat for your bath.
It takes messages between the fire/ and your skin. It lets them meet,/ and it cleans you!
Very few can sit down/ in the middle of the fire itself like a salamander or Abraham./ We need intermediaries.
A feeling of fullness comes,/ but usually it takes some bread/to bring it.
Beauty surrounds us,/ but usually we need to be walking/ in a garden to know it.
The body itself is a screen/ to shield and partially reveal/ the light that’s blazing inside your presence.
Water, stories, the body,/ all the things we do, are mediums/ that hide and show what’s hidden.
Study them,/ and enjoy this being washed/ with a secret we sometimes know,/ and then not.
I woke up early this morning feeling story water washing through me. Last night as I went to sleep I was thinking about Matriarch, and what it means to connect the lineages of motherhood in my own family to the endless stories of motherhood within our collective memory. As I sat with it and allowed for the chaos to settle into stillness I felt aye speaking to me beneath my feet—reminding me as she does that she is always supporting us, she is always there.
Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.
All of those sacred messages that are meant to heal us and cleanse us thoroughly feel just like the line in this Rumi poem. What we need and long for is already here, but what does it take for us to really recognize it?
The deeper I sink into this project the easier it is for me to feel overwhelmed by the relevance. Our earth is in such a dire state, and somehow it’s still so easy for us to continue with the day-to-day without stopping to recognize the damage we continuously cause to our mother earth. We are already paying the price in our own bodies without realizing it. Our bodies are inherently connected to this beautiful sacred land and to all other bodies. To tap into a genuine feeling of connection between bodies requires us to face the reality of pain and harm long ignored. I recognize how terrifying it is to acknowledge suffering, and how overwhelming it can be to give attention to the wound.
In my own life experience I have learned that attention to the wound is one of the greatest acts of love we can offer—it does not need to be depressing or morbid. Our death sentence is not in the acknowledgment of what’s wrong but in our willful ignorance.
Still…
Study them,/ and enjoy this being washed/ with a secret we sometimes know,/ and then not.
I feel eased by this reminder that we came down into this sacred and strange humanity project to constantly be in a state of remembering and forgetting. There is beauty in both the light and the shadow. The secrets at times illuminated, just enough so that we might continue on our paths, but if we were too exposed all at once we would lose our minds.
In Hinduism, the supreme unifying energetic force of all things is called Brahman. All of the gods worshipped are reflections of this one reality. To my understanding, God speaks and appears in disguises because to actually see god fully would make it impossible to exist as a human. There is a parallel of the “sacred hidden” across many different spiritual cosmologies, and I think there is a humbling importance to honoring both what we know and do not know. Not only as a way to maintain our sanity but also just to exist in this cheeky and seductive dance with life. The sacred feminine teaches us both of these things: learning to be with what’s hidden (because the birthplace of all life is in the darkness), and how to alchemize life through sensuality.
As much as working on this project has been daunting, I’m enjoying the lessons as they come, and enjoying being with the story water of sacred femininity—all of the pain and beauty that it is able to carry. Every day I feel more and more honored to walk with the teachings of Osun, the teachings of my own mother, my aunties, my grandmothers, the earth… with all of the fractal expressions of this powerful energetic that creates and sustains all of us.
Moving into Gemini season it’s a time to really be with the distinct dualities that life holds and remember that we are both made to hold them and made up of them. The prayer I’m holding as we move closer to Summer from this strange and gloomy Spring is to sing to and dance through the fear as I move into the unknown. I want to practice finding that Gemini quality of joy, play, and curiosity.
Before I go, here’s the poem again—maybe you will find something new in it:
A story is like water/ that you heat for your bath.
It takes messages between the fire/ and your skin. It lets them meet,/ and it cleans you!
Very few can sit down/ in the middle of the fire itself like a salamander or Abraham./ We need intermediaries.
A feeling of fullness comes,/ but usually it takes some bread/to bring it.
Beauty surrounds us,/ but usually we need to be walking/ in a garden to know it.
The body itself is a screen/ to shield and partially reveal/ the light that’s blazing inside your presence.
Water, stories, the body,/ all the things we do, are mediums/ that hide and show what’s hidden.
Study them,/ and enjoy this being washed/ with a secret we sometimes know,/ and then not.
Andddd a side note about this blog:
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