What do I say about our Suavecito of the South? He was the first Guardian I met, the companion of my childhood. I was a very magical child. My mom’s family are SDA and we had a prophet. Ellen G. White. I was convinced that this was going to happen to me as well. It was said that a prophet could breathe on a mirror and they would not fog it up, so I practiced this all the time. Such is the hubris of early childhood. After being fully informed by grandmother how I was not special in any way to God, I decided that I wanted to be a prophet for the stars. I had always been entranced by the night sky, and I was convinced they were angels. I would lie on the lawn in the evening and sing in my child voice, moving my arms to dance with them. I look back on this with wonder now at how I knew my place as a child, and how it took years to beat this out of me. I had a beautiful voice. This was not always a blessing. My mother would haul little four-year-old me out to sing Moon River to guests. I sang songs at church and at gatherings at my grandmother’s home. As a shy child, I hated this. My father finally took care of this situation by teaching me a different song. The lyrics were:
Once, I went in swimmin’, where there was no wimmin’
Or no one to see
Seeing no one was there, I hung my underwear
Upon a willow tree
Dove into the water bare, as Phaeroh’s daughter
Dove into the Nile
Someone saw me there, and stole my underwear
And left me with a smile.
The next time my mom trotted me out in front of a church group, I belted out this little ditty. My father nearly expired from laughter. My mother and grandmother were mortified, staring at me with mouths that looked like perfect Os. There was silence. My father looked so proud of me. I didn’t know what to do with the silence, so I did a great and dramatic curtsey, as if I was Leontine Price at the Met. My dad took me to get some ice cream before anyone could inhale.
I didn’t always want to sing for people. I wanted to sing for the stars. Sometimes the stars sang back. We would sing strange melodies and harmonies. As I got older, I took voice training. I studied opera. I sang in choirs. I would fall into ecstasies when singing in a choir, as my voice fell in with others and I became no self. The delusion lifted and I became part of the whole. At that point, we are part of the law of all things. After I sang at a church once, an older woman asked me where I was when I closed my eyes as I sang. I said that I was with my angel. She cried. But my mom and grandmother looked concerned. I guess that was not the right answer, but it was the truth.
I stopped singing in college. I kind of had to choose between music and science. I threw myself into research and graduate school. After a few years of bad bronchitis, my voice officially was done. And I stopped. When I stopped, my access to the ecstasy was gone. My guiding force was gone. All I was left with was my ambition. I began to forge my armor, piece by piece. You have no idea of what it is like to be a fat, queer, indigenous, disabled person in a prestigious graduate program. I have never felt like I was walking around with feathers in my hair more than every fucking day in Tolman Hall. I had to make armor to survive. And the sound of South’s voice faded and left me. I was bolted in tight, all by myself.
Luckily, there are many roads to ecstasy. So in my twenties I began trying to tug and pull at that armor, mostly through the use of entheagens. My first time on taking Ecstasy (the drug of that name) was in Guerneville. We were going to the Russian River for Spring Break. All of us were in graduate school at Cal and we needed to just stop and reconnect with our humanity. We decided that we would go up to the Willows for a few days to just relax, smoke a lot of weed, and play in the water. And that should have been the extent of this story. Except for the fact that I’m Sewa, and that isn’t how I do things.
The friends I was with didn’t do that either. We were all spiritual explorers in some way. Mostly every morning was spent eating muffins and drinking coffee, all provided by the lovely proprietors. We would lounge about on the deck and read tarot cards or do whatever divination called to us that day. I was just learning the tarot at the time, and I was such a baby witchlet. It was the time of the New Age. I tried the crystals and the flower essences and what not. Some of it connected, some of it did not. By far the best thing I got out of the New Age exploration was opening to channel and meeting my spirit guide, Sarofi, my eternal companion. But there were always ways in which I didn’t fit the mold. Not being white will do that. For example, all the white people seem to have taken all the guides that are love and light, the diaphanous and beautiful. But Sarofi is always surly and on fire, and I could not love them more. When we met, I asked why they chose me. They replied, “You don’t know who you are yet. I have been waiting for you for millennia. We are going to get into so much trouble. We are going to change the world.” And in some ways, we have.
Gabrielle decided that this day we were going to go to the redwoods, and she had brought along some Ecstasy. I had never done that before, but my twenties were all about experiences and I was curious and wanted to try it. I was pretty much game for anything those days. Sarofi was hovering about and was excited. While the others were getting ready I was sitting on the deck waiting to go. Sarofi softly said, “This is the day, my love. This is the day.” I kept wanting to ask about it, but just then my friends returned. Gabrielle handed me a cup filled with cranberry juice. She was smiling. “Bon Voyage,” she said, tipping her own cup down her throat. I did the same.
As folks were packing up, I could feel the shimmering coming on. My whole body felt a tingling, like anticipation. Then I could feel my friend Pablo’s hands on my shoulders. He could tell that I was starting to feel the drug. We packed up and headed to the forest, which was only a mile or so away. But I could not make myself get into the car. I didn’t want to be in a confined space. So off we went, with me hanging out the passenger window to my waist in Gabrielle’s old Honda Accord like a dog happy to have their face in the wind.
People often have judgements about experiences they have on drugs, like drugs invalidate the truth of what they experience. That happens in monophasic cultures who only see reality in one phase of consciousness. Only waking consciousness is considered reality in this culture. That same reality is considered delusion in Buddhism, where mindfulness is the only reality. In polyphasic cultures, there are different realities. All of them valid and true for the reality in which they occur. I will tell you this, that moss on a tree if soft. That some trees smell sharp and others smell like vanilla. That the sound of a wild stream talks to you. And all that I could feel was that this drug let me touch the moss, the tree and the stream, where I normally would not have done so. Sarofi just kept saying, “listen” and so I did.
