Kali

Another Winter Visit

It seems the deep winter months, a time where I reflect and ponder, write, and paint out my soul, is becoming the time that the goddess Kali pays me a visit. She comes to shake me, to rid me of anything that is holding me in unhealthy bounds, or to remind me, usually not so gently, that I am not living true to myself or using my full creative and feminine power. For once again, I have lost my wing feathers and once again I have allowed myself to carry the shadows of others that were not mine to bear. She answered a call from my soul I hadn’t even realised I had made with the seeds of release, transformation, and healing.

Her arrival in my life is never the same twice, and this visit, the result of a meditation on the loss of parts of life and therefore myself, she appeared a little less fierce than she had before. She was not, though, any less powerful or determined to reshape me, but more in the guise of a wise woman with millennia of truth behind her that was not averse to showing her raw and innate power. And in case I had forgotten that fact, her sword lays at her feet in a silent warning.

Kali, with her blue skin and hair of dense obsidian black, always packs a visionary punch with her occult beauty. I always know she means business when she looks directly at me with dark shining eyes that hold the whole cosmos within them.

This visit was tame by comparison to others I have experienced. Forceful, yes, but not in a scary way. I know that transformation is ahead of me, and it won’t be all roses. I have work to do on myself and changes to make which I wholeheartedly accept. She speaks of life cycles, of death and rebirth, and of moving through times of waxing and waning power.

As always, she has given me much food for thought, has empowered me and inspired me.

My first post here on Substack this time last year was about a previous encounter with her. And as I now work on my second poetry collection, Woman of Wild Imaginings, I share another Kali poem from that book, written some years ago.

Image: Canva

Kali–Birthing my Power

Through my pain, my stuckness

My sorrow for yesterdays

My fears for tomorrow

She sees.

She tears at the sticky black

Clinging monster

Whose claws have hung

Painfully and stoically

Onto my screaming shoulders

Asphyxiating my soul

Beneath which a once glorious

Pair of wings

Now withered and weak

Have been smothered

And cannot remember how to fly.

She rips and roars

Pushing this cloaked dark being

All of my own making, from me

And I sigh and cry

As the light returns

The heaviness now trampled to nothing

Under her bloody feet

The pain relieved

Leaving only the wounds of claws

To be healed

A reminder to carry no more on my shoulders.

The shackles that have heavied my arms

That were placed there so very long ago

She cuts free

Casting them with disdain

Into her fiery war ground.

‘These do not belong to you’

She rages

‘These are other women’s, other lives

Let the shadows of them leave you

Do not carry the burden of others.’

My belly lurches

From sickness, from birth pangs

As a power surges through me

A quiver runs down my spine

As I feel newborn movement

From my imprisoned wings

Flexing feebly, the first flutter

For so long a time.

I hear the rustle, as feathers regain

Their lustre and life

And I know once again I will fly.

She stands before me

With all she has torn from me

Disarmed, destroyed at her feet.

Her roar quietens

The blazing eye in her forehead softens

As the blood of her rages runs

Down her open mouth.

She has taken me into battle

Unarmed, uninitiated, and raw

She has fought beside me

Until we are both exhausted

Spent of all we have - just for now.

Her gift to me is to own

My victory, my freedom

I must cherish the spoils of this battle

For there will be others

And she will answer my call again

An ally in another time, another place

So I may keep my wings and my sacred peace.

Rhea Ruth Aitken

Image: Canva