A Broken Fairytale Births a Royal Daughter

The Holy Rage of Her Dragon Heart

Freshly hatched January.

Because the gods are ruthless, I intend to make good on my new year’s promise. I stop smoking weed and suddenly I am confronted by her - me - THIS. My inner abyss. The place I’ve worked so hard to suppress.

The dark voice I’ve silenced.

Every morning for a month I wake up with the urge to scream. On early morning walks with my dog I stomp through the woods, a banshee in my black furry bathrobe, beseeching the ancestors. Keening.

How long has this feeling lived in me?

I am boiling. Bothered. Seething. Surfing an unbearable surge of grief. Something is erupting through me.

Now that I have summoned the strength to be with her, I am allowing my holy rage to breathe.

•

It only took a silly man coming back to beg for my forgiveness after he left my world a goddamn mess.

It’s not the first time a man has done this, but let me begin with him.

This man who found his way past my protections and into my heart last spring because, in his words, He was here to serve the goddess. You know, I wanted to believe him. I liked the idea of being served. And at first he did. He spent a few weeks clearing paths in my forest with the rake he bought on Amazon and transplanting moss by hand. But mostly he played video games and rolled too many joints and worked on his DJ sets without paying rent.

When I felt into our togetherness, it never quite made sense.

But I wanted a partner and I wanted a man, and if there’s one Achilles heel I have it is willing things into existence. So when he showed up on my doorstep deep in the woods, I said yes. In order to say yes I forced myself to ignore his emotional immaturity and the fact that he always found a way to make every conversation about himself regardless of the topic. Don’t get me wrong. I saw the way he related to all his favorite women, as though he was the savior of the harem. But still.

I wanted to be right about him.

So I excused the outright hubris of him adopting the name of a lightning god and using it to gain entry to the goddess.

Then, my friends, I reached the end of the plank I was walking.

It was only after I discovered his betrayal of his stated creed of Loyalty and his betrayal of me and all the lies he used to cover his transgressions without thought of my safety that I finally - FINALLY - banished his ass into another reality.

How I wish that was only the beginning.

•

And yet – perhaps this man was the beginning of the end of a fated story that has plagued me.

Once upon a time, I gave myself a name: Persephone.

I was fourteen when I initiated this journey of descent, teetering at the threshold of a year thrumming with death. I look back on this time even now, several decades later, wondering how I survived such strange fates. To list it all along with the impact would require more space, another book if you will, but needless to say: I was abandoned by multiple people over the course of a year – my first lover, my entire group of friends, all my elders, even by my best friend’s mother, who decided to ditch me in a literal island fortress– culminating in a near death experience on the way to my grandfather’s funeral.

I was adrift or maybe drowning, it was too early to tell, but either way this is me at fourteen: a lonely desperate log in the ocean being battered by immense, unrelenting waves. But I digress. This is all just the essential context for what became a kind of unending shamanic death passage.

How telling that I would begin my first online blog during this passage and give it her name.

How could I have anticipated the power and potency of the underworld? I hadn’t yet visited. I was just a young teen who felt too many things; doing my best to process the most insanely surreal year of my short life while trying to heal the gaping void it punched in my psyche.

Love wasn’t safe and neither am I.

Maybe the only way for me to survive such a shattering passage was to grasp a power bigger than me and claim it as mine. A dark goddess who ate the fruit of life, died, and came out the other side seemed…a fitting idol at the time.

I would fill this online diary with rants and musings that years later would be lost with a forgotten password; a strange treasure sinking to the bottom of the wild seas of my self’s history. I couldn’t comprehend then the ripples I set in motion by what I conjured in my little Livejournal.

Not so little now.

I didn’t anticipate the power of the goddess’ gravitational pull or how it would drag me out in its undertow.

In order to reclaim some essential part of me I, too, would sink deep into my own dark story before re-surfacing.

Hopefully reborn.

•

Like a reed pressed into wet clay, I was marked as an acolyte and forever changed.

What we call on, we call in. And so Persephone’s fateful myth lived again, writ in red ink on my soul, my skin. I’m not a weaver of fate (or maybe I am) but it seems to me that life is built on a trembling paradox:

Everything must come apart to know itself.

So I travel backwards, grasping for the root of the story that will finally let me move forward; hunting for the holy threads that wove this prayer flag. An essential piece of me is here, lost below the surface of that fateful year. The evil seed at the center of the fairytale. I see it all now, how the hole replicated itself.

An original wounding, if you will.

My soul’s Achille’s heel.

•

Some stories are inherited. Some come with the territory of the lives we desire to live. Certain stories are stickier than others. Some are poisonous. Some stories keep us alive.

What happens if you can’t tell the difference?

As a child I devoured all the myths I could find – bloody tales of gods and kings and ancient creatures – and yet for years I would struggle to understand mine.

