Ceremonial Ofrenda

Sometimes the words find you --to remind you of how much you've been tucking away out of habit. A polite unmerited accommodation that is in need of a reckoning, so you unleash some truths you've been burying, while you keep yourself under an illusion of safe keeping. And you begin to rip at the seams while the words spill over onto the page . . . tucked away until you circle back . . . to some post danza midnight reflections on some patterned dysfunctions from not so far back.

Maybe I've been reading too much Lorde, Anzaldua, and Castillo; or maybe I've been serendipitously connecting with too many stories that weave together a constellation of truths; or maybe, I'm just tired . . . because my thoughts rumble like prayer, expanding like thunder. 

But I digress . . .

With a ceremonial ofrenda from a poetess:

Pray for the ones that don't understand how the ceremonial ways are inextricably bound with the sacredness of women amidst the sanctity of ceremony, whose internalized relationship with propriety stripped of the erotic runs deep.

Pray for the ones who live these ways with the best of intentions while privilege affords them an overlooked elevation of binaried framings of unatainable purity at the expense of our collective humanity.

Pray for the ones that confuse the erotic for the pornographic, while failing to understand that the erotic is essentially pure love, joy, and spirituality while living in complete alignment with spirit.

Pray for the ones that misinterpet our ability to give life as limited to biology and physiology because it is so much more. Sometimes we give birth to ourselves.

Pray for the ones who are chronically uncomfortable with the sacred feminine because it permeates the every day.

Pray for the men who take offense at women harnessing their own medicine by way of the power of haokah to heal and connect, to laugh, to activate joy and resilience to help us see past the smoking mirrors of systemic neglect.

Pray for the men who shame the women for making light of the context of chronic trauma we have remained complicit in by policing women's medicine. 

Pray for the men who have lost touch with the feminine as a part of themselves; a lopsided masculinity is a fragile one at best.

Pray for the men who fancy themselves keepers of the sacred at our expense.