The other thing that this drug in particular did was to crack off the armor that I wore every day. Between the discrimination I dealt with at school every day and the fact that riding a bike in public was an invitation for assault, I can have a lot of compassion for myself building such hard armor. It was shiny and tough, and combined with a spirit that tended to push through the hard stuff, I often was a juggernaut that got my way. We can’t really be present in the world and listen through the armor, though. It muffles the voices of living things. You can’t feel the softness of moss on a tree through it. And the second armor that snaps shut around your heart stands in the way of love. When people see you armored, they will often take a swing at you. The only way to truly to be brave in this world is to take that armor off. The only way to be invincible is to drop it at your feet in a pile and say, “here I am.” So after hiding in trees and petting moss and swimming in the stream naked (much to the consternation of the park rangers), we found ourselves quietly sitting in the forest theater as we realized that we had been here all day and that we weren’t feeing high anymore. Some of the others decided this was the time to smoke the weed we brought. But two of us didn’t want to do that. We just wanted to be there, in this beautiful place, without our armor, to contemplate everything that had just happened.
It was getting dark and cold so we headed back through the park to the car. The others were walking ahead of us, laughing and silly, but Pablo and I hung back and walked silently. It had gotten dark and we were following the white lines in the road through the dark forest. We could hear the animals starting to stir as they reclaimed their kingdom. We held hands, because that is what one does in a darkened forest with open hearts when you can’t see your way. And then. And then we came out of the forest into an open area where the sky was full of stars. And then. And then I looked up. The others were finding constellations and naming them. But I kept looking at the stars. And then I said to Pablo, “I can hear them singing.”
It was the last thing I remembered that made any sense. And evidently the last thing I said before I hit the pavement.
“Today is the day,” said Sarofi, gently, with no surliness at all.
I heard a voice, the most beautiful voice. It sounded like it was echoing through a brass instrument. It sang to me. I stood there, stunned, and it said my name. My true name. “Namariel, Namariel, it is time to wake up.” I felt like I was in love. I felt like I was flying. “It is time to build the new world. It is time to begin your work.”
“What is my work?”
“To make family, to build worlds, to construct gates. You make the container for magic in the world.”
I laughed. “whuh? Me?”
It laughed, too. “I will sing you awake, Namariel. Come to me.”
And I found myself lying on the ground in the middle of the road, surrounded by my friends, with a ranger shining a light in my eyes. I was mumbling but not really responsive. They thought I was having a seizure. I looked up at them and said, “How did I get on the ground?”
The next morning, I was up first. I went down to get muffins and coffee and just sat there, listening. I had a strange dream, about an ancient force that loved me. It bent to pet me and I could feel something like a smile as it folded and unfolded in the starry sky. All I could do was cry. I woke up crying. Pablo had petted my back and went back to sleep. I got up and slipped downstairs to be in the quiet morning. The mist still clung to the willow trees and over the grassy lawn that stretched down to the river. I walked down to the water and it taught me a song, a song for spinning the lines of the world into ropes. I sang it over and over. The song seemed pleased. I went back to my coffee.
By then, Pablo was up. He came down to look for me. “Are you ok?” he asked as he hugged me.
“I’m fine. It’s strange, but fine. I feel Sarofi so close now. And everything in this world is so beautiful. Even pain. Even the hard things,” I said as I put my head on his shoulder. We sat like that until the others drifted in to check on me. They smoked more weed, and I didn’t. This concerned them. But it was interesting, I did not do any drugs for the next 6 months. It was like everything that wanted to take me away from this place I avoided. I cried at the drop of a hat. I meditated a lot. I was trying to understand what happened, to deal with the feelings around being touched by something so difficult to describe. I was awake, but still unclear about what they wanted from me. It never occurred to me that I should be afraid.
Years later, I was talking with my friends about the story of the Sky People and the Suremem. I stopped in the middle and looked at Pablo. “I think I understand now. The thing that talked to me in Guerneville. Maybe it knew me from before. Maybe it was a Sky Person.” Pablo had started studying witchcraft by then. He was in a school of a branch of Star and Serpent and this was how I was introduced to the tradition that would become my home. He put his hand on mine and said, “There are beings of the Outer Darkness. Maybe they are calling you.”
We talk about having a calling, but it is actually a hard thing to hold. I think it is harder for me to hold because of the ways in which the world sees me as less valuable than other people, even down to refusing me medical care and safety. After awhile I started to believe that, too. But for some reason, this hawk on fire wants to be my guide. And this mystery folding and unfolding in the stars wants to dance and write songs with me. It is a constant struggle to remain awake. Being awake means that I have work to do. I was called, so it is my obligation to struggle on in remembering every day that no matter what the world may think of me, no matter how I have been treated or dismissed, beaten or broken or violated, no matter how scarred or damaged, I am precious. No one can do this thing but me. In the words of a round that I like to sing in the mornings “I will believe the truth about myself. No matter how beautiful it is.”
In that way, pride is love for the world. It feels like a basic knowledge for a witch, and yet one we have to keep waking up to every day. I realized much later that it was South that came to get me that night in the forest, as I walked out hand in hand in the starlight without my armor on. With Sarofi singing, “wakey wakey, eggs and bakey!” because they are just not like the white people’s spirit guides. They curl around me now, as I drink my coffee. “So how is Namariel this morning?” they hiss good naturedly. I laugh. Because sometimes love surrounds me in a way that I can’t understand. I take a hit on my joint as I turn my wheelchair to get out of the sun. “Namariel, the Sword of the Powers, needs another cup of coffee,” I smile.
Seyewailo 