It was almost too easy for the underworld to claim me.

When I began my first descent of many, I wasn’t given a map or a mentor or a compass. I was dropkicked alone, always alone, into a kind of psycho-spiritual labyrinth.

I didn’t have the words back then for what I was given, but I would find them.

•

Two decades of deadening my instinct.

Drugs were the only way I could ignore the simmering rage that feasted on my buried thoughts and feelings. Weed wasn’t a problem (until it was) because it was protecting me. So as much as I want to enjoy an enlightened perspective my own bullshit, I’m not there yet.

What else to do with my newfound sobriety but face my anger, for it is here, bubbling up from the deep before I’ve had my morning coffee. Having done my time being devoured alive, I decide to try a different path:

I let this rage anoint me.

One of the first teachings of Kali.

•

When I was 28 I did something silly.

You would think I learned a lesson about inviting certain goddesses in but if there’s one thing you should know about me it’s that I’m going to walk the edge whatever the cost. They had my number long before I picked up the phone.

Maybe I needed to see how easy it can be to create a new reality.
Maybe I too needed to be brought to my knees.

True power is humbling.

Nonetheless, I was about to learn a big lesson that Halloween evening when I invoked another: the dark mother.

Kali Ma.

She with the lotus mouth.
She whose mind always laughs.
She whose spirit soars.
She who is respect.
She who dissolves all evil.
She who is the divine beloved.
She who loves the battle.
She who holds the weapon of good actions.
She who is the ultimate.

Me – in a blue bobbed wig with an Adidas lotus flower cut from a shoebox pinned to my sports bra. Black eyes and red lips. Radiant and dangerous. A ripe little tribute. I thought it would be fun to go as a destroyer goddess, not realizing that some ladies should be handled with oven mitts.

But the truth is – I’m the kind of woman who would prefer to find out.

And I did.

•

When I first tasted the fables and myths, something flickered awake. I felt it in my belly – a wild hunger. A raw force at the center of my being with its own heart beat. A nuclear core of power. A devouring mouth with an ancient voice. I was born with the kind of desire that’s dangerous in a woman. Or so I’ve been told.

But maybe they’re right.

The longing I have for my own supreme realization on this planet is blinding, immense. Truthfully, I’m obsessed with god consciousness. I’m a beast in my depths. I want to experience everything – obviously – and the truth is, I don’t understand those who desire less. My whole life is a testament to this fact. I’ve always wanted a big, loud existence drenched in aliveness. I came here with a lot of voltage. No wonder I got burned by it.

The real irony is – men get to want this. Men get to be this.

Me? I have to fight for it.

•

No wonder I am guarding the gates of this temple.

Too many slippery black arrows have wormed their way past nice words and “good intentions” and lodged themselves in my soul – and from the hearts of men who thought themselves evolved. I should have known by their slithering language, but I was naive back then. Gullible, some have said. Yet the arrows struck true. You remember the real weapons.

Still, I knew how to remove them. Except the one left by him.

Shango. I will never call him by this chosen name.

Even writing it here feels wrong. That man left behind a psychic knife with its umbilical cord wrapped around my spine. His lies suckling my lifeblood. The sister who found it one night when she was doing energy work said it was fresh; still raw. My body weeping his energy. I had cut him from my life but I hadn’t realized how deep he had plugged into me.

When she pulled it out for me she screamed.

She told me afterwards that the same wound had been used many times, in many lives. I remember one: me, a warrior, riding into battle; pierced in the back of the heart with a black arrow. By one of my own men. Not again. It wasn’t the first time I was killed by someone I loved.

In another: slain by my jealous lover.

Or the life when I was a willing sacrifice for a god. I should have known there would be echos of all the undoings in this one.

•

The back of the heart is the doorway to the subconscious; the first place trust is betrayed.

The first place trust is given away.

The worst shenanigans always seem to come at the hands of the self-proclaimed spiritual men. I recall a photo now of another long-ago lover, handsome as the devil in his white Nehru jacket. His prayer hands stance in front of the glowing sign hanging outside some Hollywood bar blinking:

Heart of Darkness.

What dark urge in my own heart has called forth this?

I could have listened but I didn’t. I ignored the neon until it was too late to spare myself everything that followed. But back then I was a heat-seeking missile for men that would test my edges. I didn’t know why for the longest time but it’s easier to see now: intensity helped me feel alive. I was finding my outline. I wanted to know things and be things. I craved love but I also wanted power, having forgotten mine.

Perhaps I confused them.

One way to discover power is through what erodes it. The men with their silent, subtle weapons would continue changing.

And each one was first presented as a gift.

