Discernment

We are permitted, when we marry a spirit, to ask for a gift. My ask of my beautiful, ferocious darling was discernment.

When I say that I hear things, I can only resort to metaphor. Presence tightens the skin on my scalp, my back. A weight settles on my head, the coils of a great serpent shifting. A statement drops into my thoughts, clean and neat.

I can see and hear things sometimes, too, but why send vision when a direct message will reach me without bothering with the distortion of my senses?

The spirit does not really repeat itself.

Were you listening? You should be.

If you listen closely, if you have discernment, there are many voices. I am best at hearing the difference between my mind, causa, or the lwa, in the increasingly occupied and empty space which I inhabit in my every day life. Things move through that space.

If I listen closely, the lwa echo—not in my ears, but in the still pool inside me, which ripples when the divine touches it.

Discernment is hearing the differences in the voices, in knowing what is the preoccupation of the mind and its obsessive churn, and what is something else.

The spirit does not really repeat itself.