Priestess of the Winds

I am not very good at holding still.

Its always been a problem. In a rushing enthusiasm of the moment I will confess passion, affection, desire and joy for a job, a friendship, a project, an expression of faith, a way of life. In that moment, it will be the truest thing I have ever expressed and I will probably feel moved in my elation to put it to words and say it out loud. This time of transcendent exultation will pass, though, and I have been chastised, ridiculed and banished for this in the past when people have felt betrayed by this seeming impermanence. I have been told I am horribly inconsistent, selfish, untrustable and I internalized this. It was a long time before I could do anything but hate myself for my changing, wild self.

The Yoruban Orisha, Oya, is a great goddess of storms, of natural forces. She is not a yielding river of honey like her sister Orisha, Oshun, nor is she an eternal and nurturing sea as her sister Orisha, Yemaya, is. Oya dances the winds. Oya shifts and changes like clouds, breaks into patterns of sudden beauty and unexpected destruction. Her tears wet the hungry fields and her strength dazzles us like lighting breaking across the sky. Nothing about Oya is constant, except her constant changing. When I met the stories of Oya, priestess of the winds, I found a myth to begin to know myself through.

I am *not* consistent in my behaviors, not through any mundane lens. No one is all the time and I use to try to assert that everyone is inconsistent, but, in truth, I am more "inconsistent" than most. It is hard for me to understand why I seem this way to others and even harder to understand what they want consistency of behavior out of me for. I struggle to grasp why many in my life have claimed hurt when I do not behave the same today as I did last week, when I do not express my passions or affections in the same manner, when I do not wish to live in the same place this year as I did the last.

I have grown in a family of very consistent people and maybe that is what shaped the root of me into something swooping, bending and spiraling instead of a trunk that is straight and upright. Those around me early in this life were very consistent in one thing above all else - their consistent unwillingness to step outside what they were use to and what was expected of them no matter how bored, sad, or miserable it made them. In contrast, I stuck with nothing. One day I would plan to go college and become a psychology professor, the next I would be flaunting a cheap diamond ring and be planning to get married at 19 and run away to California with my boyfriend. One year I was married to a man, the next living with a woman. One month I was jubilant in my work, the next yearning to be doing something completely else. Maybe my whole life was just a ridiculous over reaction to my family and the society around me, a dark flipside to the very same penny. Often, when I didn't understand the way I was behaving and felt lost, I despaired that this must be so.

Many fear Oya because they never know what to expect of her next. They say she is an uncontrollable storm, and, at times, she is. But there is an eye to Oya's storm and I have found it by searching my own self. There is one unchangeable thing in all Oya does, in all I do. They say Oya is beholden to no one, no particular husband (she's had a few), and no particular path. But she is. The intense electricity that makes her crack into arks of lightening is the divine Spirit, the booming of her thunder is the sound of her perceptions exploding and yielding to ones far broader than her own. She is bound to the force of creation itself.

Some who have known me and actually enjoyed me, unpredictably and all, have told me they admire how I am so certain of who I am. But I am not certain of who I am, the only thing I am certain of is that anything I grasp onto as a definition of myself is an ego construction of sticks that the wolf of Spirit will soon be by to blow down. I've tried to build these houses, I've known times of desperately wanting to be as others expected. I was never able to make that house, just a frail construct in which I attempted to hide from the force of what I could not control. At my best, I do not build little squats of twigs and mud but rush out to meet the coming, unstoppable force. At my best, I know life, the unfolding of all creation, is something to run to. I struggle, I try to hold off the parts of the All that I do not understand, but in the unshakable core of me I yield and sing "yes, yes, yes", because its all I can do.

In my life-long attempt to greet the unknown I have seemed, in my day to day life, to be inconsistent and I accept that some have felt hurt, left, or confused by my shifting ways. It is my habit to apologize for this, but it is has never been an honest apology and so I will try, here, to be unashamed in saying: I never intended to hurt or confuse anyone and all expressions of enthusiasm, love, joy were sincere when they were expressed. No matter whether I move away, or our relationship to one another changes, or we never speak again, these expressions are forever sincere, beyond this corporeal life. I let my spirit open to the Spirit that cradles and tears us all and I saw you, the job, the community, the relationship in a light that awed and blinded me. I was blessed to see, and what I saw was beautiful.

I am consistent in my love, no matter what else unfolds in this mortal drama. But I am not capable of being tied to anyone's plans, even when I try. I am made of the same breath as Oya, blowing like an uncontrollable gale across the land and the sea. We, Oya and I, may seem constant to little in this world, but we are as true to the Spirit that makes up every particle of creation as we can be. I sometimes fail this, but I get up again and I dance.