On Creation, Writing and the Garland of Decapitated Heads

After a day of trying to distill ideas about Kali Ma’s energy that I’ve been contemplating for years into just the right words, the lights at the house finally went out. It was past 8pm and I had been telling myself all day that I would go out for an excursion just to move the energy in my body. But my mind was racing. I wanted to mentally unscramble my thoughts and string together just the right sentences. I brewed in fear that this endeavour was a failure before I even launched it because I couldn’t find clarity, originality or perfection with my words.

When the lights went out though, I finally bolted up. I knew I had to close my computer lest it shut down mid thought. It was pouring and summer rain is my favourite. I made it out to the water just past sunset. The thick cloud cover was occasionally interrupted by pinks, oranges and eventually blues of progressively deeper hues.

I walked onto the stone walkway into the water that lead to a floating wooden dock. The dock and I rocked gently with the ocean waves, cradled by the forces of nature. It was hours before the new moon, the time of month most apt for Kali worship.

In a moment of surrender, I realized what I actually could to express. Not because I knew what the perfect words were, but because it wasn’t about words at all.

Kali Ma wears a garland of decapitated heads. Decapitation of heads is a powerful act of liberation in Kali’s lore. Chinnamasta, a form of Kali, cuts off her own head and drinks her own blood freeing herself from the confines of her ego and nourishing herself and others with her own life-force. The decapitated heads in Kali’s garland are said to belong to those that have sacrificed their knowing to Kali Ma’s wisdom. In the Tantrik tradition the heads also symbolize the Sanskrit alphabet. Their decapitation means that Kali Ma is here to free us from the limitations of words and language.

No wonder I felt a futility in trying to use finite words to describe the experience of the infinite.

The experience of Kali Ma is not in a specific outcome or product but in the journey of creation and rebirth. Writing might be a pathway in the journey, but could never be the whole of it. Realizing and remembering this at the dock was so freeing.

In my experience, the creation journey often starts with an erotic desire. The erotic, as Audre Lorde describes it in her seminal essay The Uses of the Erotic, is a resource that is deeply spiritual and “firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”

The journey from that charged desire to actualisation can entail the grief of what has been lost or denied, honest confrontations with self about the depth of our longings, the shedding of the fears that holds us back, the moving through the darkness of the unknown, the embodiment of surrender, the witnessing of the divine within and all around us, and the releasing of expectations of what happens past the threshold of birthing. Each part of this journey is sacred. In not judging or trying to fix our paths we surrender to Kali’s wisdom, a love greater than anything describable.

Knowing this, writing it out, reading it, won’t change the challenge of the journey. Because it calls us to step away from known safety. Ultimately it is the wild unknown that Kali embodies that terrifies us. Like a baby journeying through the birth canal, I always make it to the other side crying and screaming. It is, however, a journey worth taking because on the other side of creation we get to breathe different. We are reborn.