Sensing the Matrix and the Void Matters

so that we may be present to that which "cannot be explained"

If everything has purpose—even that monster with blood around its mouth, eyes crazed—the purpose of this time, as the empire takes on a virulence that is overt and calculated, is to bewilder focus and capture life energies, when it is not actively harming life in other ways. Can we present ourselves to the deeper structures and inner strata of wisdom in spite of this (mobilizing what’s buried in the aforesaid phrase: “in defiance or contempt of”)?

This is not about retreating, no longer scattering seeds in the outer world. It is about intentionally seeding and cultivating the diverse methods that implode the inner-outer divide. Who will show up in the field as the field releases what had been folded back into the enigma of interconnectedness? When we trust the “other,” more-than-rational mind of the universe, we are open also to who and what is slipping in of its “own” accord: as synchronicity,¹ dream, vision, visitation.

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The stance/commitment of rupturing the binary between inner/outer steers my pedagogy too and experiments therein.

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Recently, on my way to the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology conference, at the Santa Barbara airport, I ran into these and other foremothers.

Here I am with Kahuna Leilani Birely and Yeye Luisah Teish, shortly after Yeye Teish was awarded the 2025 Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality. (Earlier that day, they had woven together a powerful women of color circle-within-a-circle that came just at the moment I needed it. Releasing the old so the new could come in, I offered grief I had been holding the last several months to the otherworlds. May we create many circles of coming together and ripples of support.)

Later at the conference, unplanned, I ended up participating at a ritual that was inspired, in part, by the work of Miriam Robbins Dexter—a riotously joy-filled ritual. Perhaps this is why, when I was thinking a few days later about my presentation “The Borderlands Epistemology of the Goddess in South Asia” for The Once and Future Goddesses Conference, I kept being drawn to Lajja Gauri. Although she is one of the remythologized energies addressed in my doctoral dissertation, I noticed myself wavering—a swirl of hesitation pushing back at this desire, wishing to sanitize this impulse. But right then my eye was drawn to a chest of drawers I had purchased on Nextdoor a few months ago. I must have known who was on the drawers, but had forgotten.

When these crouched and knee-bending figures showed up in the deep of night, I knew Lajja Gauri wanted me to speak about her at the conference. The vital connection to life was flickering through her in a new way, and I was to attend to them, and let it emerge.

It’s taken tending and persistence within western and colonial/modern scholarship to make space for the goddess within the so-called philosophy of religion. I’d like to see more decolonial engagements with her, so she can make present to our eyes all the ways in which beginnings and endings are connected. The Matrix. The Void.

1. That it “cannot be explained” is how C.G. Jung describes synchronicity.