For someone who pours language from her pores, I find myself finding so few words at this stage in my life; in my process of initiation—rebecoming and unbecoming.
What language suffices for the process of death?
What language is the pre-verbal space of the womb where we are remade by life again and again?
Sometimes, absence is the only poem.
Yet: the Ancestors are asking me to share— to be more Open; to Open my heart and my brea(d)th wider
than the edge of my ego,
And then rest, and go again.
So. Here’s a Go:
I’ve spent the last month in the mountains of California with my teachers, Makhosi Himi Gogo Thule Ngane and Makhosi/Gogo Ekhaya Esima, continuing my training and initiations in the Southern African spiritual tradition known as Ubungoma. My new temple sister, Ife Madzimoyo, describes Ubungoma as “an indigenous shamanic practice of traditional and ancestral healing.” Sangomas are ancestral healers who practice Ubungoma through our gifts which reveal themselves in a continual unfolding through the initiatory process.
After years of running, avoiding and sleeping, I answered my calling and committed to staying awake.
So that’s a beginning. In a sense, that is perhaps, all there ever is.
Now,
What does it mean to devote one’s life to practicing indigenous African shamanism and Ancestral wisdom? What does it mean to choose again and again to honor and acknowledge how much we live and die from moment to moment, how much light and dark we hold in one breath? How much surrender does it require to move life forward through dreams? Through the unseen? Through an Ancestral language that confounds speech?
I’m committed to finding out with you. In front of you. For you. For me. For us.
At the Ancestors’ urging and this transformative time at the Makhosi Foundation, I’ll be sharing in my newsletter and here and wherever all that I can, when words suffice.
