Winter Solstice: African Cosmology
What do you see when you close your eyes and consider 2023?
Reflecting on the dark in “dark” has been my sojourn this solstice. I stretched it beyond the usual timing as I incorporated the Yoruba winter solstice of Okeyu Meji. This allowed me to steep a little longer.
I have no fierce pronouncements nor any wise sentiments to pass along. All I can really say at this point is that I have fallen hard for the practice of steeping. This is a practice that requires the wrangling of your attention, pulling it back toward you gently so it can wash over the finer things like beautiful writing, purposeful research, soul-fulfilling music, communing with more-than-human kin, writing down the melody of thoughts as they come mildly filtered by judgements adopted before discernment. Napping and gazing out the window are also essential to the practice
The dark womb of the season with its warm fleshy hollow has been a verdant grotto in which to consider the messages that come up from the unconscious guided by the occasional ancestral surprises.
The womb is a portal, I’m discovering, where all manner of divinity and wisdom is steeped and nurtured into its next incarnation. Having lost my own womb some years ago, my whole being has become a womb. This knowledge came to me in the potent liminality of pre-dawn. “Let the force of creation flow through you again unabated,” the Ancestors said, “it’s what you are here to do.”
This time of Okeyu Meji is infused with the dark power of the feminine energy of creation just before it bursts into life and light. It holds the cosmic dark trilogy of energy that generates, moves, and holds the stars - the first experiments of life creating itself. Africans knew this.
Please stop saying that you are the first generation to know how the universe created itself. The doctrine of discovery has already been debunked yet you still feel the need to plant your flag. Africans, and many other indigenous researchers and elders I suspect, have known this for thousands of years. As always you are late to the party, the ultimate party-crasher and party-pooper, Modernity. But I digress.
A few weeks ago, we convened an experimental space to explore blackness. A portal opened up shortly before the appointed date of the event, and I have been wandering entirely bidden by the cosmic power of allurement (read Powers of the Universe by Brain Swimme when you get a chance) and the dark flow as described by quantum physics. Odu has been calling me to return again to contemplation of my ori (purpose) and the call has been irresistible.
What do I see when I close my eyes in stillness and turn inward to the inner darkness/wisdom. All I see is the light that has always been there, for the two are inseparable, and which continues to generate futures.
All there is ia to remain in the portal, in the steeping.
by Oceana Sawyer
