Flowers Falling On My Head
Black Madonna + Experiences With Tara PLUS Recommended Reading
Blessed Sunday!
Welcome back to the Chapel of Honey! We meet you where you are, as you are, no judgement.
Writing a book changes you. I didn’t realize it as much with Honey, that was more of a pressurized exhale disguised as a compilation. I am still enamored with the beautiful beginner guide that I crafted and released, in love while knowing the material was really a gift to a former self: Honey is the baby guide I wished I’d had. Publishing that allowed me to approach the Black Madonna venture with time, discipline, and care. Though originally set to be a body of expanded essays with additional commentary and original prayer, I find myself writing another book through and alongside, something that I can feel changing me. A record of my meditations and experiences, continuation of healing through ritual, walking, and eroticism (ie, LOTS of body work), an exploration of our relationships with and understanding of God, Goddess, Self, Us. I am being drawn in to a journey with myself, numerous emanations of divinity, my own trauma, my nature. All the years of my early life spent in absolute obsession with goddesses, history of religion, and the methods I used to come out of some of my worst pits are finding room to breathe and contribute in new ways, and hopefully into something that both reads beautifully and delivers medicine in motion. She is calling us as we are calling Her, the One Who Wields Deliverance must be awakened and nurtured from inside out.
(Image depicts Mother Ezili Danto and Divine Child - Deck: African Goddess Rising Oracle
Author: Abiola Abrams)
The Black Madonna Path
She calls us to dance, to liberate, to sharpen the machete.
In my bones I know this will become a reference material in the future. I have stacks of books next to my desk, another pile on the downstairs cafe table I’ve claimed as a casual workspace. None of them have quite what I’m looking for and the floating thought about “making it myself” turns into a realization: I really am writing what I’m looking for. My third and final new-to-me book arrives, China Galland’s The Bonds Between Women. I’ve just received Love Cemetery (same author) and When God Was A Woman (Merlin Stone). They rotate from my bag to the office and cafe table in rotation, travel with me around the city.
She beckons me to wide empty avenues and art deco buildings, to Her painting at the DIA, to the riverbank
I am most excited for The Bonds Between Women, as it has chapters about Durga, Kali, and most important to me has stories about Our Lady of Aparecida, a Brazilian devotion to Mary. Everywhere I see the notes about Montserrat, Czestochowa, but rarely about our Black Madonnas. Our Lady of Kibeho, Our Lady of Charity, the original Spanish OL of Guadalupe, our Saint Antonia Kimpa Vita? That is the disconnect for me, a lack of understanding of Black Madonnas in relation to Blackness. So much of the writing around Our Melanated Lady feel colonizer-y even when they (8.5x11) don’t mean to. I cannot help but see the way white faces turn to Black spirits as a space of reflection, seeking redemption, understanding the surface level of transformation yet rarely confronting internalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-disability sentiments. This understanding of Our Lady as a savior in place of the stainless two dimensional face of Mary many are given shows up as a willingness to co-opt and appropriate (Black and Brown spirits, culture) rather than correct, embrace, or create ( why y’all not throwing Brigid feasts?). Whiteness seems to view and approach the Black Madonna the way it views Blackness: some blend of hatred and fear, possessive desire for a fix, a solution, their own slice of mysticism. They see Her as a respite from the bonds of reaching for perfection, but rarely (to me) show an understanding of necessity. If you love the Black Madonna you must love Ezili Danto! You must love liberation! How can you turn to the mother and find respite without championing the people she first shows up for? Fry up some pork and trample the oppressor, Cynthia!
She drops flower petals on my head.
Tara, Kurukulla, Me: Three Meditation Experiences
Tara is the bodhisattva of compassion. Known to be an emanation of Avalokiteshvara, she is the Lady Who Hears, or She Who Ferries Beings Across Samsara. Though most known in her Green Tara form she has hundreds of emanations. Green Tara herself has four expressions: Green, White, Red, and Black. Red Tara is also known as Kurukulla. I think it is especially cool that her name connects to the Sanksrit word referring to the North Star, my Hoodoos already get it. Our Mother the Liberator!
A couple weeks ago I was sitting outside under the large tree while reading Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna. I had recently started a passage about receiving a Green Tara meditation, and the suggested visual given to the author was to envision flowers falling all over the room, flowers becoming the room and falling on you. In that moment I felt something fall on my head, and another something, a third! Small white flowers, dried by the sun, had blown over from a neighboring tree.
I was meditating in front of my altar on a Venus day a week or so ago, after some previous meditations with Kurukulla. As I lay on the floor sinking into my body I see Her walking toward me in a body of fire. We continue being drawn toward one another until we are nearly face to face, and Her face is My face.
I am laying in my office on the floor near my desk, letting my spine rest. I notice anxiety and decide to meditate, listening to the spaces that tense and the thoughts bubbling up. I offer prayer for a family member and for myself, and as this happens I begin to hear the Green Tara Mantra being chanted from the back of my mind. Pink lotus blossoms are falling on my head simultaneous to a yellow lotus center opening on my forehead. I am deeper in the meditation now and being shown rows of Buddha statues by someone of no age and no gender, but they are with sorrow. Many statues across several rows have been broken, shattered, stolen. I am asked to repair the line. I am shocked with a sense of cold and waking though I never slept, and vaguely recall the destruction of oral and written lineages, violence in Buddhist history I am not well studied in.
All my love,
Honey, Sibyl of Detroit and Southeast Michigan