A Shimmer In Bloom : Day One of Navratri (Durga-Goddess Mother) Festivities

As weird things go, last night I got obsessed with drawing, sketching and paining "Mother Goddess" images, and Earth Mother type stuff. My mood and mind changes so often that no one really thinks it is weird. (I have witnesses.)

Then this morning I saw on FB, that today is the first day of Saravarti, "The Goddess Mother Festival" in hindu tradition that carries on for nine days.

Maybe Ma Durga reached out and kicked me last night? Or I subconsciously heard or read about this festival? Your guess is as good as mine. Either way I am posting a snippet of my little theory on Anais Nin as the "Matriarch for the soul-self writer."

Matriarch: a woman who is the head of a family or tribe

Mother: a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth.

Here's what I know.... I’m thirty-eight, soon to be divorced, a mother of three, possibly highly-sensitive and in the throws of the washing-machine cycle of growing out and up and awake in a very “anti-aberration” society, not to mention- my town.

If you said "Anaïs", I thought of the French perfume that Georgette from South America wore, or the famous book "Henry and June", a copy of which I own and still haven't read. I retreated and hid in the caves of books. Steady and reliable were my old go-to’s of writing, reading and doing anything creative to “exercise all the junk”. Then weird shit started happening:

Symbols, numbers, and dates all hovering relief-like from a strange metric dimension I was all of a sudden aware of. All of this, coinciding with my exposure as a cheater, the collapse of a marriage and an identity and the grave loss of peers, friends and family.

Naturally I assured everyone I was in a psychosis of sorts. I lost twenty-two pounds, I woke up with quantum mechanics and physics knowledge. I predicted happenings with horrific and specific accuracy, but admittedly I could be just "in tune" or creating a diversion or spectacle to avoid my sordid reality.

All my habits changed. I barely slept, chain-smoked, wrote, read, and began reconnecting with strange haunts and memories from the past, and....

I discovered Anaïs Nin.

Hers are words that look like those middle school pictures in text books that show the different layers of the earth all the way to the core. Even the layers of soil apply.

We read them at surface for one entertaining perspective, some see the deeper layer and grasp a meaning applicable, and then the very few archeologist of emotions like us, find over time, what was deep in the bedrock.

All of it is richly solid. It is as if I can feel the entrance of some thoughts breaking through my skin, and into my soul but not yet ready to be understood, or focused on. Divorce, parenthood and birth, are all things that in my younger years I believed I "understood."

Let me assure you that I don't believe I am in any way, shape, or form her " conduit" or "prophet of literary and esoteric teachings." Hardly! I'd hope she would have picked someone who could spell, had better grammatical knowledge, and absolutely had bigger breasts. So. Nope. I'm not delusional.

I do, however, realize now that we are ever-evolving. That there may be a human energy network of intelligence that allows us to receive or “pull down” certain aspects of people we believe to have " passed on." But that is merely an argument of time/space/reality continuum right? I have no idea, nor do I presume to know how it all works, but perhaps “time” as I understand it, isn’t a dimension or factor.

The same way gravity is non-existent in space. I’m merely open to the idea that although my father died thirteen years ago, to his energy or soul, wherever it may exist, it may be only thirteen minutes, seconds, or some fraction of time that has no correlation. Maybe. Who knows?

I always wonder what Anaïs would have said, thought and felt about being a mother. To give life, to nurture it at her breast and watch it grow and begin to be independent. Independent of her. It is in fact life and death in one, but poetic nonetheless.

As screwy as I may appear, I am compassionate and empathic to a fault.
I would lean so far in as to say, so too was Anais Nin. More on that later, but ponder that…there are words, phrases and clues others like her would recognize as “secret-handshake” clues.

Mine is the kind of existence that has learned survival by understanding deeply what motivates us all. Self-preservation skills have served me well and taught me to be accountable, stand up for myself and rebel against closed minds, quick persecutions and false humility.

So here we are. I make grilled cheese sandwiches and poetry. I'm about to move into a new house by myself with my kids, and I'm a painter and perhaps a cliche to the outsider. I see auras and sign field trip permission slips. My ex husband named the past year "the quickening." and my ex-friends joke that I'm a "fake gyspy."

If you're reading this, I guess someone else is just as mad or maybe hopeful that love, oneness, emotional awareness, empathy and healing of our long lost collective hearts is possible, and might even turn into the possibility of evolution.

Anaïs Nin will remain to me a poignant example of a “goddess mother” in her own way. She gives permission and love and acceptance all at once while disarming us with her strength in being vulnerable. I’ll write that again: the STRENGTH in being VULNERALBE.

That to me, regardless of what tweeters say about her being the queen of sex-goddesses, or the first to show feministic qualities (uh…..Xena, Lou Salome, Sheba…to name some) she is so much more than whatever it is we want her to be, neatly packaged for or conveniently stuck to.

Her energy and her joie de vivre was this brutalistic and she-ballsy sweetness. Words would never describe her, no matter how genius or perfect or articulate. She is, to me, undefinable. The way a maternal goddess should be: Too much. Too many things and too powerful to define.