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
Thankyou for the restack. 🙏❤️
Thank you! For the words and the powertry. X