Opening the Portal

An excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer

Luminous

I remember the stirring. Deep within you, subterranean, alive in the porous light. Moon grows within your belly, voice-birthed, hollow ground made holy by your crying into air.  Your lament shakes certainties, crumbling edifices, dust into ash scraped over face. Raw round skin of drum skin inside body hollow resonance resounds. Vow yourself home, into the widest womb. Birth yourself whole.

Opening the Portal

It is dusk. The river a still and reflective surface, the sky is vast above me, the moon is almost full.

I feel myself deep in the very specific felt sense of the softened, open erotic right now. It’s so delicate. I am still oscillating in and out of it, but I realize I can also so tenderly stretch the feeling into the rest of me. I feel my psoas much more supple, my center of gravity lower. Such a specific feeling of holding and wellbeing. 

How to speak of this place? This sacred place inside of me from which the erotic flows unbidden, a secret well connecting me to the whispers of the ancestors, to the dreaming pulse of life. 

I used to think that it was scarce. Those feelings of potency from which beauty would bubble up from the deeps. Now I realize that it is always inside of each moment. On the other side of the fear.

There is a still point in the middle of the longing. There is a point where the words flow unperturbed. From the womb of earth, terrifying. Softly showing the way, the wild places. That place in my throat opened like a tuning fork. My work is here, no longer hiding but being seen.