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Feel this seed burst open into galaxies of love.

By: Marjory Mejia

Goddess Kali Colored etching on paper. 1770 Print

Kali, dancing in the flames of your own heart.

Creation is wonderful, exhilarating, intoxicating. Observe NATURE, the way night precedes day, the way winter gives birth to spring, seamlessly. But what happens when we get fixated on creation and deny the other aspect that is part of life? Yes, that other aspect encapsulated by a word we hate to bring up: Death.

Death is part of life, and yet, it is the ultimate OTHER.  DEATH: Unfortunately, an ugly, unspoken word in our culture, still taboo in our glorification of only one aspect of manifestation, which really thrives in the embrace of both life and death kissing each other.

There is no creation without dissolution; they are the yin and yang & the ebb and flow of life forming the natural rhythm of the world. May we notice that we can die a little every day, constantly dying and being reborn. Call it alchemical rebirth of serpentine motion:

“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth it would look like complete destruction.” Cynthia Occelli

“Death leads to new life,” wisely says Marion Woodman in her book: Dancing In The Flames. When we finally embrace our own death and sense of mortality, we won’t have to kill others in the name of justice, or in the mistaken use of the name of God. Here is a quote that illuminates the mystery of death:

Kali, the goddess of life and death, of creation and destruction, is the most revered Hindu goddess, beloved in India. But our country hasn’t dealt with Kali at all because we don’t like to think that death is part of life even though we’ve just finished with winter! I mean, if we gave any thought to it at all, we’d know that death leads to new life. I think we have to learn to accept mystery, to accept that the Divine is mysterious and that if we think we know everything, we are grossly deceived. ~ Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames

Kali, the dark Goddess, dancing in the flames of your own heart may feel like churning, tremor, tremblor, shaking, melting, dying–to new life. Kali is the FIERCELY FEMININE archetypal Shakti energy and power that cuts through obscurations of the egoic mind. Here we experience death as the ultimate agent of awakening, death as a symbol of the parts of us that need to die so we can live; not just live, but feel alive.

“If you are gonna live your full soul’s journey and find the spiritual dimension, you are gonna go this way and surrender the old life to the new…Surrender can feel like death and in the experience of  death, you find the birth of a whole new consciousness.”  ~ Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames

Surrender:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. ~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum: A Novel (P.S.)

Such a beautiful passage… What is seeking dissolution in your life? Surrender. Let it go. Let it burn bright in the fire of love. What is seeking space? Feel this seed expand and burst open into galaxies of love. You are here to risk your heart,