•

The abuse wasn’t physical. No, these men were much more skillful. Gaslighting over great spans of time weaponizes intimate relationship. It is an insidious kind of violence that warps one’s reality in ways that literally don’t make sense. Discerning who and what to trust becomes impossible. Worse yet – your instinct turns on itself. A lifetime of this would contort anyone’s psyche and yet even now I struggle to confront it: the wreckage of living inside a distortion field created by someone else. The sacrifice of myself. Underneath the plot line of my life is an energy knotted in on itself.

What is an ouroboros but a mouth that devours.

So as mad as I am about the hand I was dealt, what I really want to understand is why I continued to bind myself to such men.

Men who lied.
Men who refused to listen.
Men who couldn’t see me.
Men who wanted a mommy.
Men who denied my existence.
Men who exploited my generosity and mined my energy.
Men who dumped their pain at my altar.
Men who pissed on the temple of my heart.
Men who sacrificed my safety for their pleasure.
Men who told me I knew nothing.

Men who treated me like I was nothing.

I wonder how I will exit such a myth. I circle the heavens of my life, starved as a vulture, sifting the rot for such answers.

The falcons swoop over my house hunting in pairs, but it is the death eaters that speak. They sit on the wooden fence lining the old road next to the river, waiting. I float like a specter over the charnel grounds of my past selves and the stories they’ve lived. The vultures have come to teach me.

Because I have prayed. Because I am finally listening.

In my dreams the ancestors come as feathered beings. The spirits gift me shimmering dresses and strange jewels and alien headdresses that coil like snakes below my bare breasts, shielding me from the demons.

Yet the only demons I meet in this life are humans.

•

It is March. Month of my birth.

Driving the back roads through the cold woods home late one night, Kali arrives.

I feel her heat descending. Her heavy breathing behind my seat, growing fur. She finds me begging the stars vomited all over this stupid beautiful sky why I can’t seem to shake my fury even though I stomp and I breathe and I pray.

She feels like divine laughter burning away my pain.

What is more hilarious?

Them fumbling me, a woman who carries the lightning? Or the fact that I haven’t yet found the lesson inside this strange blessing?

He can claim Odin’s name all he wants, but we both know who was prowling the woods like a mad witch when it happened. Turns out, I’m not in charge of his vengeance. No, the gods came for me instead.

As evidenced by that heaven-sent strike smashing the earth and sizzling the leaves ten yards ahead before the real storm rolled in. Me, alone with the lightning and my dog. Me, sent three feet in the air by the blaze of energy so bright it blinded me temporarily.

Me, still not seeing something here clearly.

Lightning is a medicine of integrity. Lightning harmonizes, reveals, rectifies what is out of balance. While the righteous mouth on me wants to say He would act right if he actually walked with this medicine, a bigger truth is waiting for me. He might be lying, but not Kali.

Kali is the purifying flame, dancing on the ash of falsehoods.
Kali is the incinerating force with her precision saber and blistering grin.
Kali is the great re-calibrator.

Fire is life breath, life force, re-maker of the world. Destroyer and creator. Honored by dragons.

My kind of woman.

•

Each morning I do my best to forgive myself.

I count the pale blue beads of the mala as it slips through my fingers, offering up my sacred burning rage to all to the beings who know my name. My name whispered into the waters of the muddy river. My name. In the hair and the DNA. My name, writ in spit on the mountain’s hide. To have protection is to live by your true name. I search every chapter of my life for these pieces of me, tethered together only by my name. My name. I tell it to the trees so they remember.

Pure One. She of the Summit. My God is an Oath. From the Border Grove.

How many men have tried to invoke me, only to spell my name wrong.
How many men have denied my truth when it spoke its ancient tongue?
How many men have insisted that they are the answer for what I’m seeking.
How many times have I believed them?

And yet here it is so clearly, writ in blood on the glowing walls of my soul – they cannot hold this electricity.

I am the only one who claims me.

Kali has heard my questions.
She has heard me weeping.
She has felt me simmering in the deep stillness.
She comes in the sanctuary of darkness.

From the underbelly of the world to my bedroom.

Instead of sleeping I listen to her speak.
Slow drip of divine language spills forth, pungent and bittersweet.

Like blood on the back of the tongue.

•

Kali tells me that my anger is an oracle.

Look at all the pain you swallowed by not honoring your truth.
Look at the seeds that found root in your being.
Look at what bloomed in your world.

A tree is identified by its fruits.

My pain is a surreal hall of mirrors, always pointing at what I can’t bear to look at. But Kali won’t let me escape myself this time. Instead I follow the invisible threads of each belief, each storyline back like a hound in the night, praying for the divine to guide my sight.

Because the truth is, I came here to dropkick these men off the proverbial cliff, wanting to prove that they did do me wrong and I was right to want to punish them.

But perhaps I should be thanking them.

