Drifting from the path is also the path
The below are a few musings I wrote leading up to this Cancer new moon today.
I release all of the old, back to the Divine Mother, back to the womb of the universe, I release it all back I surrender all that was.
I tried to describe to myself what it felt like to be this alone.
I imagined myself a pale baby sitting in black sand, near a dark red body of water. Crying, I keep getting passed over by those walking by. I am dressed in black. I grow up and it still feels like I’m in that sandbox, the imagination I built for myself because it’s who I am. I explain to my parents that they came together for better or worse and birthed a goth product, a darkness (that is not really about fear, but about the unknown/hidden) that although not understandable, is real - but they won’t touch it, or me. They won’t acknowledge what’s gone on. They won’t acknowledge it’s what made me who I am today or that it’s steering my life path, my destiny, that the darkness was in them to begin, passed to me. I say thank you and they say nothing. I wave and they walk away.
To them I am a piece of paper, easily crumpled. They throw me into the wastebasket and laugh about it on the way home.
When I was drifting away from the church years ago and denounced my religion, announcing it to my family, my grandma was very up in arms. She spent the next year asking if I wanted to go to church, or commenting why was I no longer going even though she knew the answer. On one occasion I just kind of threw my hands up and said I’ll talk to you when you’re dead. I remember thinking to myself it’s the only way, it is the only way I can speak to her without all the societal programming getting in the way, it’s the only way she’ll see that I have my own path, and that starting down it saved my life. And that I’d seen things work this way before. My grandfather was a horror in this lifetime. When he died I didn’t cry. But it’s how we became best friends. He’s so loving toward me now and I have an altar for him.
Thich Naht Hahn talks about not needing to be in contact with the difficult people in our lives to heal us or them. Because they are a part of our blood line, they live inside us, so when we speak to “the mother” in us for example and transform ourselves we are helping our biological mother transform too. It reminds me of when I got a reading several years ago and the woman said all the healing I was doing was similar to placing my hand into the water of my ancestral line, and creating healing for everyone. Another reader at a separate time told me every time I took a break or stepped away from stress to soothe myself I was healing the entire generation of people who came before me. I believe all of this. This goes along with the Sadhguru saying, don’t let the dead live through you because they will try unless you do something about it. The ghosts will continue to recycle themselves.
Something else I found of value recently from Naht Hahn was his comparison of the body to the ocean, that when you know you have a physical body (the waves) as well as a cosmic body (the ocean) you no longer feel fear. When you know you are made of water you enjoy going up and down, you’re not afraid of it. When you understand there is no birth and death because you are eternal, you drop the fear and enjoy the ride of life. The other day I was thinking about this, saying to myself what if everything was just peaceful all the time. That’d be boring. I would never be who I am today. Achieving peace is a wonderful thing, but I can understand why you achieve it when you’re older - you need to become the peace to achieve the peace and it takes so much madness for that to happen. Without the madness there is no peace.
Jennifer Diane is a goddess of darkness, writer and model based out of New Jersey. Jennifer writes for Healing with the Occult, speaks for the Enlightenment through Hellfire Podcast, and creates books and zines (coming soon).