In This Body, In This Life

This here is a Caribbean household, the soyeste I’m learning in, and one where there’s a lot of traditions in one place. We have vodouists, sancistas, espiritistas, and from time-to-time we have visiting santeros, paleros, Hoodoo family practitioners, and even some Wiccans/European traditions people—and not your casual practitioners or twenty-somethings trying out recipes from Tik Tok, but people who direct covens.

I would not be in the least surprised if someone from any tradition outside the religions of the book show up, though we got us a mess of Catholics. People fly in from every country you could imagine. We’re getting someone directly from India in the next few weeks, and someone from Poland after that. If I came on someone doing a Beltaine fire in the backyard, I would shrug and be about my business. I’ll catch the bodies when people get possessed, but the divine do what it do.

My papa calls this a mystery school, in the old tradition. Define anything outside yourself at your own peril. If it seems mixed up, it’s because the divine is for everyone and comes in exactly as it pleases, as it needs, to meet us where we need it. Wherever we can, in this life, see the face of the divine, it will meet us.

I have found myself reading one of my papa’s books of late. I’m in the section on soul contracts—that is, when we are incarnated in this place (as opposed to the many other places we might take form), we come for a reason. Over the pattern of our lives, over the pattern of choices we make to release our bonds or to develop our capacity to touch the divine, we work through our spiritual infancy and eventually into adulthood. This is not a one life kind of process.

What sort of adult am I making, this this body, in this life? When they raise me to mambo in this life, in this body, what name will I be given?

What life have I lived?

I joke with my spiritual spouses about that name—naming is old magic. To be seen, but more importantly to tell people who cannot see what there is for them to see. I know the spirit can see me, but I’ve met few people indeed with that capacity.

In this life, in this body, in this gender, with this skin, in this country, this contract I came to fulfill. Where the divine meets me, I will be met.

This much I know: if the divine allows it, I will be back. I am willing. I have more contracts in me.

Burn me again.