The bigger truth is, I’ve been following the wriggling tail of these stories for so long they now bore me. I have grown tired of carrying this sad myth of mine like a boa constrictor on my shoulders, bragging about how heavy it is to anyone who will listen. I’ve learned a lot in this lifetime about the power I hold, even in my weakest moments. I’ve shown myself that I can weather immense pain and navigate extremes and recreate my life again and again in order to outrun my festering wounds. I am that witch.

And the plot twist is this: the real reckoning of Kali is facing the reality of my own self- abandonment.

I spent most of my life searching for some man to rescue me from the waters I was drowning in. How humbling to see now that I was seeking a false salvation.

It was never just about them.

The holy rage I’ve been tending has incinerated my resistance. I didn’t realize I was so opposed to letting this story finally fully go.

Because for so long, this story has been my home.

•

This rage is a strange kind of reverence.

By now I’ve fully beheld the bottomless well that is my most sacred and righteous suffering. Anger means something is both alive and denied. I have accepted that it is only me and only me who can transform what I have been given. In doing so, the gems beneath the grief begin to glisten.

The intensity of each experience I’ve magnetized towards me has been a battering ram against my deepest defenses.

What a blessing.

True divinity will always incinerate something.

After all, Kali offers liberation by obliterating what is rigid.

•

I go to the spirits on my knees.

I am given a several week-long ritual to feed the snake spirit the remnants of my myth. It will take me months to complete its spiraling path and name each facet of the belief that has plagued me, but when I am done I go back to the homeland of my ancestors, back to the father mountain, where I give the story of my self-sacrifice to the grandfathers. I bury it once and for all.

I start shedding.

I shed my pain. I shed my misdirected rage at men. I shed my baneful maiden. I shed my punishing queen. I shed my escapism. I shed the relationship dynamics woven into the tapestry of this energy. I shed my addictions. I shed infected ideas and identities. I shed tired defense strategies. I shed my need to be right. I shed my terror at being wronged. I shed my shame around not being powerful enough. I shed my superiority complex. I shed my fear that I will never meet a man who isn’t afraid of me. I shed stories that were never mine.

And I confront my dark desire to be annihilated at the altar of the divine.

I stop praying to be released from this pattern and start asking how I can surrender and see the perfection of its higher lesson.

And as I shed my resistance to my own brokenness, I come into greater relationship with my absolute wholeness. The miracle always lives in the shift of perspective. Because as you and I both know – the entire truth contains its opposite.

Kali says: To deny nothing is to see with the eyes of god.

Finally, after months, a new thought drops in: What if no one was wrong?

•

You create what you need.

I wanted to believe that I was worthy of the kind of man who could tend an altar without dismantling it. But the reality is, no being can validate what you deny. It was always up to me to save my own life. I say it here, so I don’t forget this time: I dishonored myself first. So even though I came here with a bee in my bonnet, wanting cosmic justice, it was my denial of my holy instinct, the shadowy sublimation of my truest self, that got me into this mythical mess. There is a piece of me that’s been hiding out in the proverbial underworld, afraid to be seen but running the show.

The joke is on me, because in confronting their darkness I was forced to face mine.

All shadows are labyrinthine in nature. How can I blame these men now? I’ve seen too much. What divine ambassadors. What devilish, perfectly designed mirrors illuminating all the ways I’ve gotten lost on the way home. They might not be innocent, but what can one expect from the villains in my personal psychodrama? I have the goddess to thank, because I can finally see the truth that honors all sides.

These men have gifted me a righteous reckoning.

•

I bow to my totality.

Real and divine, monstrous and holy. A DESTROYER CREATRIX IN ALL HER GLORY. With babyfingers and blind trust, I’m learning how to hold what is goddess-gifted. It is humbling to be a human body siamese twinned to the infinite. Over this journey I’ve been taken apart, stripped down, left with so little to defend. It has taken me months to come here defenseless.

9 months to be exact.

But now I’m shorn to the bone. Scrubbed clean. Simultaneously I’ve grown full with the living energy of this myth finding its completion. I am slowly arriving into a truth that feels bigger than any storyline I could have written. But still, I have been waiting on the arrival of some final revelation.

I send a message up to the sky one night last week: Let this energy resolve now.

And finally my apocalypse finds me.

I am walking in the woods like I do. It’s that crepuscular hour before night, when all the veils open and the wet scent of the earth rises. With each step I feel myself relax into the growing darkness, sensing a new presence. There, outside of time, like a secret only known by the trees, exists an all-embracing reality far beyond what my tiny human ego can conceive of. I let its truth come for me. And there, on the dirt road, with the last light blackening the leaves, this sublime knowing penetrates my being completely.

How I laugh then – feeling closer than ever to the root of my essence.

I come here to share this: if there is one thing that the dark goddess has taught me, it’s that you don’t get the cheat codes on such lessons for free.

The actual cost?

When you arrive in yourself, you will forget you were ever lost.