Signs were everywhere: Mami Wata on exhibit at UCLA's Fowler gallery. Me and Oteezy had to go witness, so we left Inglewood and headed north on the 405. We arrived and walked across campus. Music streamed from an outdoor concert in the ampitheater in front of the museum. We entered the dark chambers of the gallery and the first thing we saw and heard was the sea broadcast across an entire wall. We stopped dead in our tracks because something unnamable was calling us: back to life...back to the vulva, back to the sacred space from which all things rise up in funkiness. We were moved and moved again through the space taking in breath, beadwork, altars, paintings, assemblage, iron and wood sculpture of artists from places like Haiti, Sierra Leone, New York, Nigeria, Cuba, New Jersey, Brazil and Gabon. Artists who were compelled to create and consecrate Mami Wata's presence in the world. Our bodies are made up mostly of water as is the planet. Get it? We are bathed in her nourishing fluids as we develop in the amniotic sac that sustains us. No doubt we need water to hydrate lest we shrivel and sucuumb.
It is the liquid of lushness that makes the creative juices overflow in the morning or evening shower. Water is healing, especially salt water which is why we add Epsons or sea salt to a therapeutic bath in order to draw out the toxins that tend to accumulate in the nooks and crannies of the mind/body cortex. Like dirty laundry, we must shake up the crud that clings to our psyches, doing our best to purge it from our selves and our cells which are ever beginning, transforming, retooling, refreshing. The old self falls away and a new self emerges in a higher state of consciousness.
Nothing is constant but change. Every day we rise we have a chance to reinvent who we are in relationship to what we do, moment by moment or in the words of Lauren, the main character in the great late Octavia Butler's novel
Parable of the Sower..."
to shape God" or in Mami Wata's case, shape the Goddess within our best self.
Signs were everywhere: Mami Wata on exhibit at UCLA's Fowler gallery. Me and Oteezy had to go witness, so we left Inglewood and headed north on the 405. We arrived and walked across campus. Music streamed from an outdoor concert in the ampitheater in front of the museum. We entered the dark chambers of the gallery and the first thing we saw and heard was the sea broadcast across an entire wall. We stopped dead in our tracks because something unnamable was calling us: back to life...back to the vulva, back to the sacred space from which all things rise up in funkiness. We were moved and moved again through the space taking in breath, beadwork, altars, paintings, assemblage, iron and wood sculpture of artists from places like Haiti, Sierra Leone, New York, Nigeria, Cuba, New Jersey, Brazil and Gabon. Artists who were compelled to create and consecrate Mami Wata's presence in the world. Our bodies are made up mostly of water as is the planet. Get it? We are bathed in her nourishing fluids as we develop in the amniotic sac that sustains us. No doubt we need water to hydrate lest we shrivel and sucuumb.
It is the liquid of lushness that makes the creative juices overflow in the morning or evening shower. Water is healing, especially salt water which is why we add Epsons or sea salt to a therapeutic bath in order to draw out the toxins that tend to accumulate in the nooks and crannies of the mind/body cortex. Like dirty laundry, we must shake up the crud that clings to our psyches, doing our best to purge it from our selves and our cells which are ever beginning, transforming, retooling, refreshing. The old self falls away and a new self emerges in a higher state of consciousness. Nothing is constant but change. Every day we rise we have a chance to reinvent who we are in relationship to what we do, moment by moment or in the words of Lauren, the main character in the great late Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Sower..."to shape God" or in Mami Wata's case, shape the Goddess within our best self.
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