Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of spirit in my life. In Just Like Me: An Anthology by 14 Artists, I wrote about a vision I had in the middle of the night when I was 5 years old. I saw a light so bright that it woke up my brother across the hall. In the morning when we asked our mother about it, she said casually that it was an angel. Growing up, visions were a part of life. They happened. Both of my parents and myself. My brother walked and talked in his sleep.
Spirit like creativity has been my mainstay throughout life. I experience them as one breath. This is how I approach everything because they are everything. It’s not a magic formula. It’s real. I have learned the more I can acknowledge the whole (all wholeness), the stronger I am.
Ironically I’ve spent many years learning how not to talk about spirit. Not spirit in the sense of religion of course, but spirit in the sense of the vision I had as a child, the kinds of experiences many of us have, often in relation to birth, death, nature and creativity.
Being able to acknowledge and include this part of my life is a big part of what’s missing for me in Western culture. I believe this disconnect is part of how power and privilege are able to play out. The legacy of colonization is a false separation from our whole and natural self and consequently our knowing that we are connected to all things and in all things we are reflected.
So often I feel flattened out when I engage in a world that only validates a small sliver of my actual experience. As a creative, (a devotee of the creative force), and a queer Chicana activist, I do what I can to open up to the unknown edges of spirit and creativity to expand into what I sense may be my most valuable inner resources. It feels subversive, edgy and massively powerful. I’ve found that so much of who we are has been shut down. But I know these resources are still there waiting to be awakened.
When I engage with my holistic self it widens my base and gives me a platform from which to reach both higher and deeper within myself. This is what gives myth, symbol, meaning and sacred purpose to my being and from here, all my doing. This is what makes life arte.
As the darkness of this year comes in, I’m using it as a reflection to press into my unknown: the edges of my own self–beyond what I think I know about myself and my world. As I do this I know that I press further into my purpose here on mamiearth. I open up to be who I didn’t know I was, but who I have always been becoming.
I acknowledge that I want to talk now. I want to make room for spirit and the unknown in the world. I want to talk about death and birth, about visions and inner knowing, miracles and healing, nature and the force of creativity. I want to talk spirit because I know everything is alive. There is support everywhere if we stop looking where Western culture wants us to place our attention.
I open up to see a new world. A whole world.
This begins my entry into teaching Believing is Seeing in January. Like life, it is ritual; it is arte. One breath. I begin the year with peace and working with what we believe about ourselves, our lives, our limitations, the world, our historical and cultural context because this affects who we are and everything we do. Each one of us is the revolution. Each one of us is the healing we all need. I believe.
Many blessings on this glorious time of year. May the seeds that you plant in the dark be the most precious your heart can hand you. And may your unknown rise up to dance with you in the most inviting and flirtatious way to help those seeds GROW! I love to watch a revolution in motion, all of us waking up and becoming whole in circles ever expanding, reaching out.
I am dancing in the dark with everyone,
Tu eres mi otro yo.
xomaya