Kali the Great Goddess

She is mad, her lover is mad, and I am mad for loving her!
This world is bewitched by the lovely goddess.
No one can describe how lovely she is, how glorious,
how perfect her gestures, how sudden her moods.
Her lover, poisoned with love for her, calls out her name
endlessly, singing Kali's name over and over and over.

Life has currents, cycles, tides which ebb and flow,
She looks upon them all with equanimity.
Nothing is opposite in her mind: not life, not death;
not love, not hate; not the self, not the void.
Your raft, the poet said, floats upon the sea of life.
It drifts up with the tide, and down with the ebb.
But the goddess is there. The goddess is always there.

— Ramakrishna (Tantric Master)




art credit:
Mother of Wands in the East: Kali
by Hermann Haindl
Winged Serpent Tarot

In my fear, I exchanged self for other. I made of my heart a hollow home in which I’d hoped to hold love, and I found the vessel wanting.

Her gaze meets mine, and my boundaries dissolve. In becoming the personification of my fear, she shows me how flimsy my fear is.

Kali/Kali Ma. The Black Mother. Great Goddess. Dark Goddess. The Terrible Goddess of Death. The Crone. Mother of Karma. Female Principle. Patroness of Witches. Exhibiting traits of both gentleness and love, revenge and terrible death.

Her audacity and disregard for social mores is associated with divine madness and the violent wrenching away of the veils that mask our eyes from the blinding clarity of our true nature—which isn’t always easy to stomach.

One of Kali’s many names is “She who knows the nature of passion.” Her impassioned energy is the essential nature of the spiritual quest, which has the capacity to return us to ourselves.

Behind my fear is a desire, that vital hydrating oasis of my internal landscape, which is one of my links to Kali. Desire seeks shelter in the watery, turbulent realm of the feminine. Its path is circuitous and labyrinthine, and it chooses detours, untaken paths, and perilous cliff edges over well-paved roads adhering to authority-stamped safety standards. The path to freedom offered by desire is feminine, dark, and deeply mysterious.