Wonderoom

I developed this fascination with Kali the Goddess of Death in college. I was searching for a different form of spirituality, something that felt right. My overly academic head delved into a veritable smorgasbord of possible belief systems. It would be a while before I truly internalized the notion that you can’t get the essence of a belief from a book. You should at least find one practitioner to chat with. Anyway, I developed this thing about Kali.

First, I was interested in the Hindu notion of creation, preservation, and destruction. You have a god or manifestation for each one-a different kind of trinity. I was drawn to the destructive aspect because, well, that’s just my nature. The bottom line is that I was looking for a tradition that allowed women to be powerful without apology or containment. This is where Kali comes in. There are stories involving her just completely losing it and dancing on corpses until Shiva shows up and calms her down in various ways. The best part for me is that Kali’s destructive nature was just accepted, not judged as evil or wrong. I found writings which described her as a kind of holy mother, both creator and destroyer. I thought I had hit the spiritual jackpot. Of course, I was reading all this in books. I never met an actual member of this belief system. This did not keep me from becoming obsessed with Kali. I found pictures, read every account I could find. This being the eighties, I didn’t have the Internet, so I had to make due with a lot of dry academic texts and the occasional sensational account of severed ear necklaces.

My early college years were a kind of a tricky time in my life. The delicate balance between studying, writing papers, and partying for days at a time was difficult to find. At one point, I had to write two lengthy papers within a 36 hour period, neither of which I had really even started on. It didn’t help that I still hadn’t learned to type. Many pots of coffee into it, at about hour 26, I took a short break. During this break, I had a hallucination of Kali. A waking dream. I was on a bridge over a highway. The barest hint of dawn was touching the horizon. She was standing right beside me. I could see her out of the corner of my eye, dark as night, completely naked. I could see her eyes. I was scared, but I didn’t move because I was too fascinated. We stayed there for a moment. When I finally completely turned, she was gone. Nobody there.

I know, I know…craziness…too much coffee, not enough sleep. But I was extremely pleased to hallucinate Kali. There are far worse things to hallucinate.

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