Kali and the Return to Spring

The green growing life we call springtime is a miracle each and every time. Spring is the renewal that does not loose the ability to amaze.

The divine as feminine also does not loose the ability, and like the four seasons the divine too, has many faces, from the smooth-carved stone of bountiful goddess, to named icons of cultures past, feminine as divine is every woman, and within every man.

Each of these faces, each of these powers are symbolic of a whole and yet each differs. Their collective remind us of the interdependent web of life that informs the seventh principle of Unitarian Universalism.

I like Goddess iconography, and am typically drawn to the goddess of compassion, Kuan Yin, or Gaia, the mother goddess of all goddess. I even view Mary, mother of Jesus, through a Goddess perspective. Yet for all those Goddesses and as as enchanting as Isis or Innana are, for some time now I have been thinking and feeling drawn to Kali.

In my tarot deck, where the major and minor arcana iconography are all goddesses, Kali is death. She is fierce, standing atop a dead body, with a sword in one of her many hands. She wears a ring of skulls as a necklace, has fangs and a lolling tongue. She is not the pretty soft new-age goddess that many people might think of when we conjure images of “divine feminine.” And yet there are many kinds of divine feminine, each feminine, and each divine. Why does such a frightening image of the divine feminine exist? And what does the death card have to do with spring?

Is Kali just another projection of hostility and masculine fear of the feminine that characterizes patriarchal traditions within Hinduism and many of the other world faiths? Or is she a source of social and spiritual liberation for all women and men? How can we best understand her? Kali can be a horrifying depiction of a female deity. Yet on a higher transcendent level her terrifying nature can be seen as symbolic of her power to destroy...ignorance, to shatter the delusions of the ego. Thus viewed, her destructive energies can be seen as a vehicle of salvation and ultimate transformation. To those stuck in the material world she is the Black Goddess of death because she threatens the destruction of the ego/individual.

According to Elizabeth Fisher, Kali is to the awakened, those who have sought to dissolve the blinders of their own ignorance and greed, she is benign, the death of death, she is liberation.

Gardeners well know the riotous beauty called spring, how it is made possible by tilling, pruning, pulling out the weeds, and cutting things back. In this season of spring, we are in a time of dual reality: we are surrounded by new growth and blossoms, as well as uncertainty, confusion, and possibly fear. From autumn and through winter, we often lift up as sacred Demeter and her bounty of grain, we are grateful for the release of Persephone and the return of the butterflies and blossoms, yet everywhere we turn these days, we find the presence of Kali in the chaos and destruction we see around us, and may even feel within us.

There are things that we should be angry about; things we should seek to destroy: things like poverty, illness, sense less loss of life, war and greed. All that dull our sense of shared humanity and prevent us from living out our true, real, interconnectedness. As Dr. King said, “There are things to which we all should feel maladjusted.” Children are dying. Laws are limiting basic freedoms. Many are not able to find meaningful work and tragedies that defy reason seem to defy us! But, Kali is frightening only when we deny the totality of life in all its aspects. When one can accept, not with grim resignation but with clarity, the coexistence of life and death, joy and sorrow, one truly becomes free and thereby fearless.

This is a time of planting and also of pruning. In this season of springtime and growth and also chaos and confusion, I often set time to myself to mark some intentions. I close my eyes, and ground myself, feeling a connectedness to earth. I think of what I like to plant in your life at this season. What do you want to see grow? What does your spirit tell you is your deepest need? Bring it to your awareness. Then, I turn my attention to what you would like to prune. What I would like to release from my life in this season? What limits me from being the person I know I am called to become?

Identifying these things lead me on a path of intention, where I can take a step further and name them in writing and naming them somewhere prominent in my life. By stating intention, you offer opportunities to develop the things you wish to grow, and to prune the thing you wish to release. This is how we become spiritually mature, when we look deeply into our garden that is our soul and nurture the areas that need light, and prune away the overgrown brush.

When I think of my life as a garden, one that honors the divine feminine, I am reminded of poet May Sarton’s “The Invocation to Kali”. She writes:

Kali, be with us... Help us to bring darkness into the light, To lift out the pain, the anger, Where it can be seen for what it is— The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love. Put the wild hunger where it belongs, Within the act of creation, Crude power that forges a balance Between hate and love.

Help us to be the always hopeful Gardeners of the spirit Who know that without darkness Nothing comes to birth....

As without light

Nothing flowers.
Bear the roots in mind,
You, the dark one, Kali, Awesome power.

Amen, and blessed be.